Experience, narrative and testimonial

notes on Barracoon, by Zora N. Hurston, and Lose Your Mother, by Saidiya Hartman

Abstract

Considering Barracoon – the story of the last black cargo, by Zora N. Hurston (2018 [1931]), and  Lose your mother – a journey along the Atlantic slave route, by Saidiya V. Hartman, I discuss the relationship between experience, narrative and testimonial – concepts present in the Literary Studies and in the ones focused on the historical knowledge. As a hypothesis, I argue that those works testify an impasse of two moments of the testimonial turn in the historical knowledge between the 20^th and the 21^st centuries in the context of the debate on the distinction of what is fictional and what is non-fictional and the questioning of the validity of a “universal history”. While, in Hurston, there is a tensioning between the constitution of a non-Western voice and the search for an inclusion in that exclusionary Western tradition, in Hartman, the starting point is the non-belonging and the narrator’s belief in her incapacity of understanding the world (of hers). As theoretical references, I highlight Seligmann-Silva’s work on the testimonials (2005) and the concept of history according to Benjamin (2020). I conclude stressing the female testimonial perspective in the constitution of a new space of images that, in its turn, asks the reader an active attitude both in the reading practice and in the political agency.