to be a ‘witness’ to the bombing in order to write about it. There was a ‘collapse of witnessing’, a collapse of understanding as these traumatic events were taking place in Ota and Teresa’s life. As Teresa wrote and was forced to face the traumatic experiences as they were, she was forced to face the Truth. It is the facing of this Truth that forced her to be a ‘witness’ to the actual traumatic events of her life.Similarly to Teresa, Mary Rowlandson faced the actual ‘witnessing’ of her trauma through the writing of her autobiographical text. Throughout the telling of her story, Rowlandson is forced to face the Truth of the traumatic experience she endured. However, it was only through the writing that Rowlandson completely was able to come to terms with what she went through and the effect that it had on her life. Rowlandson says, “If trouble from smaller matters begin to arise in me…[I] say, it was but the other day, that if I had the world, I would have given it for my Freedom” (Rowlandson 69). It is not until the last page of her text that Rowlandson acknowledges the Truth and faces the extent of her trauma. The ‘witnessing’ of her trauma did not take place as she was going through the traumatic period of her life, but instead, when she was writing about the events after they had already happened. Rowlandson suffered the ‘collapse of witness’ on all three levels that one can experience the ‘collapse of witness’. Rowlandson was separated from her family, taken captive by Indians (a group of people whom she felt were savages), and thrown into a life of pseudo-slavery from the respectful life of a minister’s wife. Rowlandson faced the ‘collapse of witnessing’ on the level of “being a witness to oneself within the experience” (Laub 75). She physically suffered through the, “grievous...
