The Right to Pain and the Limits of Testimony

Abstract

“The Right to Pain and the Limits of Testimony” centers on two questions: Who has the right to pain? Who is permitted to speak about issues of injustice affecting them? I contend that the indifference, disavowal, or appropriation of pain results from a structure of witnessing that accepts violence and injuries on some subjects as deserving, natural, or unreal. Pain, illness, and disability are naturalized within marginalized communities because the terms of death are gendered, racialized, classed, and ableist. By analyzing Vietnamese American memoirs, novels, photography, and the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City as testimonies, I make connections among Critical Refugee Studies, Disability Studies, and Visual Culture Studies to reveal the military, economic, and racial systems that expose immigrants and refugees to overlooked danger. These textual, visual, and physical sites present the debilitations produced by the Vietnam-US War by adopting strategic frames of reference, narrative construction, and language in order to connect with the observers, revealing that witnessing maintains an asymmetrical power structure. Models of witnessing give too much interpretive power to the witness, allowing a privileged group to define what counts as pain, the identity of victims, the language of testimony, and appropriate reparation and healing methods. In the closed system of witnessing, the savior is often also the perpetrator.

By looking at moments in which witnessing fails the testifier, I deromanticize witnessing, shift interpretative power, and assemble an alternative archive on the Vietnam-US War, pain, and healing. My dissertation presumes that witnessing fails while clings to the potential of testimony. Each chapter examines the body as testimony—the visible Agent Orange impairment and invisible illnesses of transhistorical pain and synesthesia—as another way to know the war. The disability as an index of debilitation is a bridge that links history to the present, event to language, self to an audience, imbuing the testimony with urgency and ethical dimensions. My attention to the limitations of witnessing raises concerns and strategies for accounting for silent voices. My project promotes the value of the victim’s language, frame of reference, unique vision, and particular demands in order to resist the listener’s power as ultimate savior in the exchange. I view testifiers as neither innocent victims nor unfeeling objects but as complex agents, intensely negotiating motives, languages, frameworks and multiple audiences.

The focus on pain accounts for the complexities and the ongoingness of debility of Vietnamese affected by wars, colonialism, poverty, and dislocation. Recognizing the limits of visibility to engender compassion and necessary changes, my work also attends to personal and communal healing strategies. The attention to marginalized forms of care emphasizes agency and rejects the white savior complex that underlies leading scholarship on ethics by Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Riceour, and Judith Butler. I attend to the creativity, endurance, and commemoration associated with pain. The survival strategies evident in Vietnamese American art and literature have aesthetic and epistemological value that expand understanding of trauma and reshape engagements with discourses of race, war, globalization, and community formation.