In the SNF Paideia designated course “Testimony as a Dialogic Practice” (COML 0522), we read Daniel Nayeri’s 2020 work of autofiction Everything Sad Is Untrue (A True Story) together over the course of many weeks. A heartbroken and heartbreaking refrain of Nayeri’s narrator throughout this book is “A patchwork memory is the shame of a refugee.”
But a patchwork theory is the joy of a Testimony class. Over the course of our weeks together, we each individually stitched our own textbook together, literally cutting and pasting snippets of theory, poetry, memoir, autofiction, and scholarship into our journals, adding our responses, thoughts, extensions, questions, challenges. We wrote and shared our own testimonies each week, with the autonomy to snip out pieces we were not ready to reveal and present something like a snowflake cutout of the truth we’d committed to paper (no less beautiful for the parts that were missing).
With Keimahney Carlisle, we crafted poetry zines as confronters, guideposts, and cultivators. With Quinn Diacon-Furtado and Natan Diacon-Furtado, we put our hands in water to receive messages from beyond at the Bio Pond. We told stories about social class in public at an open-mic night in a cathedral while the rain poured down outside and a mysterious choir sang hallelujah below. We hosted a film screening to view Moses Storm’s stand-up special Trash White and we witnessed five U.S. military veterans deliver public testimony in a Community Healing Ceremony.
We got to learn from three former “testimoniantes” from the fall 2024 class – Rissa Howard brought us SaidiyaHartman and imagination as critical methodology, Sydney Liu taught us about graphic testimony, and Cuong Nguyen shared his testimonial scholarship.
But we began and ended the class with just us. Our final testimony was a collaboratively authored Meta-Testimony, in which each student cut out scraps of their own Meta-Testimony and sewed them together into a collective offering responding to our core questions:
What is testimony?
What is required of the receiver of testimony?
What is the effect of crafting, sharing, and receiving testimony?
Their meta-testimony is presented below. For more about the class, and to see the responses of fall 2024 Testimony students to these questions, see this DiaLogic post.
What is testimony?
E: I began to understand testimony less as a genre of story, like a memoir or confession, but rather, a moment of exchange. I imagine an offering that demands an answering offering, the simple visual of two arrows pointing in opposite directions, signifying a transaction, like a risk that asks for risk in return. To testify is to risk exposure, but to listen well is to risk transformation and destabilization. When testimony is shared, both parties become beholden to each other, hence it constitutes an exchange between equally strong forces rather than an offering and recipient framework.
G: To testify is to open a fissure in the self, to make vulnerable that which is most intimate and, often, untranslatable. It is a dialogue in time, a relational negotiation between the one who speaks and the one who receives, both bound by attention, care, and the capacity to be altered. I have come to understand testimony as a genre defined less by structure than by its ethical and affective commitments: its attentiveness to selfhood, the particularity of experience, and the relationality of sharing. Testimony, in this sense, is not merely the recounting of an event, a memory, or a feeling; it is the invitation to inhabit another’s world, however briefly, and to be transformed by that inhabitation.
FS: I believe the single most important definition of testimony must include two essential and interconnected words relating to love: intimacy and vulnerability. […] The listener must hold the testimoniante but both must hold the testimonial process together. […] Like the brilliant Anna suggested in class, there is a stark difference between writing a testimony on your own and sharing it by reading it out loud. She said something around the lines of: “It feels like if you are not reading it aloud, you are not doing the real thing”. I could not agree more. This is what would seem to set apart what psychoanalyst Emma Lieber calls the “writing cure” from testimony. Writing may be cathartic and healing but it does not become a testimony unless it is shared. I am not testifying if I am writing about my deepest secrets and sorrows and printing a document for you to read. I need to choose, as I am able and willing (thank you Chaplain Chris), to be vulnerable by reading it out loud to you.
