The Intersubjective Ethics of Dialogue

Dialogic Negotiations in Life Narratives

In my inquiry, I am drawn to the dialogical model of collaboration that many scholars in autobiography and cultural studies have proposed as an ethical way to negotiate the narrative space between writers and vulnerable subjects. ³ Dialogic communication is clearly at the heart of co-laboring, where two people must engage with one another, address and respond to each other, share a narrative space, and produce a story between them. In the best case, dialogue reflects a reciprocal, mutually beneficial, and egalitarian relationship, where partners equally share the authorship and authority of the narrative account (Couser, 2004, p. 36). Many life writing scholars have noted, however, that collaborative relationships are charged with problems of power, politics, and property in the narrative process and the story produced: When two people work together on one story, whose story is it? Who can claim ownership, authorship, or take credit for the text?

In his article, “The Unseemly Profession: Privacy, Inviolate Personality, and the Ethics of Life Writing,” Paul John Eakin defines collaboration as a “narrative relationship” in which “the story of the self is constructed through the story told of and by someone else” (Eakin, 1998, p. 171). While collaborative narration can take various forms—as-told-to narratives, ghostwritten narratives, co-produced narratives, testimonios, and so on—in each case, partners must negotiate the relational space between them in order to produce a single narrative. Constructing one story between two people becomes particularly fraught when partners are not social or political equals, as is often the case in co-writing stories of trauma. These collaborations tend to involve partners “whose relation is hierarchized by some difference—in race, class, gender, age” and challenged by the trauma (or other limitations) of the vulnerable subject (Couser, 2004, p. 37). This disparity often results in an imbalance of power between partners, which may render the person whose traumatic life is being written vulnerable to exploitation and misrepresentation on the one hand, or paternalism and patronization on the other.

Co-authoring one’s traumatic life is further complicated by the disparity of contributions between the two partners producing the story. In most cases, partners do not actually share the act of writing, but rather, as G. Thomas Couser (2004) points out, “one member supplies the ‘life’ while the other provides the ‘writing’” (p. 36). While the oral processes used to stimulate the story may well be dialogic, the published product is often monological—represented as a single narrative voice. As Couser observes, “the two voices are permitted to engage in dialogue only in supplementary texts—forewords and afterwords—and even there, the dialogue is managed and presented by one party, the nominal author” (p. 35). What is at risk here, particularly from a political perspective, is the loss of the vulnerable subject’s identity, voice, and authorship in the writer’s representation of it. The vulnerable subject’s “I” can be silenced in the writer’s authorship and his or her human rights lost in the process. In what sense, then, “can the subaltern speak?” as Gayatri Spivak has famously asked. Do writers have the right to “speak for” vulnerable subjects in writing their lives? Can their traumatic stories be rightly heard in the writer’s representation of them?

Life writing scholarship challenges the problem of monological narrative through the discursive model of dialogue. In collaborative relationships, dialogue tends to be represented as a practice of “address and response” between vulnerable subject and collaborator, a relational and discursive practice through which subjectivity is formed and maintained (Eakin, 1998, p. 63). Eakin, following the psychology of John Shotter, asserts that one’s capacity to say “I” depends on one’s being “addressed as a ‘you’ by others” (p. 63). One’s ability to say “I” also depends on a “you” to respond to one’s address. Dialogue, at its roots, signifies this very subjectivity in relation with others, through one’s ability to address and respond to others. Without dialogue, one’s ability to identify oneself and formulate oneself to others is profoundly diminished or even lost. This is precisely the case in situations of severe trauma, where victims are silenced and their suffering disregarded. ⁴ Trauma theorists Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub thus suggest that victims be given space and time to bear witness to their suffering and take up their rights as speaking subjects to reinstate, through language, an “I” that trauma has taken away. In collaborative writing, then, the vulnerable subject is encouraged to take the position of addressee—giving voice to the trauma and marginalization that has often left him or her voiceless or inarticulate. The same positioning applies to subalterns who have been silenced through marginalization or oppression, as well as through the well-meaning representation of others (Spivak, 1988, p. 285). ⁵ In both cases, addressing oneself to another person in the process of collaborative writing is meant to restore one’s sense of self in relationship with others.

The collaborator, who aids in the practice of self-articulation, takes the position of respondent in this dialogic framework. Collaborators are response-able to respond ethically to vulnerable subjects, to create space for the narrating process by means of an open, listening, and responsive posture. Such ethical receptivity has the potential to generate attentive responses not only to the speaker’s story, but also to his or her marginalized identity. Dialogue, as Susanna Egan writes, “is one mode of ‘realizing’ identities to which ‘attention must be paid’” (Egan, 1999, p. 8), particularly those whose lives have not been recognized or attended to. The process of address and response can thus empower the vulnerable subject to speak and challenge the collaborator’s dominant position of representation and authorship with the hospitable responses of receptivity, attentiveness, and recognition. Address and response can also potentially aid in the vulnerable subject’s healing process, as “validation of the teller’s story can lead to new forms of subjectivity, beyond victimhood” (Schaffer & Smith, 2004, p. 111). This dialogic framework, then, focuses on restoring the life (story) and the rights of the vulnerable subject through the responsibilities of the collaborator in their partnership.

While such a framework functions to challenge the problem of monologism and its associated power imbalances in writing collaboratively with vulnerable subjects, my contention is that it does not go far enough in addressing the ethical foundations of dialogue imbedded in collaborative relationality or the benefits of mutual responsibility generated in the collaborative writing process. Most thinkers in autobiography studies construe dialogue as a responsible methodology for doing collaboration in order to reinstate the agency and discursive relationality of vulnerable subjects broken down by trauma. As a result, they emphasize the responsibility of collaborators to ensure the voice and rights of vulnerable subjects, but do not consider the full import of thinking of subjectivity itself as response-able, and thus overlook the responsibilities of vulnerable subjects and the regenerative role that mutual responsibility can play in collaborative partnerships. If, as Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) warns, monologism “denies the existence outside itself of another consciousness with equal rights and equal responsibilities” (p. 292), then we need to examine how collaborative writing functions to reinstate not only the rights of vulnerable subjects but also their responsibilities, to ensure human flourishing in narrative partnerships and in their stories produced.

In addressing this issue, I uphold the premise that collaborative writing both depends on and generates human relationality, lives that are deeply intertwined or entangled together in processes of telling, listening, writing, reading, and re-writing (Davies & Gannon, 2006, p. 362), and that this relationality has an inherently ethical dimension. As Kelly Oliver (2001) puts it,

Insofar as we are by virtue of our environment and by virtue of relationships with other people, we have ethical requirements rooted in the very possibility of subjectivity itself. We are obligated to respond to our environment and other people in ways that open up rather than close off the possibility of response. This obligation is an obligation to life itself. (p. 15)

With this starting point in mind, I want to suggest that we see dialogic subjectivity as an ethical orientation of reciprocal response within collaborative writing relationships. This is not to nullify the political dimension of collaboration or the power hierarchies imbedded in it, but to foreground the underlying ethical constitution of the dialogic self that can potentially open up and transform these hierarchies with reciprocal responsibility, relational kinship, and narrative creation though the collaborative writing process.

Dialogic Subjectivity: The Basis for Reception and Reciprocal Response

In the context of literary and narrative studies, I have found the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur particularly fruitful for formulating the “dialogical constitution of the self” and its intrinsic responsibilities (p. xiii). In Ricoeur’s framework, dialogue establishes not only the basis of selfhood but also the ethical responsibilities inherent in selfhood—a relational structure that begins with “reference to the other” in the constitution of oneself (p. xiii). In his description of the self, Ricoeur (1992) points out two etymological strains that contribute to its meaning: “sameness” (idem) and “selfhood” (ipse) (p. 2). The former signifies the temporality of identity, its trait of maintaining sameness (being identical to itself) over time. Ricoeur contrasts this sense of identity with ipse or selfhood, a dialogic conception of the self that includes otherness at its core. The title of his prominent text, Oneself as Another, emphasizes this dialogic “self and other than self” at the heart of selfhood:

Oneself as Another suggests from the outset that the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought without the other, that instead one passes into the other, as we might say in Hegelian terms. To “as” I should like to attach a strong meaning, not only that of comparison (oneself similar to another) but indeed that of implication (oneself inasmuch as being other). (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 3)

Ethical dialogue between oneself and another thus begins with intersubjectivity—recognizing oneself as another, an alterity (otherness) that is intrinsic to selfhood.

