Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the intersection of healing and justice within the different approaches of individuals who have been directly or indirectly involved in the violent conflict in Northern Ireland to speaking about experiences of accountability and suffering through publicly performed testimony.

Paper long abstract:

Despite the slow-moving struggle of political leaders to design an effective strategy of how to come to terms with a violent past, Northern Ireland's post-conflict society has found its own approaches on a community level. One of those foregrounds creative spaces in which individual experiences of suffering are performed in public.

Through a long-term ethnography on two community drama projects that placed the story of 'ordinary' people who were directly involved in and/or suffered from the conflict at the centre of their focus, motivations of and impacts on those who spoke out as well as those who listened were explored. The paper critically examines notions of healing and justice and argues that there are, in fact, three approaches to dealing with experienced violence which can be, but are not necessarily consciously interlaced. In this context, the incentive for former combatants to speak in public is also taken into consideration. While for some storytellers recovery from trauma (that might include guilt) and thus individual healing is clearly prioritised, for others, their own well-being is willingly sacrificed for justice or the broader socio-political peace building process.

Although the driving forces for 'getting the story out there' may differ in detail, the argument is developed that the concept of witnessing, of having their own or a loved one's suffering recognised and acknowledged by their society, appears to be the crux of giving testimony of personal experiences of war.