A testimony can be made in any and every way. It can come from a brain dump onto paper, it can be a beautifully crafted narrative. It does not need to make sense to anyone but yourself. I have found great pleasurein turning off my spellcheck for the first time since 5th grade. Without the bombardment of squiggly red lines, there is a freedom in self expression. The liberty around craft also removes the requirement to make your story aesthetic or pretty. Some stories are not, and they can be told as ugly or messy or convoluted or haphazard as they feel. – AB
Y: Testimony is creating and entering into a space where language becomes a mirror that reflects one’s inner self. It also serves a space for others to witness. This space cannot be reduced to merely information sharing or factual. Instead, it opens to expressive and relational ground. Therefore, testimony cannot be unilateral and instead is an exchange. It is not about aiming to persuade or change one’s perspective but allowing others to see the contours of one’s experience. The receiver becomes the witness of the testimony, holding presence and creating this shared ground. I believe the power of testimony arises from this unique mutuality that cannot be observed in other genres. For me, the power of testimony can strengthen one’s experience, heal, reconfigure self-understanding, honor fragility without breaking, make invisible visible, and many more.
Rat Mom: In the Korean novel A Dwarf Launches a Little Ball, the narrator turns to writing in a moment of great adversity and turmoil. He feels that it is an imperative; he must “testify to these wretched times.” I feel that this is where testimony originates: a need to record, make sense of, and lay bare […] At the core of every story, essay, and testimony is a story that is too trivial, inconvenient, or incoherent to tell.
A testimony is the intentional sharing of a personal experience with a listening other. The intention is simply to be heard and to make meaning out of one’s individual experiences. As Adriana Cavavero so beautifully says, “She becomes, through the story, that which she already was.” Hence, through testimony, the act of telling the story creates who we are as humans. A testimony must be shared with a receiver to be considered a testimony. The act of sharing is often what allows for the deep reflection that accompanies testimony, and is what helps the speaker begin to accept their story as a personal truth. Therefore, the practice of sharing testimony is a healing one– it allows people to think critically about the events in their lives and find beauty and strength in the seeming confusion and disruption.
What is required of the receiver of testimony?
E: Listening is not passive receival, it is intense labor. Listening is swallowing our instinct for comfort so that someone else may speak. Listening is an intensive, risky, and ultimately charitable offering… In [grammatical] framing, the listener is not a passive recipient, but the acting subject, a recognition that makes me question the listener more closely. If charity flows outward, then listening itself must be a kind of offering, as I will discuss later.
G: Testimony: it must hold contradictions, the simultaneous co-presence of extremities of experience. Testimony is not testimony if it smooths over tension or discomfort. It is precisely in the adhesion of opposites, the layered weight of contradictory truths, that testimony finds its moral and aesthetic force. The practice of testimonial listening, I now understand, involves multiple layers. It is cognitive, attentive to language and narrative structure; somatic, responsive to affective currents and bodily cues; and imaginative, willing to occupy, however briefly, the lived world of another.
[What defines the practice of testimony is a posture of openness. A curiosity to engage with another person and to co-create a space of encountering something new. Such a posture is one rooted in humility and reverence. How at the heart of it, we are all here to learn and recognize an inherent form of dignity and uniqueness that is bestowed to every single one of us. In this way, I found these parallels between my initial encounters with testimony and what it meant through my religion to track with the highly resonant themes across the readings we read together. The act of two people coming together to open up “the door of yourself to another, [to] become the space [another] steps through to show you, who they are” is an act of holiness, a form of worship (James Crews, How to Listen). As taking care and washing of feet is reminiscent of how Jesus looked after his disciples, the vivid reflections from Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha remind us how testimony is service oriented and holy. In this case, the reflection on feet being touched gently by a doctor symbolized how testimony becomes a space where care is paramount. Testifying and the act of testimonial is about care and when we engage in receiving or sharing testimony, we are taking care of others through reaching out to the parts of others that are often neglected or taught to be ashamed of and to touch those very parts and hold them. The purpose of testimony is really about bringing us back to one another and to really take time to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to feel, and to be.
In this way, testimony is an integral part of being human and engaging in community with others. Social connection and belonging are so fundamental to how we are wired. It’s part of our nature yet while testimony at its core is simple—to be open to engage in another’s story and to be a witness to sharing—the process also requires a form of intentionality. An intention to be present or an intention to listen? An intention nonetheless. We might seek to remember, to imagine, to resonate, to witness, to feel…but if there is no intention, then testimony ceases to exist. The only requirement then of the receiver of testimony is to be aware of why they are choosing to witness, resonate, feel, and so forth. And if they are unclear about the why or what, being intentional about the not knowing or choosing to engage with clear presence is critical to ensuring a space is created. Creation allows for testimony to be possible. Design from the testifier in what they share and intention from the audience receives. ] – cecilia
Rat Servant: […] I do believe that receiving testimony is salvation, in the same way that giving it is. Accepting a story to be true—not in some objective sense but in an inherent, personal way—allows the “listener” to practice care, protection, and meaning-making alongside the “speaker.”
