Citation

Chiwengo N. Comp. Stud. S. Asia Af. Middle East 2008; 28(1): 78.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2008, Duke University Press)

DOI

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PMID

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Abstract

Elaine Scarry affirms, in The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, that the language of pain is incommensurable, inexpressible, and unshareable. The medical field has had to use the linguistic register of its patients to objectify internal pain. Human rights discourse and literature equally experience difficulties recording pain, yet to eradicate torture and depict human suffering, these discourses must enable readers and viewers of documentaries to understand the "aversiveness being experienced inside the body of someone whose country may be far away, whose name can be barely pronounced, and whose ordinary life is unknown except that it is known that the ordinary life has ceased to exist." To successfully elicit reader or viewer identification and empathy, the language narrating violence must sustain tonal stability and convey a sense of immediacy. Human rights discourse, according to Scarry, diminishes pain in its very act of expressing it; it can speak for the pain of the other solely on the basis of its international authority and credibility, acquired through the veracity and accuracy of its statements.

While physical pain can be conveyed by fragmentary means of verbalization, its ability to assault language into inexpressibility seems oftentimes inevitable; therefore human rights organizations have at their disposal a small number of verbal strategies, revolving around what Scarry terms "the language of agency," to represent assaults. This language remains so unstable that it needs to be controlled lest it should be enlisted for other agendas and "invoked not to coax pain into visibility but to push it into further invisibility, invoked not to assist in the elimination of pain but to assist in its infliction". Human rights discourse experiences the additional challenge of making pain visible through the verbal objectification of its characteristics and referents