Responding to Pain, from Healing to Human Rights — Aminatta Forna, Antjie Krog and James Orbinski

Abstract

Throughout this book, I have examined the strategies African writers adopt in order to represent pain. If the full perception of pain, as Elaine Scarry has argued, compels the observer to take action to work towards pain’s cessation, we could suggest that literary representations of suffering are motivated by the author’s desire for change.¹ Readers perceiving pain in novels and testimonial writing are, in turn, invited to respond to the demands of another person’s suffering. The reception of pain then, is a gesture which exacts action. Such a demand is apparent on multiple levels: in the author’s own explanation of their motivations for writing; in the descriptions of the ways in which characters within the text respond to the suffering of others; and in the address to the reader receiving the story. Ultimately, they all hinge on the notion of individual and overlapping collective responsibility that Orbinski points to above: ‘How am I to be, how are we to be in relation to the suffering of others?’ (4). What does Orbinski mean by this organising statement that he asserts defines his life? Why does he move from the singular to the collective? In this chapter, I will explore how Orbinski’s question functions in dialogue with literature through a discussion of three contrasting yet interrelated texts: Aminatta Forna’s novel about the aftermath of the war in Sierra Leone, The Memory of Love, Antjie Krog’s well-known account of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Country of My Skull and James Orbinski’s memoir about his years working with Médicins Sans Frontières in Somalia, Rwanda and the DRC, An Imperfect Offering.

‘I ask myself again and again, “How am I to be, how are we to be in relation to the suffering of others?” It is a question that has preoccupied me for much of my life.’

James Orbinski (4)