The intersubjective witness: trauma testimony in Towfiq Al-Qady's Nothing But Nothing: One Refugee's Story

Abstract

Testimony typically privileges singular subjectivity; as a means of representing psychological trauma, it is thought to bear witness to an individual's unique experience. This essay interrogates the question of singular subjectivity, arguing that a community can be the nexus around which witnesses ‘gather’ the human and historiographical significance of their experiences, focusing their constitutive relationship with those of and for whom the testimony is spoken. I examine this idea with reference to Towfiq Al-Qady's autobiographical solo performance, Nothing But Nothing: One Refugee's Story, first presented in Brisbane in 2005. Al-Qady constructs a fluid, unstable (inter)subjectivity, performing as and speaking about his mother, lover, daughter and his child and adult selves, as well as speaking for other communities with which his experience connects. While the decentralisation of the individual witness highlights possibilities for encounter and communication, it can be problematic in terms of witness agency and risks de-specifying individual experience. This problem focuses the tensions and slippages between self and other(s), ‘truth’ and ‘fiction’, that inhere in testimonial acts. I investigate the extent to which Nothing But Nothing enables effectual generalisation, whereby lines of community engagement are drawn up across the divide between asylum seekers/refugees and Australian audiences.

Keywords:

• asylum seekers
• refugees
• testimony
• witness
• theatre
• Australia

Notes

1. Other Holocaust survivors, such as Charlotte Delbo and ‘Ka-Tzetnik 135633’, explicitly situate their own trauma within a historiographical context, drawing attention to the communities of others that experienced it. See Trezise (2002) and Popkin (2002).

2. The work premiered at Brisbane's Metro Arts Theatre on 10 April 2005. Towfiq Al-Qady continues to present it to schools and colleges in Brisbane.

3. All quotations from Nothing But Nothing: One Refugee's Story are drawn from Towfiq Al-Qady's unpublished unpaginated playscript with the author's permission.

4. Al-Qady's Metro Arts audience consisted of Australians as well as members of Brisbane's refugee (particularly Iraqi) community. My reference to the Australian audience–community is not an attempt to homogenise the audience, but identifies the dominant ‘others’ to whom Al-Qady's text speaks, as distinct from those on whose behalf he performs.