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Chapter Three

Language, Violence, and Oppression

It did not matter that they might die along the way; what really mattered was that they should not tell their story.

—Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved

Physical pain … is language destroying.

—Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

The literary and philosophical traditions of many cultures reveal that the urge for revenge is an ancient, deep-rooted human need that has only tentatively been transferred to central authority in the form of state-sponsored retribution. If that need for revenge is not acknowledged by being in some way incorporated into formal systems of justice, as are the Furies by Athena in the Oresteia, it reemerges as private vengeance, as it does with Paulina in Death and the Maiden. It has the potentiality of “dripping poison over all the land,” as Athena fears the unsatisfied Furies will do in the Oresteia. If a state fails to enact retribution that is emotionally satisfying to victims, the victims will eventually take justice into their own hands in an attempt to reestablish a psychologically necessary balance. Like Paulina, those seeking revenge are not driven by ressentiment or by political expediency, but by personal passion, “from an elementary sense of injustice.”¹ Revenge-seekers do not see themselves as evil or cruel; they see themselves as setting the world back into its proper order. The original quest for revenge was less about excess (although excess certainly sometimes occurred) and more about balancing and reciprocity. The victims’ passion is not directed at getting something new or extra for themselves, but for getting something back. Any legal forum that enacts retribution should take this passion and this need for balancing into account. Criminal sanctions against revenge seekers, moral or religious pleas to turn the other cheek, or state-ordered “forgiveness” cannot quell this deeply rooted need and can be futile and dangerous.² In countries that “attempt to induce a national amnesia … [victims’] unanswered calls for retribution develop into hate,”³ often escalating into violence that perpetuates revenge cycles.

At the same time, violence for violence has not always been the norm, and the notion of what retribution means has not always focused exclusively on what the perpetrator deserves (“has coming”). People have been seemingly satisfied (as “satisfied” as one can be under such circumstances) by a payment of money (or even a parade)⁴. While there seems to be a human drive for getting something back, what that “something” is may not be self-evident. What, then, constitutes appropriate retribution that is emotionally satisfying to the victims, fair to the perpetrators, and not destructive to the society that enacts it in situations in which violent retribution by the state is not possible or wise? What does it mean to say “I don’t want revenge, I want justice.” What is wanted? Is justice necessarily a proportional act of violence? What is Paulina’s “good”? The importance of this question should by now be clear, as should its difficulty.

This chapter examines the role that language plays in initial harms in an attempt to discover whether the recent plethora of truth commissions that substitute language for state violence have any chance for long-term success as adequate retribution. Leaving aside the distracting question of what perpetrators deserve, I want instead to analyze whether truth commissions can give something adequate back to the victims. I will proceed by examining the misuse, manipulation, and perversion of language that occurs with initial harms on three levels: personal, familial, and societal. If one of the significant things that victims lose in oppression is the ability to use language, then language as retribution begins to make sense.

Language and Violence

The harms that may be visited upon a population by an oppressive regime and the victims such a regime can create are limited only by the regime’s creativity and malice. For the purposes of this study, however, I want to focus on three kinds of victims: (1) victims such as Paulina who were kidnapped and tortured and desire personal retribution; (2) relatives, such as Orestes, Electra, and Hamlet, of victims who have disappeared or been murdered; (3) society itself, which has been terrorized and “polluted” by the activities of the oppressors. And my primary interest resides in the way that language functions in the harms perpetrated against these victims.

Personal Harms

In her brilliant study of torture and war, Elaine Scarry establishes several principles about the relationship of language and pain that can help in the quest to understand the role that language plays in a situation involving a surviving victim. Scarry first lays bare the inarticulability of physical pain: when in pain we cannot accurately describe it to another nor can we fully understand another’s pain. The closest we can get to communicating the reality of pain is metaphor: the pain feels like a burning, a piercing, a hammering, a vice. A primary attribute of pain is its ultimate unsharability because it cannot accurately be represented in language. Eventually, physical pain can become so extreme that its ceases to be articulable even as metaphor. The ability to speak words disappears: “Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it; bringing about an immediate reversion to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned.”⁵