FS: To say that the testimonial process implies fullness coincides with saying that this form of existential listening is binary: you cannot half-listen any more than you can be half- pregnant. You either do it or you do not. Notably, fullness does not require perfection. There is a distinction between intentions and impacts. The expectation of perfection concerns the valence of an impact but fullness concerns the simpler and more controllable intention. Having the right intention may not be enough but it is a starting point or, in the language of logicians, is a necessary condition but not sufficient.
The receiver of the testimony bears the responsibility to listen.Their unobtrusive presence is what allows this healing aspect of testimony to occur. Knowing that someone is truly listening to the words of the speaker and accepting them as truth without judgement, is reassuring. As we saw at the Community Healing Ceremony, it truly allows the speaker to “come home.” When we listen we become a beautiful mosaic of everyone we’ve met. We are meant to carry their stories with us; this is how we find resonance of the past in the present moment, as mentioned by Stauffer.
Y: The receiver of testimony is essential in testimony and holds responsibility. The receiver is not a passive consumer but rather a participant in a relational space. Felman and Laub write, “For this limited time, throughout the duration of the testimony, I’ll be with you all the way, as much as I can. I want to go wherever you go, and I’ll hold and protect you along this journey. Then, at the end of the journey, I shall leave you” (70). The testimonial listening is a specific listening that may involve great effort from the receiver.
AB – The importance of spoken testimony reshapes the listener, too. Listening becomes embodied, you feel someone else’s breath patterns, their pauses, their hesitations. You listen with your heart wanting to hold them, not just your ears. You witness with your entire nervous system. Testimonial listening is not “hearing words.” It is something more attuned to lending your body as an instrument for someone else’s truth to resonate inside of. Testimonial sharing is allowing your truth to vibrate outside of you long enough for someone/somewhere/something else to hold it. Let it resonate, let it grow and shrink and bounce off the walls. Try not to capture it that is when the spell is broken – “I don’t remember what shattered the enchantment. I think I blinked, I think I retrieved my brain from the weasel’s brain, and tried to memorize what I was seeing, and the weasel felt the yank of separation, the careening splash-down into real life.” A testimony spoken aloud becomes an encounter. An encounter that Annie Dillard describes, perhaps with a weasel!
What has the experience of crafting, sharing, and receiving testimony over the course of the past 12 weeks been like for you?
G: Ultimately, these twelve weeks have shaped my working theory of testimony as a mode of relational, embodied, and ethical practice. Testimony is not simply narrative; it is an ethical and affective labor, a negotiation between self and other, presence and memory, human and nonhuman. It holds specificity and universality in tension, navigates the contradictions of experience, and requires both vulnerability and care. Its listening practices extend beyond ears to body, imagination, and attention. It recognizes that agency, intimacy, and authenticity are inseparable from the act of sharing. Testimony asks not only that we speak but that we attend, and that attending is itself a moral and creative endeavor.
E: In my own experience in this course, being both the testimoniate and the listener, the testimoniate is not the primary giver. The testimoniate seeks something through their offering, and the listener gives it, making them an offerer as well. In the beginning of class, I was unaware of what I was looking for by sharing, but I ended up learning the answer through the very same act of sharing.
Hairless Rat: As mentioned before, I often feel like testimony is part of my life’s work; not by choice, but some force beyond myself. Regularly engaging with this practice has been meaningful to me for various reasons (not least because I have not been able to write as much as I want to), but I feel infinitely more grateful for the opportunity to listen to others do the same. It was important to me, I think more than I realize, to co-create a space that centers the peripheral.
The purpose of my testimonies have been to reclaim my own story, and take authorship of our experiences. Crafting and sharing testimonies has allowed me to reflect on my life experiences, both positive and negative, and see my resilience. I was able to see my strengths and their origins, and truly understand the way that my family, my travels, my academic interests, and my heritage have influenced my life path. In a way, it was like I found the signs and encouragement I have always been looking for, and what made this so much more meaningful was that I found it within myself. With writing my testimonies came a sense of autonomy. My experience writing and sharing testimonies has allowed me to care for my younger self, accept my past experiences in their entirety, and give myself grace.
