Paper Short Abstract:

Combining Critical Poetic Inquiry with ethnography, this paper explores the analytical and methodological potential of poetic testimony after witnessing extreme forms of violence for anthropologists and their interlocutors.

Paper Abstract:

Integrating Critical Poetic Inquiry into anthropological research treats poetry as a potent socio-political phenomenon and sets it into a wider conversation on individual and societal trauma after instances of violence. This paper discusses the analytical and methodological potential of poetic testimony for both researchers and their interlocutors.

Witnessing instances of extreme forms of state violence in Managua was traumatic and disrupted my fieldwork in 2018. However, it also formed the premise for becoming a credible researcher and conducting further fieldwork on Nicaraguan exiles in Western Europe.

Recounting witness accounts relates to a broader scholarly debate in Latin America, known as 'testimonio'. Especially in Nicaragua, poetry has become an expression of vernacular resistance to its violent regime in the past years. This is not coincidental: Nicaragua, also known as the “nation of poets,” has strategically used poetry for discourses on national and revolutionary identity. After mass protests turned into crimes against humanity (GIEI, 2019), hundreds of thousands of Nicaraguans fled, many of them reverting to writing poetry about their traumatic experiences.

Delivering testimony through poetry becomes a personal archive of memories of violence breaking through the governance of fear that exiles are subjected to (Vasanthakumar, 2022). It also opens the potential to conduct research on and with communities that otherwise are inaccessible to researchers. Moreover, through this process, the asymmetry between individual witnesses' accounts and indirect witnessing and between researcher and interlocutor is lifted (albeit temporarily) and provides a unique insight into what otherwise can neither be said nor heard.