Testimonio

Variously classified as a genre or subgenre of Latin American and Latina/o nonfictional writing, an activist pedagogical technique for the constitution of a subject that has undergone trauma or been marginalized and silenced by being placed in a “border” condition between official or hegemonic discourses, in the category, that is, of those who, as one of its practitioners ironically states (Barnet 1994, 203), have ostensibly “no history,” as well as a method for the transformation of that condition into consciousness, collective memory, theory, and political action, testimonio is the resulting textual or visual product of an individual act of witnessing and/or experiencing an abject social state that is more than individual, that is indeed collective. Atrocity, genocide, extermination, torture, rape, and social abjection due to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, or some other politically or socially marked difference are never far from it. These are the unspeakable background or referents that haunt the witness or testimonialista’s (testimionio’s narrator or speaking subject) act of “coming to voice,” of truth-telling and “speaking back” to the social powers that be in order to transform his or her unspeakable experience of trauma into consciousness, collective memory, political action, and theory. Thus an overarching literary or rhetorical trope that structures the products of this otherwise nonfictional genre—where truth-telling, the presence of the other’s voice, and the “effect of the real,” however achieved, are most often privileged—is the figure of the speaker who narrates his or her story under the duress of the social order’s threat of abjection, invisibility, or death, or what the New York Puerto Rican writer Manuel Ramos Otero, who wrote about social abjection and death and died of AIDS in 1990, called in his meta-testimonial tale, “Vivir del cuento,” “the Scheherazade Complex” (1987, 55). Like Scheherazade, the female narrator of the Arabian Nights, who must tell a different story every night to stave off death and save herself and the women of Persia from the sultan’s sword, the speaker of testimonio narrates under the threat of social invisibility and death their unspeakable tale to save themselves and their community by reconstituting their sense of self and their community’s collective memory. This feminine trope for the production of testimonios has been especially generative in the United States where, as we shall see, testimonios have most often been deployed in Latina/o writing for the expression of gender and sexual dissidence.