Fragmented Testimony as Narrative Structure
Author Sarah Bruni shares her reasoning for writing a novel with fragmented testimonies from multiple perspectives.
When I began to envision the structure of my novel Mass Mothering, two principles guided me. First, I wanted the story to be told in fragments, mirroring moments between wake and sleep, a feeling of the static of white space breaking up the text, as if it were starting over, and over, again. Then, I also imagined many speakers would be responsible for the narration, both telling their own stories and grappling with, or mediating in some way, the stories of others.
I was interested in these accounts piling atop one another: interrupting, complementing, and complicating one another’s versions of truth. I was thinking about the layers of an onion that would keep getting pulled back to reveal new speakers with different relationships to the events of the story. It was my hope that the narrative truth feel a bit unstable, fluid, and for the reading experience to mirror that, as the reader slowly gains her footing in this fictional world.
The novel’s protagonist is an amateur translator, named A., recovering from a medical trauma. She encounters and obsessively reads an unfinished book, Field Notes, about a town where a community of mothers, whose sons were the victims of political violence, turn their collective grief into action. Eventually, A. begins to translate the book and finds her way to the unnamed country where it was written, only to uncover that the story, and its author’s relationship to it, is more complex than she understood from afar.
The mothers (by way of transcripts of conversations within this book) and A. are both responsible for parts of the narration, as the novel shifts between them. Each of these narrators also shares a state of ambiguous grief and lives in a state of a perpetual present. I imagined creating a text that moves transnationally and represents the aftermath of a trauma, moving between the voices of women within different communities and with a range of abilities to circulate both themselves and their stories.
I started to imagine the structure of this novel while I was a graduate student in a Latin American Studies program at Tulane University in New Orleans, where I had the institutional support to spend time considering narrative traditions other than those I had grown up with in the US. The tradition of crónica blends the techniques of fiction writing with the stakes of journalism, so that the story told is both one that is true but also is written with heightened attention to the artifice of a literary text.
Testimonio, a genre in which speakers relay firsthand accounts of violence in order to seek justice, tends to uplift the collective truth rather than privileging any single speaker’s experience. In many of the testimonies I encountered, speakers finished stories for one another, talking for one another, through one another, to get at the most critical details of the communal experience. Also, despite the dire nature of many of the events being told, they often eschewed drama; the tone was measured, factual. The horrors could be so manifold and complex, but they are often told in such quick succession, that they layer upon each other.
When I understood my novel would feature the aftermath of political violence, I couldn’t imagine writing Mass Mothering without engaging features from these traditions, especially as settings of the novel are deliberately undefined, a choice I hoped would allow the reader to arrive at the text without assumptions about the types of places where certain kinds of tragedies occur.
Field Notes, the fictional text within the novel, is described within A.’s translator’s note of sorts as “factual, based on recorded testimonies,” but it certainly is not written in a straightforward, journalistic way, and its author becomes a character, continually calling attention to the writing process. I was interested in the ethics and consequences of bearing witness, representing how the process of documentation, dissemination, or translation can’t help but compromise truth, because of the way stories change as they transverse speakers, experiences, borders, languages, etc.
As readers and listeners, there are always things we’re misunderstanding, through the very nature of our distance from events. In part, the movement between the perspectives of A. and the mothers themselves—and later the author of Field Notes as well—helped me create a narrative structure that mirrors some of the ethical questions at the heart of the book.
Check out Sarah Bruni's Mass Mothering here:
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