Testimonies
Week 3 

“The formality of testimony provides a structure within which events can be related and feelings expressed.  A testimony is also a form through which the voice of a ‘witness’ is accorded space and protection” (144).
                     -Linda Tuhiwai Smith 

“History runs thick in all of us” (61).
                     -Lee Anne Bell 

“I have to write.  I have to dump this onto paper.  I can’t keep it inside of me” (130).
                    -Octavia E. Butler 

“Each of us must come to terms with the multiple ways in which race, class, and gender as categories of analysis frame our individual biographies” (465).
                     -Patricia Hill Collins 

“Start with recent memories and work backward, I tell them.  Memory leads to consciousness, recollection to the possibility of meaning which always includes a perception of relation between oneself and the world.  This is the central principle of an autobiographical attitude we shall try to practice and name” (23).
                    -Jane Lazarre

 “We write to release old injustices and abuses, to make sense of them, to contextualise ourselves.  We write to tell the truth, our writings like graffiti on the surface of the moneyed culture at large.  We write so that we can finally see our experiences portrayed honestly, in many dimensions” (xv).  -
                    Michelle Tea