Ricoeur describes “oneself inasmuch as being other” concretely by considering how otherness is intimately implicated in one’s body, conscience, and story. As a body, I am other to myself in that my body can become foreign to me, particularly in physical trauma, illness, or aging. In such suffering, I do not have agency or control over my body. I become the passive recipient of its heavy hand. My body is also that which mediates between me and others in the world. It is at once part of me and part of the world outside me (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 326). It is thus never “my own” without also always existing as an other for others in the world with me. ⁶ Similar to my body, my conscience functions as an other within me. It represents the “ought” of moral behavior alternate to the “is” of my experience. Ricoeur speaks of the conscience as an interior other that is motivated from outside and calls on the self. Quoting Heidegger, he states, “the call comes from me and yet from beyond me and over me” (p. 348), rendering me a passive listener and summoned to respond to its moral imperative.

Perhaps most critically for our context of narrative collaboration, Ricoeur describes one’s story as oneself inasmuch as being other. One’s story is never wholly one’s own but always exists in relation to the stories of others and the “official” story of history:

The actions of each one of us are intertwined with the actions of everyone else. We have insisted elsewhere . . . on the idea, proper to the narrative field, of “being entangled in stories”; the action of each person (and of that person’s history) is entangled not only with the physical course of things but with the social course of human activity. (Ricoeur, 1992, p. 107)

Each self, then, is a “tapestry of stories heard and told,” as Richard Kearney (2006) puts it: “Life stories and life histories are always parts of larger stories and histories in which we find ourselves interwoven or entwined” (p. xix). In this sense, telling or writing one’s life story is inherently relational and always implicates others in its telling. I interpret and author the lives of others (often unconsciously) in writing my story, even as they interpret and author my life in writing theirs. Life stories, then, bind us together in our similarities and differences, as we share our lives with one another, whether in the spatial terms of living together or the temporal terms of being historically intertwined.

Constituting alterity within or as the self, Ricoeur reveals dialogic selfhood as having a responsible bearing toward other people, both as other and as intrinsic to oneself. Dialogic selfhood thus challenges a self/other dichotomy and the oppositional attitudes and uneven power dynamics it implies in human interactions. Given its relational constitution, dialogic selfhood has two clear ethical dimensions: It involves an orientation of hospitality toward other people and a reciprocal exchange of words and positions between oneself and others. Taken together, these dimensions have the potential to transform partners engaged in collaborative life writing. Hospitality involves reception and response to vulnerable subjects and reciprocity ensures that this receptive responsibility goes both ways. Both the writer and the vulnerable subject are mutually involved in receptive and reciprocal responsibility with and for each other.

Let me elaborate: In his introduction to Ricoeur’s On Translation, Kearney observes that hospitality is etymologically embedded in dialogue. He writes, “Dialogue means just that, dia-legein, welcoming the difference,” an openness or hospitality to the alterity within oneself and the alterity of other people with whom one interacts (Kearney, 2006, p. xvii). A number of continental thinkers in the French phenomenological tradition to which Ricoeur belongs describe hospitality to alterity in dialogic terms, as reception and response to the call of an Other as a Thou. Notably, they use a theological framework to signify this interaction: the call of God on the patriarchs (Derrida) and the prophets (Levinas), or the call of Christ on the apostles (Marion). In each case, the Deity (Thou) is positioned as “the Other” who calls and, in that call, invokes a human response in the form of oneself: “Here I am.” This dialogic interaction between I and Thou is significant in its relevance to human relationships. Perhaps its most familiar expression is found in Martin Buber’s (1958) I and Thou, where the revelation of Thou is reflected in every person (p. 5): “God’s presence in each element,” Buber asserts in his epigraph to the book. Locating the other person in the position of Thou signifies the sheer alterity and mystery of him or her as “not me” or “beyond me.” It also signifies his or her sanctity, dignity, and value. Another person is not an object to be grasped, a presence to be subdued, or a thing to be mastered, but a Thou to be genuinely encountered and welcomed.

