Alexandra S. Moore - Witnessing Torture

I became involved with human rights activism at the age of fourteen, but it would be twenty-five years before I met a person who had survived torture. Many human rights activists and academics never meet someone who has survived a grave violation such as disappearance, torture, rape, or genocide, and certainly the vast majority of survivors never meet those who speak on their behalf in the arena of international human rights advocacy. Indeed, at its highest institutional levels, and in spite of the intrepid on-the-ground work of advocates and humanitarian agents, much human rights work is divorced from the intimate struggles, pain, and trauma experienced by individual humans, focused instead upon reporting on and negotiating with governments, armed resistance groups, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), corporations , diplomats, and others about the treatment of groups of people: dissidents living under repressive regimes; ethnic minorities mistreated by state apparatuses; detainees confined without trial in the war on terror; women and girls violated and oppressed the world over.

In spite of the fact that I had been an activist with Amnesty Internationals Urgent Action Network for more than twenty years, and although my professional life was focused upon teaching and writing about human rights from a cultural perspective, it was not until I was invited to participate in a panel at a One Day Forum on Torture at Catholic University in Washington, DC in June 2003 that I met a group of people who had survived torture. The events of this day illuminated significant issues regarding the relationship between survivors of human rights violations and the community of human rights activists /academics/clinicians who have not experienced such violations; such issues can best be identified through the Cartesian split between mind and body that marks the construction of these two groups in the public sphere, and that also informs the rhetorical modes in which they are known to speak most frequently. In spite of all we have learned about the limits of the philosophical division between mind and body (also responsible for separating emotion from intellect, and public from private space) from postmodernists, feminists, and multiculturalists, among others, it remains surprisingly conventional in the human rights arena in ways that correspond predictably to national, racial, and gendered identity positions.