Abstract

Using the analysis developed in Elaine Scarry’s seminal The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985) as its framework, the article seeks to analyze the structure of torture as represented in autobiography and understand the role of autobiographical writing in the reconstruction of self and the emergence of rights. A reading of Lualhati Milan Abreu's Dawn shows that autobiography can have a complicit role in the structure of torture. Through the torturers’ demand for an autobiography that details the victim’s life, including the critical admission of being a spy for the government, torture destroys the persona’s pre-torture self and world and a new self is constituted in the exigencies of survival and the alleviation of pain. The persona thereby assumes a new identity, confesses her guilt, and implicates other people in the crime of spying. This article argues that Dawn, published twenty years after the acts of torture, constitutes an attempt to reconstruct the author's self and the revolutionary plot in which it played a role. In retelling her life, Abreu reembodies her self, provides it with flesh, wounds, and sex. In this reconstruction, another self emerges armed with rights and a demand for fair treatment. Moreover, the retelling also re-emplots the revolution to counter end-of-revolution narratives generated by the purges committed by the rebels against their comrades. Abreu’s narrative thus affirms the plot of revolution as a movement towards rights and liberty. By subsuming rights discourse into a larger revolutionary discourse, the narrative distinguishes itself from “human rights bestsellers” and remains intransigently insurrectionist.

摘要

本文以伊莱恩·斯卡里 (Elaine Scarry) 的开创性著作《痛苦中的身体：世界的形成与毁灭》 (1985) 中的分析为框架，试图分析自传中所代表的酷刑结构，并理解自传写作在重建中的作用自我和权利的出现。Lualhati Milan Abreu 的黎明朗读表明自传可以在酷刑的结构中起到同谋作用。通过施刑者对受害者生活的详细自传的要求，包括批判性地承认自己是政府的间谍，酷刑摧毁了受刑前的自我和世界，在生存和缓解的紧迫性中构建了一个新的自我的痛苦。该角色因此承担了新的身份，承认了她的罪行，并暗示其他人参与了间谍罪。本文认为黎明，在酷刑行为发生 20 年后出版，试图重构作者的自我和它在其中发挥作用的革命情节。在重述她的生活时，Abreu 重新体现了她的自我，为其提供肉体、伤口和性。在这种重建中，另一个拥有权利和公平待遇要求的自我出现了。此外，重述还重新策划了革命，以反击由叛乱分子对他们的同志进行的清洗所产生的革命结束的叙述。因此，阿布雷乌的叙述肯定了革命的阴谋是一场争取权利和自由的运动。通过将权利话语纳入更大的革命话语，该叙事将自己与“人权畅销书”区分开来，并且仍然是顽固的叛乱主义。