A truly ethical response to another person thus involves a hospitable orientation of openness, vulnerability, and receptivity. I must first be open to receive the call of the other before I can respond. As Ricoeur describes it, the other person

offers himself through his face, in his voice, with which he addresses me, designating me as the second person singular. This is the other of interpersonal relations. You are the you that says “you” to me and to whom I respond, as Emmanuel Levinas loved to repeat, “here I am”—me, in the accusative case. (Ricoeur, 2000, p. xiii)

“The accusative case,” which locates the respondent grammatically as the “patient” of an action, also signals an ethical position: The respondent is passive, subjected, receptive, and listening to the other in order to respond, “here I am” (me voici). If we agree with Gabriel Moran (1996) that “moral deficiency is mostly a hearing failure” (p. 85), then receptivity and listening to the other can be seen as the ethical orientation that makes responsible response possible.

If reception is a hospitable orientation toward the alterity of another person, then response is the ethical outworking of that orientation. I cannot receive “the call” of another person on me without also reciprocating with a word or act of response: “The Thou meets me” in the call, Buber (1958) aptly describes, “but I must step in direct relation with it. Hence the relation means being chosen and choosing, suffering and action in one” (p. 11). Ricoeur (1992) similarly describes the act of response when he writes, “When another person addresses me in the second person, I feel I am implicated in the first person” (p. 195). Response-ability to the call thus signifies the self as both passive recipient and active respondent: a receptive “me” located in the accusative case and a nominative “I” capable and committed to respond (p. 165). In short, my agency is enfolded in my response-ability and entails my responsibility: I am responsible to the other person who calls me and counts on me to respond. And I am responsible for my actions before that person (Hall, 2007, p. 97).

In Ricoeur’s formulation of dialogic selfhood, reception and action, passivity and activity, and responsibility and agency are not mutually exclusive but reciprocal and implicated in each other in every response. This dialectic at the heart of response challenges the power hierarchies that emerge if either agency or responsibility is taken on its own in human relationships. The implication for collaborative writing here is that writers can neither “receive” the other person’s story without actively responding to it nor “take responsibility” for the other person’s story without receptive hospitality to his or her personhood and the dignity he or she possesses. Both the passivity of response without action and the power of response without reception result in unethical relationships and unequal narrative practices between collaborators.

This brings me to the second dimension of ethical responsibility implicated in intersubjective relationships: that of reciprocal exchange. In collaborative life writing, our interactions depend on reciprocity and social exchange to function. We are called to address and respond to each other, making reception and responsibility mutual for both interlocutors. In ordinary contexts of dialogue, each interlocutor takes the role of the speaker and respondent in turn, addressing and responding to each other. We exchange words with each other, words that do not belong to either of us, as Bakhtin (1981) argues, but exist between us (p. 293). We also exchange positions, relationally and grammatically, through those words. When I speak, I am situated as an agent of an action in the nominative case. When I listen, I am situated as a recipient or “patient” of an action in the accusative case. These positions are reciprocal: The other person is also an agent and patient. As Ricoeur (1992) observes, “the agents and patients of an action are caught up in relationships of exchange that, like language, join together the reversibility of roles and the nonsubstitutability of persons” (p. 193). Ricoeur argues that such relationships reveal a paradox of exchange: We are at once equivalent and exchangeable (in language, in grammar) and different and irreplaceable (as people). The constantly exchanging positions that we inhabit in language—between speaker and respondent, agent and patient—represent mutuality, equality, and bi-directionality between us in relationship.

Reciprocal exchange thus guards against the unilateral responsibility of one person for the other in relationships, since this position of response is responded to (or returned) as soon as one moves from the position of respondent to that of speaker. Reciprocal exchange also guards against the relational one-sidedness that characterizes a receptive response without return, a seemingly responsible asymmetry that potentially limits its own ethical reach. Just as a dialogue quickly comes to an impasse or mutates into a monologue when one interlocutor maintains the role of respondent, relationship is impeded and develops into a power hierarchy when one person maintains the position of responsibility for the other person in their interactions. Such “responsibility for the other” challenges the mutuality necessary for a relationship to flourish and undermines the other person’s dignity to respond and power to be responsible.

