The Example of Margaret Randall
Considerations of the subject’s voice and perspective are also vital to a variety of experimental reportage I’ve been referring to as “testimonial” journalism. An illustration of this approach can be found, for instance, in the writings of Margaret Randall, who reported on Latin America (and particularly women’s experience there) for decades starting in the 1960s. Repudiating the standard practices of war correspondents from what she deemed imperialist countries, Randall instead took to likening her own work to the practice of oral history. Indeed she compared her reporting to what she called “reclaiming” the “lost” experiences of women transformed by war, forced to live underground in revolutionary times, or marginalized in cultures given to machismo.1 In famous works like Sandino’s Daughters (1981), Randall even took to printing snapshots of her subjects, and then transposing their memories into short, inset reflections cast in their own voice–as in this selection from a chapter entitled “The Women in Olive Green,” about female soldiers following the success of the 1979 Nicaraguan revolution:
Right alongside this particular photograph, Randall offers two different ways of framing it. The italicized selection below is from the unnamed narrator (we assume Randall herself); the second is the direct testimony of Randall’s subject:
This is Ana Julia Guido, a young woman with an honest face and strong body. She is dressed in olive green and carries a heavy pistol at her hip. The rolled-up sleeves of her army shirt revealed traces of the notorious “mountain leprosy” that was so common among guerillas assigned for long periods to the mountains. Ana Julia works in Personal Security, the office responsible for the bodyguards of the Revolution’s leaders. . . . ANA JULIA: . . . When I went underground I was sent to a training school in the mountains. It was given by Tomas Borge. We studied political, military and cultural questions. We also learned some basic nursing techniques. But the emphasis was on military training Monica Baltodano and I were the only women. It’s because of those classes that I’m the guerrilla I am today. Eight or nine of us decided to form a group in the mountains. The others all went to work in mass organizing, in the neighborhoods, or in the underground student movement. I was in the mountains for two-and-a-half years. (128 – 129)
Many readers will no doubt recognize that Randall’s technique is carrying even further the “mosaic” or scrapbook effects I discussed in my previous chapter—in a sense, literalizing those effects. In many moments Sandino’s Daughters looks like a collection of “candids” captioned by very personal, even intimate histories. Especially in Randall’s photographs, the bodies of these women, as females, are made larger and important, and the exchanges these ex-soldiers have with Randall often pivot on their shared understandings as women. In short, narrative journalism is presented as a record of a transaction that is itself is meant to testify to a forged political relationship between Randall and her subjects. At the same time, the subject’s voice is allowed to emerge, as if she is given more authority over her own memories (to decide what’s important seemingly without the journalist choosing it for her.) Randall seems to ask her U.S. audience to see her Nicaraguan women not as dangerous guerrillas, but as we would our own veterans, as returning home with new expectations and a new maturity. Their testimony, in turn, becomes something to cherish, again like a literal a scrapbook–much as, say, memoirs of war correspondents often do, by including photographs of comrades or soldiers. Or, as Dexter Filkins did in The Forever War (2008), when he included some work by the photographers who had accompanied him in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It would be unwise, of course, to read testimonial journalism or scrapbook effects uncritically, or to view the words of Randall’s subjects as fully “unframed.” Testimonial journalism can lure into thinking that we need not question the subject’s own story, or its authenticity–since it makes it look like we’re getting that story straight. (Or, to make the “news story” the same as the subject’s story.) But especially in partisan or politically controversial contexts, subjects often don’t just tell their stories unprompted, or without expectations about what their listener(s) want to hear–quite the opposite, in fact, is usually the case. It’s unavoidable, for instance, to wonder whether Randall ends up cropping her subjects’ testimonies much as she does the photographs that accompany them: even the verbal text alongside acts as a caption, interpreting the photograph for us. In the case of Dexter Filkins, meanwhile, the photographs he reprints aren’t simply “illustrations” standing on their own, un-interpreted, either; rather, we typically will compare them to the stories we read in his text. As if we are looking at another person’s scrapbook, we might well feel as if we are reading over the shoulder of Filkins himself. That is, these images are working as memory triggers to call up deeply emotional, personal responses in Filkins’s memory.
And then, of course, when we’re talking about representing “testimony,” there’s the entire complication of translation, say, from Spanish or Arabic to English. Even when a narrative journalist intends to cede story-telling authority to their subjects, translation comes in between. And in translation, of course, there is always interpretation.