The language-destroying nature of pain is linked to the political use of pain in torture: “physical pain is difficult to express, and … this inexpressibility has political consequences.”⁶ The torture victim is reduced to prelanguage screams and moans that are not heard or acknowledged by anyone.⁷ Torture becomes the visible manifestation of power; it shatters the person’s voice and makes language itself ineffective. Scarry’s theories are buttressed by the testimony of actual victims. In describing his imprisonment and torture, Jacobo Timerman writes that the pain a tortured person experiences “is a pain without points of reference, revelatory symbols, or clues to serve as indicators…. It is impossible to shout—you howl.”⁸ Other Argentinian victims remember pain “so excruciating that one couldn’t even scream or groan or move”⁹ and the use of a high voltage device that caused the tongue to contract and thus prevented screaming.¹⁰

The political consequences of pain’s ultimate inexpressibility can explain, at least in part, why the gratuitous infliction of pain is such a common and effective political tool, particularly for new and unstable political regimes.¹¹ The intense physical suffering that torture produces makes the invisible regime visible; it “converts the vision of suffering into the wholly illusory but, to the torturers and the regime they represent, wholly convincing spectacle of power.”¹² The writers of Nunca Más, the Argentinian truth report, in apologizing for the “encyclopedia of horror” that the section on torture becomes, assert that avoiding the horror was impossible: “After all, what else were these tortures but an immense display of the most degrading and indescribable acts of degradation, which the military government, lacking all legitimacy in power, used to secure power over a whole nation?”¹³

Interrogation often accompanies torture even when, as is often the case, the prisoner has no meaningful knowledge to communicate to the torturers. The purpose of torture and its concomitant interrogation is not the elicitation of confessions or information from the victims, but to “deconstruct the prisoner’s voice…. The prolonged interrogation … graphically objectifies the step-by-step backward movement along the path by which language comes into being and which here is being reversed or uncreated or deconstructed.”¹⁴ The intense pain the prisoners experience destroys their connection to their world and makes both questions and answers insignificant because links to friends, family, and country disappear in the all-encompassing world-destroying presence of pain. Torture is a primary means of “destroying … [any] sense of solidarity with an organization or community.”¹⁵ Pain annihilates everything but itself:

World, self, and voice are lost, or nearly lost, through the intense pain of torture and not through the confession as is wrongly suggested by its connotation of betrayal. The prisoner’s confession merely objectifies the fact of their being almost lost, makes their invisible absence, or nearly absence, visible to the torturers. To assent to words through the thick agony of the body can only be dimly heard, or to reach aimlessly for the name of a person or place that has barely enough cohesion to hold its shape as a word and none to bond it to its worldly referent, is a way of saying, yes, all is almost gone now, there is nothing left now, even this voice, the sounds I am making, no longer form my words but the words of another.¹⁶

The forced betrayal serves to degrade the victim, and the very degradation (making into “filth”) of the enemy serves the state: “Torturers humiliate the victim, exploit his human weakness through the mechanism of pain, until he does take on the role of filth, confessing his lowliness and betraying cause, comrades, family, and friends.”¹⁷

The victim’s ability to speak is first, through the device of interrogation, appropriated by the regime: “The victims are made to speak the words of the regime, to replace their own reality with that of the state, to double the voice of the state.”¹⁸ The victim’s voice is then destroyed as the pain intensifies and the victim reverts to a prelanguage state of being. Torture reduces the victim to a voiceless body as the torturer becomes a disembodied voice. “Although the torturer dominates the prisoner both in physical and verbal acts, ultimate domination requires that the prisoner’s ground become increasingly physical and the torturer’s increasingly verbal, that the prisoner become a colossal body with no voice, and the torturer a colossal voice … with no body.”¹⁹ Torture, perhaps more than any other wrong, is designed to denote superiority over the victim, a superiority that becomes an essential insignia of the corrupt regime: “They [the torturers] would say: ‘You’re dirt…. You don’t exist…. We are everything for you. We are justice. We are God.’”²⁰