What this means for collaborative life writing is that writers are not the only ones called to ethical reception and response in their narrative relationships with vulnerable subjects. The reciprocal exchange of positions in dialogue summons vulnerable subjects to be equally receptive to otherness and to be actively responsible as well. Adriaan Peperzak (2002) makes much of this point when he writes,

just as your speech obligates me, so my speech obligates you; your dignity awakens my responsibility, while my dignity awakens yours. Two . . . chiastic relationships of high esteem intersect one another, thus forming a knot that binds us together in responsibility. (p. 172)

Reciprocal reception and response are vital for ethical interaction to persist beyond the initial call of the vulnerable subject for help in writing his or her story and the responsibility of the collaborator to do so. In fact, I am convinced that reciprocal responsibility is necessary for vulnerable subjects to regain their dignity and subjectivity after an experience of trauma by turning their suffering (at the hands of others) into responsibility for their stories and for others. Reciprocal responsibility empowers vulnerable subjects, not simply to “give voice” to their stories, but to regain a sense of self by giving hope or healing to others through telling their stories. Sharing life stories through collaborative writing is a powerful expression of selfhood that has responsibility imbedded in it. Responsibility, in this model, is not opposed to agency, nor is the “power” involved in responding simply a hierarchical dynamic in which one person subjects another. Rather, the power to respond and the ability to “give and take” with one another are critical components of human dignity and flourishing, ones that enable us to engage in mutually beneficial relationships and to tell our stories with others.

Collaborative Dialogue and Reciprocal Responsibility in Stolen Life

Turning now to Wiebe and Johnson’s collaboration, I want to suggest that Stolen Life is structured on a dialogic exchange—the giving and taking of words. While Wiebe remarks in his preface that the reciprocal qualities of his dialogue with Johnson are reduced in the process of writing, he attempts to maintain its dynamic in their text, taking care that “the book [gives] its readers a good flavour of . . . conversation” (Wiebe & Johnson, 1998, p. xi). He structurally patterns Stolen Life on his conversations with Johnson. At times, he relays particular discussions they have shared, but, more generally, he constructs the text itself as an extended verbal exchange: Sections of Johnson’s story of her past are interspersed with Wiebe’s narration of their current interaction as if, structurally, they were taking turns speaking. This reciprocation does not function to meld their voices together; rather, as Manina Jones (2003) observes, it reveals the lives of both authors at “various degrees of intimacy and distance from the events of the story and from each other” (p. 211). Singular and distinct, neither voice dominates the text. And together, their voices offer a wider vision of Johnson’s life than either one could give alone. Additionally, Wiebe incorporates other verbal expressions into the text in the form of legal records, interviews, articles, and statements that he collects. This patchwork of voices resists the possibility of a monologue, despite Wiebe’s role in stitching them together into a coherent narrative.

Beyond the dialogic structure of the text itself, Wiebe’s collaborative method with Johnson enacts a Bakhtinian dialogue in the sense that Holly Laird (1995) describes: “a loosely structured mode of collaboration involving multiple and shifting roles for each partner, where power and authority never disappear but are shared and contested” (p. 12). Sharing power and authority demands a negotiation between two people, a practice of navigating the complicated and contested space between selves who think and do things in distinct and often contrary ways. Sharing can be seen as the “salty rub” in the “nitty-gritty of ‘co-laboring’” precisely because partners are up close and personal with each other, facing each other’s differences and facing themselves in light of those differences (Laird, 1995, p. 11). While sharing power can cause friction in narrative collaboration, it also creates a sense of mutual reliance between co-laborers. They must depend on each other to create a story between them.

