After Great Wrongs

In thinking about the aftermath of destructive violence, we veer between the impulses of retribution and the ethics of forgiveness.  Neither seems viable on a large scale; and what I want to propose instead is the notion of recognition as the reparative element which can offer some redress and relief, and can possibly lead to some acceptance and reconciliation. 

Gratuitous violence - as Primo Levi referred to it - that is, the violence that does not serve the ends of battle or victory but is meant to humiliate and brutalize the victim - is the ultimate form of misrecognition, or deliberate non-recognition. It is an attempt to dehumanize, to deny the humanity of the victim.  On the collective level, an attack on another group is a denial of that group's identity, cultural ethos, historical version of itself. 

The suffering and losses attendant on such violence cannot be undone; but I believe that recognition of what actually happened - of the victims' experience and the perpetrators' responsibility - can provide at least a symbolic redress which can allow some healing to take place, and societies to move on.   It seems to me that the one thing we owe to people whose very identities have been discounted and denigrated is a full acknowledgment and understanding of their experience and of their memories. Individual recognition in such instances is much needed, and it can be offered by family and friends, through the kind of ordinary, daily empathy and response which comes from close knowledge and intimacy with another person; or in therapy or psychoanalysis, through an examination of deeper subjectivity, and the working through of terrible memories.   (At least in our therapeutic cultures; elsewhere, rituals of commemoration and mourning may be different, and often more communal).  But I think that just as crucial is the element of a more collective or public recognition, which acknowledges what happened to a group of people - and most often, because they belonged to that group. And of course, public recognition matters profoundly to the inner world of the survivors. When Primo Levi was in Auschwitz, his greatest nightmare was that if he survived, his account of what he experienced would not be believed; and this turned out to be terribly true. I also think of the many Holocaust survivors who were deeply hurt by the early, and almost universal disavowal of that event, and were driven into a deeper silence and isolation. I have talked to Armenians who, nearly a century later, feel that until the Armenian genocide is named as that and its horror recognized, they are in a position of Ancient Mariners, burdened with the duty to tell their ancestral story.  Memories of atrocity - particularly if they are not acknowledged and processed - have a long afterlife, and weave themselves through the psyches of subsequent generations. 

On the other hand, it seems to me that the force of such procedures as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa - for all its flaws - came from the enactment of the processes of recognition; from the victim being able to face the perpetrator, and to say, this is what happened; this is what I experienced. I will tell my story and it will be heard. In reading accounts of the TRC testimonies, what is striking is the need of the victim to hear from the perpetrator exactly what happened - to have him admit precisely what was done.  Did you do that, one of the victims kept insisting; did you say that.  Eventually, the perpetrator admitted that he spoke the awful words the victim had heard.  It is hard to know what goes on internally in such exchanges; perhaps it is a kind of undoing of the powerlessness or the loss of agency, which I think is one of the most traumatic elements of trauma. Whatever the processes attendant on such encounters, their effects are sometimes very powerful.  I often think about the testimony of a man who had been literally blinded in the course of apartheid and who, after finishing his account, said, 'I want to thank the Commission, because I now feel after telling my story that I have regained my vision.'

After gratuitous violence, the damage both to the psyche and the moral sense - the moral world - of the victims is profound. The first and most urgent need is to invert the perverse order of atrocity - its principled injustice, one might say - by establishing the very principles and norms of justice.  Whatever the specific criteria of judgment or redress, the first need is to name wrongs as wrongs, and to bring the perpetrators to account.   This is a step towards the affirmation of the basic rights - the basic humanity - of the victim. And perhaps in some cases, facing the victim directly leads the perpetrator to recognize himself, so to speak - to see that he practiced his cruelties on an actual human being.  I was told about a man who had been one of the main enforcers of apartheid, who after hearing the testimony of his victims went home and cried for a week.

So, the purpose of restorative justice is on one level reparative; but its other goal, it seems to me, is to put a marker between the present and the past, and to establish the principles of justice altogether; that is, a social order, in which everyone can be and must be equally included, and in which everyone has the same rights and responsibilities.  Over the years, I've talked to Albie Sachs, who was an ANC fighter under apartheid, and later one of the framers of South Africa's new constitution.  Albie has talked about meeting his would-be assassin, a man named Henry, when the latter appeared on his doorstep one day, wanting to talk.  They did talk; and at the end, Albie was able to shake Henry's hand.  But Sachs vigorously denied that what he felt - or even wanted to feel - was forgiveness.  No, he said; it was not about that.  What he wanted was to be able to live side by side with Henry in the same country, and within the same moral universe. The handshake was a symbolic gesture signifying that intention.  So, Albie Sachs was willing to include the man who injured him in the new society he was helping to build.  And we must also, of course, include the former victims on equal terms, and accord to them the respect of both equal rights and equal responsibilities.   This is also a restoration of humanity, and of agency, to those who were previously powerless.

In talking about the aftermath of violence, we are speaking about what might be called - by analogy with the lesser evil - a lesser good; because of course it would be so much better if we could prevent such abuses in the first place.  But   how we address the aftermath of conflict also matters enormously.  It matters for the inner world of the victims, and for the future of societies in which violence has been committed; and it may be that the means we have developed for addressing the consequences of violence also hold pointers to the possibilities of prevention. One wonders if it might be possible to set up truth and reconciliation groups in advance of violence, if the processes of dialogue and recognition could be harnessed before latent (or sometimes fairly obvious) conflicts flare into communal battle and atrocity.  So far, we have been better at dealing with the aftermath of terrible events than at preventing them.  But perhaps our painful and lengthening history of internecine and international conflict may lead us to think hard about the possibilities of prevention, and of catching the licking flames of prejudice and hostility before they explode into raging and destructive fires.   

• Eva Hoffman is a Visiting Professor at the UCL European Institute.

Image: Holocaust Memorial at California Palace of the Legion of Honor (c) wikipedia user Eekim (CC0).