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2 Writing Violence
José Rabasa
The concept of writing violence points to the ways in which violence is written about and the ways writing itself exerts violence in colonial and postcolonial texts. The notion of the colonial/postcolonial divide bears less on a historical break traditionally marked by the wars of independence in Latin America than with the interrogation of the logic of colonialism. As such, the “postcolonial” dates back to the very earliest moments in the Spanish invasion of the Americas; it is coterminous with colonialism and the undoing of its civilizing claims. Colonialism and the justification of wars of conquest depend on the articulation of moral, religious, and epistemological grounds. If religion and morality are quite apparent in the denunciation of idolatry, sacrifice, and cannibalism, these conceptualizations of indigenous life entail epistemic violence. Epistemic violence reduces indigenous life to superstition, magic, and irrationality.1
In its most benign form, the consequences of writing violence institute develop- mentalist tropes that place Christianity and its institutions as historical necessities within spiritual and material teleology. In its most destructive form, writing violence sets the moral and political scenario for wars of extermination. This would be instances of writing that exert violence, but they are often intertwined with writing about violence as in telling the stories of wars against Indians, in describing massacres, or in characterizing indigenous life as inherently violent. Having said this, I would add that Spaniards, Indians, and mestizos were particularly lucid in exposing the violence of writing in the colonial period. With the exception of Christopher Columbus’s Diario, the journal of his first voyage to America, which remains exemplary of writing that discovers, my examples will be drawn mainly from sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Mexican sources, but similar examples could be drawn from the eighteenth century and the Republican period, up to the present time. The current uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas should be conceived, at least partially, as an epistemic struggle.
To compensate, though also to complement the concept of writing violence, I will briefly outline the parameters for an echography of voice.2 Literacy is most often opposed to orality as distinct realms that exclude each other. Thus writing would exert violence to the extent that it brings about the destruction of oral cultures. Beyond alphabetization and the transformations of speech brought about by the homogenization of culture through a written grammar, one often finds arguments concerning the ways in which written representation of oral discourse destroys the spontaneity and creativity of orality. Speech, like the gestures that accompany it, pertains to the ephemeral. They disappear in the flow of time. But in the same ways that one speaks of photography as capturing the real, one may speak of writing as the recording of voice, both internal and external. It fixes speech in time. It leaves the trace of what once was. The concept of echography would seek to explore ways of talking about the traces in alphabetical texts of voices that once were. If the photographic image can be manipulated, doctored, altered, one can also speak of the real that remains in spite of the changes. Recorded speech bears a similarity in that minimally it conveys an internal voice of someone who thinks that his or her representation of speech approximates what speakers would have sounded like. Alphabetically recorded speech also partakes of ghosts that are brought to life in the act of reading.
Rather than assuming that writing by its nature stands in opposition to speech, one would have much to gain to observe the multiple definitions of writing practices. The ephemeral pertains to all mimetic technologies, whether they are alphabetical writing or live video recording. They mark the end of time in unbridgeable distance. There are, of course, ideologies that seek to domesticate speech or that pretend that only alphabetical writing is worth considered such. Schooling brings about processes of homogenization by implanting correct forms of address and grammatical regimentation of thought. The tyranny of the alphabet presumes that only writing can preserve memory and history. That pictography is deficient. But these absolute definitions and reductions of writing to ideology and prejudice must be complemented with an awareness that the processes of education and adoption of alphabetical writing form part of a two-way street, in which the subjects that practice alphabetical writing might very well have things in mind that the rectors of correctness and western hubris might not have anticipated. That is why writing violence must be complemented with an echography of voice if we are to avoid oppressive absolutes and theoretical dead ends. Otherwise, we run the risk of perpetuating claims to superiority and power. We should devise reading (as well as writing) strategies that would recognize as well as enable acts of resistance and transculturation.
At this point I would like to raise the paradox implicit in the call to invent forms of writing, reading, or teaching (against)
