Provocative Memory: The Fine Line between Healing and Humiliation, Justice and Anger

This paper explores the public performance of memory for the purposes of healing and justice in post-war Sierra Leone. Following South Africa, truth commissions have commonly incorporated the public performances of truth-telling theorized within peacebuilding and transitional justice literature to provide psychological healing and postwar justice. Significant recent scholarship has, however, questioned the practical efficacy and cultural relevance of such processes in culturally diverse settings. Scholars such as Brandon Hamber, David Mendeloff, Tim Kelsall, and Rosalind Shaw have argued that there is no proof that such presentations heal individuals, nor provide a sense of justice. This paper investigates why this might be, through the lens of cultural pragmatics theory. Cultural pragmatics is a branch of social performance theory which posits that social performances produce predictable social affects only if they include particular elements. These elements include culturally salient symbols, scripts, actors, audience, means of symbolic production, mise-en-scéne, and social power. Performances combining these elements are said to achieve performative success and to allow an audience to psychologically identify with the performance. Alternatively, failing to combine these elements risks unpredictable failure. Analyzing truth-telling through this lens shows why the truth commission in Sierra Leone failed to produce healing and justice, instead leading often to humiliation and anger. The data for this project was collected during a year long period of field research in rural Sierra Leone. Over the course of the year I conducted extensive participant observation and a serious of 62 semi-structured interviews with residents of one town in the rural north of the country to determine their understanding, perception, and experience of the truth commission’s public hearings process. In these interviews I found that truth-telling performances were overwhelming considered to be provocative. The presentation of memory in public was experienced as pouring pepper on the wounds of the past, or hot water on one’s head. These findings, and the use of cultural pragmatics as a lens by which to understand these failures, are unique contributions to the research on truth commissions and truth-telling, and help to knit together the fields of transitional justice, peacebuilding and memory studies