True selves, suspicious lives: Public deceits, hopes of restoration, and existential troubles in misdocumented pasts

Abstract

How do individuals, after having discovered they were lied to about the conditions of their births and their childhoods, seek out their own identities and re/establish the “truths” about themselves? Based on two ethnographic studies conducted in sites where lives and kinships were disrupted by political violence, this article aims to examine the urge for narrative coherence in contexts defined by public deceit and betrayal. In Argentina, [Author 1] lived with the nietos who, decades after the dictatorship, discovered they had been stolen and educated by those responsible for their parents’ death. In Ethiopia, [Author 2] met with adopted children who were searching for their life “of before”. In these two contexts, the interviewees explained how their lives had been shattered when they discovered the lies they had been told. Their testimony equally revealed how they felt an existential and urgent need to re-establish the “truth”. Drawing on their experiences and their feelings, this article examines the link between two truths, truth regarding the past and truth about oneself, and explores the need to be certain of facts in the making of identities.