Description
The paper will argue that it is useful to view published humanitarian memoirs in the context of the humanitarian ideal of témoignage, or witnessing, but that the genre also draws heavily on tropes from travel writing which clouds this. Stories have always been key part of the humanitarian endeavour from Henry Dunant and the memoir that launched a movement to the rogue French doctors whose ‘refusal to remain silent’ splintered that movement. These developments have occurred in an international geo-political context in which there is ‘an emergent culture of storytelling that presents carefully curated narratives with pre-determined storylines as a tool of philanthropy and statecraft’ (Fernandes, 2017: 2). The paper will consider memoir as a particular form of humanitarian storytelling which occupies an interesting space between entertainment, in which we could think about the narratives in the tradition of travel writing or adventure story, and testimony, of atrocities witnessed. Taking the conflicts in Sudan and South Sudan as key site of this practice, the paper will consider how these tensions manifest and construct particular ideas about the figures of the aid worker and aid recipient, as well as projecting images of Sudan and South Sudan that rely on problematic tropes of Africa.
