Torture and Autobiography: A Scarrian Reading of Self, Rights, and Revolution in Lualhati Milan Abreu’s Dawn

Abstract

Using the analysis developed in Elaine Scarry’s seminal The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (1985) as its framework, the article seeks to analyze the structure of torture as represented in autobiography and understand the role of autobiographical writing in the reconstruction of self and the emergence of rights. A reading of Lualhati Milan Abreu's Dawn shows that autobiography can have a complicit role in the structure of torture. Through the torturers’ demand for an autobiography that details the victim’s life, including the critical admission of being a spy for the government, torture destroys the persona’s pre-torture self and world and a new self is constituted in the exigencies of survival and the alleviation of pain. The persona thereby assumes a new identity, confesses her guilt, and implicates other people in the crime of spying. This article argues that Dawn, published twenty years after the acts of torture, constitutes an attempt to reconstruct the author's self and the revolutionary plot in which it played a role. In retelling her life, Abreu reembodies her self, provides it with flesh, wounds, and sex. In this reconstruction, another self emerges armed with rights and a demand for fair treatment. Moreover, the retelling also re-emplots the revolution to counter end-of-revolution narratives generated by the purges committed by the rebels against their comrades. Abreu’s narrative thus affirms the plot of revolution as a movement towards rights and liberty. By subsuming rights discourse into a larger revolutionary discourse, the narrative distinguishes itself from “human rights bestsellers” and remains intransigently insurrectionist.