Wiebe insists that in their six years of working together on Stolen Life, he and Johnson “never once [have] an argument” (Wiebe & Johnson, 1998, p. 23). At the same time, however, he reveals that their different ways of thinking and writing stories challenges him. He faces the difficulty of having to negotiate Johnson’s circular thinking—”revolving around a given subject” (p. xi)—with his own desire to “find some order of chronology and fact in her past life” (p. 80). He also struggles to deal with her oral storytelling manner with his own need for written accounts, and hints at the tension that ensues:

She places three thick notebooks on the low table—her journals—and explains how hard it is for her to write her thoughts; it would be so much easier, she thinks, to talk into a tape recorder . . . and I tell her again, please, as I have so often on the phone, tapes are so hard to order, so hopeless to organize or grasp because to find anything you have to listen to everything all over again, in sequence: if she wants to tell her story, her words must be on paper. (p. 22)

Johnson’s most natural way of storytelling clearly rubs against Wiebe’s desire for order and sequence in putting together the fragments of her life in publishable form, a need that is ultimately non-negotiable, given his own abilities and limits.

While Wiebe ultimately determines the storytelling method of Stolen Life, he is dependent on Johnson’s writing for its content, writing that is often non-linear, repetitive, and even incoherent in style (p. xi). In their collaboration, Johnson repeatedly challenges Wiebe’s well-meaning organizational systems with her content: “Some stories need to be told, then told again,” she insists (p. 387). By her repetitions, “circling around and around with variant facts,” Wiebe confesses, “She will ultimately unwind a meaning my intellectualized mind can, against all odds, fathom. And all I can say . . . as usual, is, ‘Yes . . . yes,’ and listen” (p. 423). For Wiebe to negotiate Johnson’s counter-narrative (as she shares it) with the demands of storytelling (as he knows it) is no easy task. Repeatedly, as he notes, he must take a receptive role in openness and hospitality to the otherness of her narrative process.

Structuring Stolen Life as a dialogic verbal exchange suggests a collaborative writing process that is characterized by mutual interaction and engagement. As Wiebe describes it, “Writing Stolen Life with Yvonne Johnson was a mutual gift exchange: she gave me her trust and her story, and I helped her work it into a book shape that people could read” (quoted in Morash, 2004). However, this “gift exchange” does not quite appear mutual or reciprocal when we consider the intersubjective dimensions of dialogue that underpin this text. Notably, Wiebe locates Johnson in the vulnerable position of giving her trust and her story, while he locates himself in the receptive and active respondent role to her call for help in writing that story. In doing so, Wiebe is very careful to reinstate Johnson’s rights, voice, and life that have been “stolen” by others, especially in light of her traumatized past, her marginalized Cree identity, her silenced voice in the Canadian judicial system, and her imprisonment. However, by locating Johnson in the position of vulnerable subject, Wiebe witnesses her almost exclusively in terms of her victimhood rather than her personhood. He highlights her violated rights, but seems to deny her responsibility for her life, her crime, and her story in taking up her cause. In speaking with and for Johnson, Wiebe seems to over-determine her story, mediating it by the responsibility and advocacy he assumes on her behalf. As a result, he inadvertently challenges their reciprocal verbal interaction by taking on himself the full responsibility for Johnson’s life and story, relegating Johnson to an alternative marginalized position in which she is subject to Wiebe’s help and advocacy.

Wiebe’s inclination to position Johnson as vulnerable subject and himself as responsible respondent in writing Stolen Life is problematic in at least two respects. First, his sense of help sidelines the relational mutuality and equality that exists between them in their partnership. Wiebe is committed to helping Johnson reach her intended audience, “the next abused and hurting person” who may benefit from her life story (Wiebe & Johnson, 1998, p. 40). But to do so, Johnson must submit her traumatic fragments of past experience to Wiebe’s narrative shaping and authorship. Her submission is most obviously displayed on the book’s front cover, where Wiebe is positioned as the first author and the dialogic mutuality of their collaborative process is sacrificed to a more exacting economy of exchange: What will sell this book? Wiebe says as much: The order of names was

a marketing decision; after thirty-five years of writing, my name has some recognition-value in the book world. But it is clear that we are partners—and the whole cover emphasizes that this is her story and that we have worked together to tell it. (quoted in Jones, 2003, p. 209)

Wiebe undoubtedly makes this marketing decision as an act of responsibility to help Johnson reach the widest audience possible with recognition-value of his name. In giving Johnson the recognition-value of his name, however, it is still Wiebe’s name that receives the “recognition” and the “value.” The economy of publishing conceals the “salty rub” of their partnership behind the text and draws Wiebe’s receptivity into question in the published product. How hospitable can Wiebe actually be in opening a space for Johnson’s story if that story must also submit to the strictures of publishing and its marketing decisions? Wiebe’s responsibility in making Johnson’s story public challenges not only the dialogic nature of their relationship as he portrays it within the text, but also his receptivity of her story and recognition of her name on the text itself.

