Lament as Transitional Justice

Abstract

Chapter 2, Through interpretations of poetry in Carolyn Forche’s anthology, Against Forgetting, and novels from Rwanda, the USA, and Bosnia, Chapter 2, “Lament as Transitional Justice,” argues that lament is a social and ritualized form, the purposes of which are congruent with the aims of transitional justice institutions. Both laments and truth commissions employ grieving narratives to help survivors of human rights trauma bequeath to the ghosts of the past the justice of a monument while renewing the survivors’ capacity for rebuilding civil society in the future. Human rights scholars need a broader, extra-juridical meaning for “transitional justice” to capture its true power.