FS: On the one hand, crafting my testimonies allowed me to uncover an unknown self but at the same time, and perhaps worryingly significantly more, made me ossify a pre-existing and “inadequate” narrative of myself. The more I wrote testimonies, the more I latched on to this sense of self. Did I choose to write my testimonies in a certain way so as to have control over what my sense of self was because I was too afraid that by writing more freely I would have discovered an unknown self that I might have not recognized? By the working definition I opened up with, this kind of testimony would still “qualify” because I am in full power and I am choosing to be vulnerable by sharing them. Yet what happens when the unconscious self enters the game? What does it mean if I use crafting my testimonies (as I think I have done) as a shield because it feels comfortable, more comfortable than taking action to change my (narrative of) life and because I am not ready to take that action? Still, did I expect that a testimony was supposed to be a tool for mental health? A substitute for therapy? No one ever claimed that and yet I am implicitly assuming that. […] When is a testimony not appropriate? When are we confronted with ethical loneliness but testimony is unadvisable, inadequate or even harmful? When testimony leads to mulling or ruminating, what does it mean? My only conclusions to my interminable questions are that I have been delusional because we have never treated testimony as a panacea but simply as one dialogic practice. One of many existing practices. Perhaps what we need then is simply a kaleidoscope of existential “testimony-like” practices (paintings, poetry, conversations with friends, a cup of tea by ourselves, a fight with our mothers, our journal and whatnot). Maybe testimony is a tile and not a mosaic, maybe testimony is a piece of the puzzle and not the puzzle. Perhaps there is no such thing as sand in the world, we only have grains of sand.
Y: My experience of crafting and sharing testimonies over the course of the past 12 weeks has evolved significantly. Personally, I am a reserved person. It is difficult for me to share my own experiences or memories with others. I think by crafting testimonies and reflecting back on my experiences to select the story to write, I have found selfhood and discovered new parts of myself.
AB – But how to choose what to share? There may exist a pressure inside of yourself that I want desperately to address after 13 weeks of feeling the same thing. That every week, at the behest of a prompt that you are required to consider that wall that holds all the jars of your life stories, and pick out the darkest, heaviest, largest jar of them all. Where might this pressure come from?
This pressure could come from your overachieving nature (a Penn student after all). It could come from a desire to “get the most out of the class”. It could come from a desire to create a safe space for other students to share their own painful experiences – If I don’t dig that deep, maybe others will feel like they are not allowed? Maybe it’s because you don’t want others to think you don’t have any pain – you don’t want to come off as the shallow one at the table read! Maybe it’s honestly easier to copy and paste from your journal. Maybe it is less exhausting to just write out that one story than the mental battle that avoiding it would require. Why else might you feel pressured to dig oh so deep? Maybe you think that is what Sarah is looking for. Maybe you think all of the framing that Sarah offers is unauthentic. Maybe you want to garner respect, empathy, sympathy, emotion, pity, care. I have considered every single one of these.
The outside world of academic validation, likability bias, etc. still exists, and however warm and welcoming Sarah makes the room and community, it will not leave. But it is also a radical act to do your best to acknowledge in what direction these pressures are pushing you. I will not even ask you to resist it, you do you. Share what you want when you want to. Share because you want or need to speak aloud some part of you. Maybe you have told the story 1000 times, maybe only a handful. Maybe this is a something that you desperately love or desperately hate. Or maybe it is a funny moment that you like to share or an anecdote that makes you smile when you write it. I have the urge to say something like “but it can also be deep and traumatic and painful if you want it to” but I think you know that. Depth, pain, trauma does not (necessarily) a good testimony make. Intentionality and purpose creates an offering. I have found the harder choice in a context like this is sometimes that of self preservation.
This entry is part of DiaLogic: Thinking Through Big Questions for Dialogue, a monthly series in which SNF Paideia Dialogue Director Dr. Sarah Ropp and guest contributors from the SNF Paideia community explore key questions and share ideas, experiences, resources, and practices related to diverse dialogue topics. We invite you to respond with your own thoughts and ideas in the comments. If you’re interested in contributing an essay or if this post sparks any ideas about collaborating to create more dialogue at Penn and beyond, please reach out directly to Sarah Ropp at sropp@upenn.edu. For more DiaLogic posts, visit this page here.
