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Testimony: Found Poems from the Special Court for Sierra Leone
IBPA Benjamin Franklin Award™ gold winner, poetry category
Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives.
Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world.
This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.
Sierra Leone’s devastating civil war barely caught the attention of Western media, but it raged on for over a decade, bringing misery to millions of people in West Africa from 1991 to 2002. The atrocities committed in this war and the accounts of its survivors were duly recorded by international organizations, but they run the risk of being consigned to dusty historical archives.
Derived from public testimonies at a UN-backed war crimes tribunal in Freetown, this remarkable poetry collection aims to breathe new life into the records of Sierra Leone’s civil war, delicately extracting heartbreaking human stories from the morass of legal jargon. By rendering selected trial transcripts in poetic form, Shanee Stepakoff finds a novel way to communicate not only the suffering of Sierra Leone’s people, but also their courage, dignity, and resilience. Her use of innovative literary techniques helps to ensure that the voices of survivors are not forgotten, but rather heard across the world.
This volume also includes an introduction that explores how the genre of “found poetry” can serve as a uniquely powerful means through which writers may bear witness to atrocity. This book’s unforgettable excavation and shaping of survivor testimonies opens new possibilities for speaking about the unspeakable.
184 pages, Paperback
Published June 14, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
July 13, 2021
* This review first appeared in The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Books. You can watch a video about then book on my YouTube channel, Poetry and Protest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDkVl... *
Shanee Stepakoff’s Testimony is an extraordinary assemblage of “found poems” taken from the official transcripts of the war crimes tribunal established by the United Nations and the postwar Sierra Leonean government to assess and document the trauma inflicted on innocent civilians during the Sierra Leone Civil War (1991–2002). In a detailed introduction that also serves as a guide for how to read these poems, Stepakoff, who worked as the court psychologist for two years, tells of being traumatized by the stories she encountered and of turning to poetry in order to process her verbal paralysis. By recasting the testimony of survivors in poetic form, Stepakoff reveals the poetry in their words, as in the opening lines of the poem “The Rape Survivor”: “I’m not married. / I have no children. / I never went to school.”
Stepakoff is acutely conscious of the ambiguities of her authorial positioning and insists on her “responsibility to revive the voices that are at risk of disappearing.” In this sense, she might be considered a translator from the medium of speech to the page, rather than between different languages. By introducing line breaks, anaphora, and other literary devices, Stepakoff makes us see the urgency in these words of testimony:
In the graveyard
we were told
that if anyone in your family has died,
whether it was your grandfather
or any other family member,
his spirit will come
and give you something—
something not of this world—
which will make you very powerful to fight.
At once astonishing and devastating, these poems attest to poetry’s ability to bear witness to atrocity, while the poignant cover image by Liberian American artist and war refugee Papay Solomon reminds us of those whose voices have been silenced for too long.
Shanee Stepakoff’s Testimony is an extraordinary assemblage of “found poems” taken from the official transcripts of the war crimes tribunal established by the United Nations and the postwar Sierra Leonean government to assess and document the trauma inflicted on innocent civilians during the Sierra Leone Civil War (1991–2002). In a detailed introduction that also serves as a guide for how to read these poems, Stepakoff, who worked as the court psychologist for two years, tells of being traumatized by the stories she encountered and of turning to poetry in order to process her verbal paralysis. By recasting the testimony of survivors in poetic form, Stepakoff reveals the poetry in their words, as in the opening lines of the poem “The Rape Survivor”: “I’m not married. / I have no children. / I never went to school.”
Stepakoff is acutely conscious of the ambiguities of her authorial positioning and insists on her “responsibility to revive the voices that are at risk of disappearing.” In this sense, she might be considered a translator from the medium of speech to the page, rather than between different languages. By introducing line breaks, anaphora, and other literary devices, Stepakoff makes us see the urgency in these words of testimony:
In the graveyard
we were told
that if anyone in your family has died,
whether it was your grandfather
or any other family member,
his spirit will come
and give you something—
something not of this world—
which will make you very powerful to fight.
At once astonishing and devastating, these poems attest to poetry’s ability to bear witness to atrocity, while the poignant cover image by Liberian American artist and war refugee Papay Solomon reminds us of those whose voices have been silenced for too long.
June 18, 2025
3
Testimony is the perfect title for a simple, raw collection. All of these poems are taken from the words of survivors of Sierra Leone's Civil War, which was over a decade long and destabilized the nation severely. From personally seeing it I can say that Freetown (the capital of Sierra Leone) is still nowhere near rebuilt, and the outskirts of the country look even worse. In the West, we're so shielded from the consequences of war that we itch for it, which is why I think reading of survivor testimonies should be mandatory.
I see the value in a collection such as this, as these voices are not heard. However, I don't know if poetry is the medium I would have taken to tell these stories. I read this right after reading We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, which provides survivor testimonies regarding the Rwandan Civil War, and I couldn't help but feel that a comprehensive account would have been more respectful and involved. Without a full detailed account of the war, it leaves so much to be desired and is almost mere tragedy porn in prose formatting. To be fair, the author explains the causes briefly in the introduction, and presents a reading list at the end; but fleshing out the landscape, the 'before', the war itself, its aftermath, and how the community has built and survived since then is integral in providing full context for any history, in my opinion. That is not what the writer set out to do, nor did she have to, but with such a dearth of information regarding African histories, particularly this one, I think that would have been a more sensible approach than splicing public UN tribunal records. Still a good read!! I was moved.
Testimony is the perfect title for a simple, raw collection. All of these poems are taken from the words of survivors of Sierra Leone's Civil War, which was over a decade long and destabilized the nation severely. From personally seeing it I can say that Freetown (the capital of Sierra Leone) is still nowhere near rebuilt, and the outskirts of the country look even worse. In the West, we're so shielded from the consequences of war that we itch for it, which is why I think reading of survivor testimonies should be mandatory.
I see the value in a collection such as this, as these voices are not heard. However, I don't know if poetry is the medium I would have taken to tell these stories. I read this right after reading We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, which provides survivor testimonies regarding the Rwandan Civil War, and I couldn't help but feel that a comprehensive account would have been more respectful and involved. Without a full detailed account of the war, it leaves so much to be desired and is almost mere tragedy porn in prose formatting. To be fair, the author explains the causes briefly in the introduction, and presents a reading list at the end; but fleshing out the landscape, the 'before', the war itself, its aftermath, and how the community has built and survived since then is integral in providing full context for any history, in my opinion. That is not what the writer set out to do, nor did she have to, but with such a dearth of information regarding African histories, particularly this one, I think that would have been a more sensible approach than splicing public UN tribunal records. Still a good read!! I was moved.
September 19, 2022
This is powerful stuff, but I am not sure about the concept of a person (not one of the victims herself) turning it into poetry.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews