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 Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela is a psychologist and author from South Africa. In 1996, South African President Nelson Mandela appointed Gobodo-Madikizela to the Human Rights Violations Committee of the TRC, on which she served until the Commission completed its inquiry in 1998. In this video clip, Gobodo-Madikizela talks about the link between truth telling and healing.
Transcription of video clip:
"Part of the struggle by people who are traumatized is the struggle to understand, to put language into something that is unspeakable. Acts of atrocity are unspeakable; they are unimaginable. They are acts that are horrific, are beyond any human understanding. We say all of those things because they are indeed unspeakable.
“When a victim is overwhelmed by a sense of horror and trauma, it takes away all thought processes, it takes away, robs them of any language. The only thing that is immediate and present for victims at the time of trauma is the pain and the anguish. And the desire to go back…is in part a desire to be present with a loved one. In a paradoxical way, it is the perpetrator who…in a symbolic way brings back the loved one, makes them present in the here and now, with the survivor, and allows them to articulate what happened. It is the truth telling that enables victims’ families, survivors, to articulate—to find language, to find words—to describe what actually happened to them through the acknowledgement and the truth telling of the perpetrator.
“And that is healing for many victims. Because part of the struggle is the struggle of something that you cannot understand, something that is so overwhelming you don’t understand why it happened to you, why they did it to you, and who did it to you. And now that there is a face, the face of somebody who is prepared to place you in their place, to bring you to that place where you are not able to be—present with a loved one—and then to release them…that is the power of acknowledgment, that is where the power of acknowledgment lies.
“Forgetting is not possible. It is not an option. Nor is condoning these deeds an option. This is not about condoning these deeds. It’s about recognizing the needs of victims who have suffered. At the same time, it’s acknowledging that these people are human beings like us. It’s recognizing the human face of evil.”
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