In addition to the inversion of a victim’s language, other ordinary meanings become appropriated into the structure of torture. In the same way that words become a “confession” and a “betrayal” that manifest only the destruction of the victim’s world and become appropriated by the enemy to objectify this destruction, commonplace objects associated with normal living frequently are used as instruments of torture and death—bathtubs, beds, chairs, refrigerators, brown bags, ovens, showers, radiators.²¹ The infamous wet bag used in torture reenacted during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings was not an instrument devised for this diabolical purpose, but instead an ordinary police evidence bag. Even if a victim can struggle to retain the ability to form thoughts in language, commonplace meanings have changed. The ordinary has become the horrible. The story that a victim has constructed about his or her own life is systematically destroyed, and the oppressors’ story becomes the dominant and only narrative.²² The writers of Nunca Más echo this disintegration as they describe the function of the secret detention centers: “To be admitted to these centres meant to cease to exist. In order to achieve this end, attempts were made to break down the captives’ identity; their spatio-temporal points of reference were disrupted, and their minds and bodies tortured beyond imagination.”²³

We can isolate these elements and perhaps better understand them if we reflect for a moment on Paulina’s situation. The purpose of Paulina’s torture and interrogation was to unmake her world. The play provides only later accounts of the torture itself, but it is clear that Paulina has lost the ability to articulate her pain. She doesn’t like to talk about what happened to her, and she has told her husband Gerardo only sketchy details about it. Meaning was inverted in that her favorite piece of music, Schubert’s Quartet in D Minor, became background music for her pain. An agent of healing, a doctor, became an agent of torture and pain.²⁴ Her world became appropriated into the torturer’s arsenal of weapons: her medicine (she was a medical student) and her music. Not only is Paulina’s voice destroyed, the content of her world and eventually her self likewise disintegrate.

The “wild and fearless” Paulina who assisted in smuggling people out of the country has been destroyed or nearly destroyed. The student activist has become the woman who gave up her studies, who cries out “they’re coming for me” more than a decade after her kidnapping, and who huddles in a fetal-like position when she hears voices or sees strange cars outside her house.²⁵ Through the technology of torture, the prior Paulina’s world, self, and voice are unmade and the new disempowered Paulina is transformed into the insignia of the regime. And this transformation does not cease with Paulina’s release or even with the downfall of her oppressors. Years later she remains disconnected to the world. She has been unable to reclaim the things that were appropriated into her torturer’s arsenal, and she cannot listen to her beloved Schubert. No rebalancing has occurred.

In addition to Scarry’s compelling delineation of the language transference intrinsic in pain and torture, political injuries have a symbolic and communicative dimension that can help to explain why torture victims such as Paulina cannot heal themselves after their release. In a theory that extends Scarry’s sense of pain and injury beyond the physical, Jeffrie Murphy argues that “One reason we so deeply resent moral injuries done to us is not simply that they hurt us in some tangible or sensible way; it is because such injuries are also messages—symbolic communications. They are ways a wrongdoer has of saying to us, T count but you do not,’ T can use you for my purposes’” (original italics).²⁶ Political philosopher Jean Hampton puts forth an “expressive” theory of retribution that argues that “Those who commit such crimes essentially reason, T will hurt you in order to establish that your worth is less than mine,’”²⁷ thus making a “false moral claim.”²⁸ Hampton maintains that some kinds of wrongs are moral injuries that affect a person’s realization of his or her value. These wrongs “carry meanings that effect injuries to a person’s value in one of two ways: either they can damage … that person’s ‘realization of his value,’ or they can damage ‘the acknowledgement of his value.’”²⁹ The person is diminished and treated as an object rather than as a person with, in the Kantian sense, intrinsic moral worth. Argentinian victims claim: “We were objects. And useless, troublesome objects at that.”³⁰

The wrongs are committed in such a way as to denote the superiority of the wrongdoer over the victim, and our fury at the wrongdoer in part results from his posture of superiority over the victim, his treatment of the victim as worthless, less than human.³¹ He symbolizes “through his actions that he had the power as well as the authority to recognize their [the victims’] worthlessness and to decide their fate to the point of destroying them.”³² Or, as in Paulina’s case, letting them survive: “This bitch can take a bit more.”³³ The wrongful action, therefore, affects not only the victim’s sense of worth but also the community’s sense of the inherent value of all its citizens: “We care about what people say by their actions because we care about whether our own value, and the value of others, will continue to be respected in our society. The misrepresentation of value implicit in moral injuries not only violates the entitlements generated by their value, but also threatens to reinforce belief in the wrong theory of value by the community.”³⁴ If a state does nothing, it tacitly acquiesces to the mistreatment,³⁵ by joining in the communication of superiority that says that the victim is worth little.³⁶