Narrating trauma: hybrid scriptures of disasters

Abstract

The text proposes a reflection about some of the main issues concerning the gesture of testimony, highlighting the aporias that mark the act of witnessing. Departing from the idea that testimony only exists under the sign of its collapse and impossibility, the essay stresses the dilemmas raised from the convergence between the individual task of the trauma storytelling and its collective component. In the historical catastrophes, as in the cases of genocide or mass violent persecution of particular segments of the population, traumatic memory is always a search for a compromise between the work of individual memory and another, more collective work. Testimony is analyzed as a part of a complex “politics of memory”.

Keywords

• Testemunho. Memória do trauma. Trauma. Política da memória. Ditadura no Brasil