"The Rooster Says There Is Life in Fear": State Terror, Open Silences, and Historical Memory in Togo

Influential circles of scholars are still committed to the idea that history should be written from a detached perspective that is devoid of personal considerations. This “Noble Dream” as Peter Novick termed it in his 1988 polemic, is precisely that, a dream. Even before historical analysis begins, the sources that scholars draw from are already mediated by the subjective experiences of the people who produce the sources. This makes a clinical engagement with sources all but impossible. As a Togolese refugee who grew up in exile, my intimate relationship with Togo’s political history shapes the ways I conduct research and approach my analysis. Instead of fearing this positionality as somehow compromising my “objectivity,” I’ve learned to embrace it. In this paper, I interrogate my own complicated relationship with Togo’s political past to argue that there are unique epistemological orientations that come from our intimate relationships with historical processes and events. As I show, it was only through understanding how my experiences as a refugee shapes my relationship with my scholarship that I was better able to understand the regimes of terror which produce open silences in Togolese people’s collective memory.