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The Obligation to Bear Testimony to Human Rights Abuses

Patricia Jabbeh Wesley

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Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature

Part of the book series: Comparative Feminist Studies ((CFS))

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Abstract

“The Obligation to Bear Testimony to Human Rights Abuses” underlines the imperative to bear witness not only to those examples of women’s suffering that are specific to cultural ideologies, but also to other forms of human rights abuse, especially those perpetrated during wars. Eze provides an analytical study of the poems of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, who details human rights abuses during the brutal civil war in Liberia. “The Obligation to Bear Testimony to Human Rights Abuses” thus enhances the truth that women’s rights are human rights and human rights are women’s rights.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Carol Blessing, “Exile and Maternal Loss in the Poems of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley,” in Exile and the Narrative/Poetic Imagination, ed. Agnieszka Gutthy. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010, 77–93 (Blessing 2010).

  2. 2.

    Charles Morrow Wilson, Black Africa in Microcosm. New York: Harper & Row, 1971, 25–30 (Wilson 1971).

  3. 3.

    Ibid., 52.

  4. 4.

    Yekutiel Gershoni, Black Colonialism: The Americo-Liberian Scramble for the Hinterland. Boulder and London: Westview Press, 1985, xi (Gershoni 1985).

  5. 5.

    Ibid., 95.

  6. 6.

    George Klay Kieh, The First Liberian Civil War: The Crises of Underdevelopment. New York: Peter Lang, 2008, 25–29 (Kieh 2008).

  7. 7.

    Melissa Beattie-Moss, “Word of Mouth. The Painful, Joyful Heart: A Conversation with Patricia Jabbeh Wesley.” 2005. http://www.rps.psu.edu/jabbeh/index.html (Accessed October 26, 2012) (Beattie-Moss 2005).

  8. 8.

    Ibid.

  9. 9.

    Hal Herring, “Dreaming of Home: A Conversation with Liberian Poet Patricia Jabbeh Wesley,” Bloomsbury Review, 23.5 (2003): no page. (Herring 2003)

  10. 10.

    James Dawes, “Human Rights in Literary Studies,” Human Rights Quarterly, 31.2 (2009): 395 (Dawes 2009).

  11. 11.

    Richard Kearney, “Narrative and Ethics,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 70 (1996): 31(Kearney 1996).

  12. 12.

    Susan L. Feagin, “The Pleasure of Tragedy,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 20.1 (1983): 103 (Feagin 1983).

  13. 13.

    Geoffrey Hartman, “The Humanities of Testimonies: An Introduction,” Poetics Today, 27.2 (2006): 249 (Hartman 2006).

  14. 14.

    Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988, 199 (Levi 1998).

  15. 15.

    Ibid., 199.

  16. 16.

    Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Trans. Stuart Woolf. New York: A Touchstone Book, 1996, 9 (Levi 1996).

  17. 17.

    Ibid., 9.

  18. 18.

    Nicholas Patruno, Understanding Primo Levi. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 1995, 9 (Patruno 1995).

  19. 19.

    Ibid., 10.

  20. 20.

    Jonathan Druker, “Ethics and Ontology in Primo Levi’s ‘Survival in Auschwitz’: A Levinasian Reading,” Italica, 83.3.4 (2006): 533 (Druker 2006).

  21. 21.

    Ibid., 534.

  22. 22.

    Levi, The Drowned, 15 (Levi 1998).

  23. 23.

    Donald Revell, The Art of Attention: A Poet’s Eye (Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2007), 13 (Revell 2007).

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 18.

  25. 25.

    Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Where The Road Turns. Pittsburgh, PA: Autumn House Press, 2010 (Wesley 2010).

  26. 26.

    Ibid., 56

  27. 27.

    Mark Doty, The Art of Description: World Into Word. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2010, 21 (Doty 2010).

  28. 28.

    Ibid.

  29. 29.

    Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Where The Road Turns, 7.

  30. 30.

    Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Becoming Ebony. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003 (Wesley 2003).

  31. 31.

    Ibid., 8.

  32. 32.

    Ibid., 9.

  33. 33.

    “Muslim” in German.

  34. 34.

    Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books, 1999, 156 (Agamben 1999).

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 156–157.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 158.

  37. 37.

    Ibid., 158.

  38. 38.

    Wesley, Becoming Ebony (Wesley 2003).

  39. 39.

    Ibid. 27.

  40. 40.

    Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, The River is Rising. Pittsburgh, PA: Autumn House Press, 2007 (Wesley 2007).

  41. 41.

    Ibid., 11.

  42. 42.

    Cited in J. Todd DuBose, “The Phenomenology of Bereavement, Grief, and Mourning,” Journal of Religion and Health, 36.4 (1997): 368 (DuBose 1997).

  43. 43.

    Ibid., 368.

  44. 44.

    Ibid., 370.

  45. 45.

    Ibid., 39.

  46. 46.

    Reuters, “Liberia Troops Accused Of Massacre in Church.” 1990 (Reuters 1990). http://www.nytimes.com/1990/07/31/world/liberia-troops-accused-of-massacre-in-church.html.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 44.

  48. 48.

    Patricia Jabbeh Wesley, Before The Palm Could Bloom: Poems of Africa. New Issues Press Kalamazoo, Western Michigan University, 1998.

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 20.

  50. 50.

    I am grateful to Patricia Jabbeh Wesley for translating these names and guiding me through Liberian cultures and languages.

  51. 51.

    Jabbeh Wesley, The River is Rising, 34.

  52. 52.

    Jabbeh Wesley, Before the Palm Could Bloom, 9.

  53. 53.

    Wole Soyinka, “Abiku.” www.cafeafrikana.com/poetry.html.

  54. 54.

    Chidi T. Maduka, “African Religious Beliefs in Literary Imagination: Ogbanje and Abiku in Chiuna Achebe, J.P. Clark and Wole Soyinka,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 22.1 (1987): 18 (Maduka 1987).

  55. 55.

    Blessing, “Exile and Maternal Loss in the Poems of Patricia Jabbeh Wesley,” 78–79 (Blessing 2010).

  56. 56.

    Jabbeh Wesley, Before the Palm Could Bloom, 33.

  57. 57.

    Ibid., 33–34.

  58. 58.

    DuBose, “The Phenomenology of Bereavement,” 374 (DuBose 1997).

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  1. Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago, USA

    Chielozona Eze

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Eze, C. (2016). The Obligation to Bear Testimony to Human Rights Abuses. In: Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature. Comparative Feminist Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40922-1_8

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