ABSTRACT
This chapter explores time and temporality in participants’ narratives, how and why certain survivors seem to articulate their experiences in more or less retrospective or prospective ways, and some of the practical drivers underpinning these differences. This includes whether violence was perpetrated by State or non-State actors, whether these events were afforded clear and transparent inquests, the role of justice and peace campaigning, and how injuries and memories of events from the past intermingle with everyday activities in the present to produce different temporal ‘shapes’ to survivors’ outlooks. Recognising the difficulty and potential reductionism of bringing all individual narratives to the fore thematically, this chapter also presents two comparably in-depth, ideal-typical case studies from the interview sample. This affords the reader a deeper insight into the lives of Anne and Kevin, a couple whose daughter Lauren was killed by a suicide bomber on the London underground on 7 July 2005, and Chandani, who survived a car bomb explosion outside a London department store in December 1983. These two cases illustrate distinct poles in a collection of narratives about traumatic memories. In delving into a smaller number of cases in greater depth and detail, this chapter explores survivor’s ‘testimony as data’ in a way that evocatively and vividly expresses both the long-term deleterious impacts of, and ongoing variegated responses to, the harms of political violence and terrorism through a closer engagement with survivor’s biographies.
