Story involves memory and it’s through the process of having our participants share their story that our organization continues to ponder what our work creates. Asking others to tell their stories is to invite complexity in the moment. Story acts as a form of soft power and holds the potential to surface insight and grow connection.
It’s been hard to concentrate on anything the last few weeks as the Covid-19 pandemic spreads through our communities, the US, and the world. We feel helpless sitting at home, or at our desks, when all we can do is bear witness from a distance to the mass suffering, loss, and grief happening all around us.
A system becomes trauma-organized when the method it uses in trying to reach its goals becomes a barrier to those goals — compounding and multiplying harm in its attempts to right a wrong. Our current criminal justice system traumatizes and re-traumatizes those that are affected by criminal violence, police investigations, trials, and incarceration.
A former mitigation specialist still remembers the wife of a death row inmate who broke down in tears as he met with her to go over an affidavit for her husband’s defense case. Late into the night, his role shifted from a researcher for the defense team to an ad-hoc support person, although there was little he could do other than sit quietly with her and listen.
There is no question that gun violence is a public health crisis. It penetrates communities physically, taking loved ones abruptly, and retraumatizes victim families with persistence.
Throughout the last half century, theorists have laid out the multitude of ways institutional and government archives function as hegemonic instruments of state power, “structuring structures” as Bourdieu called them. The only way to find the silenced voices of the marginalized and oppressed, if they exist, is to carefully “mine the archive,” as Foucault said, to attempt to excavate “an insurrection of subjugated knowledges.”
The notion that we should interrogate annihilation in its symbolic form might seem to undermine the urgency of actual annihilation; indeed, we are confronted with reports and images of violence and death on a daily basis.
On May 12, 2021, we hosted a conversation about interviewing & narratives — as well as TAVP’s philosophy of interviewing and interviewing process.
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After years of retaliation, lies, fear, and worry, each storyteller offers stories that were unflinching in their clarity of the tragedy of the current moment and the necessity to change it.
People who are incarcerated in Texas prisons and their loved ones just want to be heard. Just because we can’t see them behind the walls doesn’t mean they do not exist. Always remember that every inmate ID number is a real live human being.
There’s no question that the COVID-19 crisis is laying bare for all to see the structural injustices and inequities that have become the cornerstones of late American capitalism and its justice systems — broken healthcare systems, attacks on workers’ rights, severe racial health disparities, over-policing of black and brown communities.
© 2023 | Texas After Violence Project