Second, Wiebe’s responsible advocacy in Johnson’s case undermines her ability to take responsibility for herself or to be responsible to others. In the three chapters that cover her court case, Wiebe takes the principal narrative voice, Deena Rymhs (2005) notes, moving “from being a witness to her trauma to being an advocate in a legal sense” (p. 96). As advocate, he reconstitutes Johnson’s crime in the context of a corrupt legal system and the guilty history of Canadian discrimination against its aboriginal people, determining her marginalization and incarceration as “horrifically representative of what has happened to the Native people of North America” (Wiebe & Johnson, 1998, p. 16). In doing so, he positions his readers as jury and judge, not simply of Johnson’s account and the injustices of her imprisonment as he sees them, but more self-reflexively, of themselves as perpetrators of a similar kind. He implies that if social justice (and not simply legal justice) is at stake in this case, then both the court and Canadians in general need to face their own guilt for stealing Aboriginal lives and livelihood and then punishing them for the same crime. As he confesses elsewhere, “We have dealt very badly with our native population, the first inhabitants of this country. We’ve broken so much of their spirit in many horrifying ways, and all Canadians should be aware of it” (quoted in Sheremata, 1998, p. 28). Wiebe is determined to break the silences of perpetration and guilt on both sides, exposing the inconsistencies of a system willing to dig the proverbial speck out of Johnson’s eye for the sake of legal justice without recognizing the plank of social injustice in its own eye.

Through his advocacy, however, Wiebe sidelines Johnson’s responsibility for her crime with his own respondent position and sense of guilt for being “exactly the kind of ‘powerful White’ who’s so often created problems for her” (Wiebe & Johnson, 1998, p. 41). He makes himself wholly responsible to fight against her injustice and interprets her story through the lens of victimization on her behalf. Johnson comes off strangely innocent in the mix, the complicated mess of her perpetration sidelined for the less ambiguous position of her victimhood. This subtle shift leaves me wondering: If justice is not simply “you commit a crime, you’re responsible for it,” as Wiebe argues, then what precisely is Johnson responsible for? What is her responsibility not only in the murder case, but also in the practice of telling her story and relating with Wiebe in the process? In what sense does the act of collaboration invoke her responsibility for her life, her crime, and her story?

I have suggested that if we consider dialogue in terms of verbal interaction between Wiebe and Johnson, their partnership appears to be mutual and reciprocal in the narrative produced. But if we consider dialogue as an intersubjective ethics, an imbalance in position remains. With Johnson situated primarily as a vulnerable subject and Wiebe as helpful respondent, responsibility seems to only go one way: from Wiebe to Johnson. Even though Wiebe shapes the text as a reciprocal dialogue that centers on Johnson’s stolen life, he nonetheless highlights his narrative standpoint, how he responds to Johnson, gives his help, and assumes responsibility for her story and crime as a means to restore her stolen life.

Upon a closer examination of the paratextual material surrounding this narrative, however, I catch glimpses of an alternative dialogic impulse in the relationship between Wiebe and Johnson, one where Johnson does not simply assume the role of vulnerable subject but also positions herself as reciprocal respondent. If we look to the margins of the narrative—the acknowledgements, epigraphs, and interviews that surround the text—we see Johnson challenge the monologism of Wiebe’s responsibility with her own responses to him in their relationship. I want to conclude this article, then, by focusing on Johnson’s responses, because I think they give us interpretive clues for reading the collaborative writing process as a reciprocally responsible practice behind the text produced.

Johnson responds to Wiebe’s responsibility in two key ways: (a) She sees herself as responsible to give an account of her life and assume culpability for her crime, and (b) she responds to Wiebe otherwise than “the kind of ‘powerful White’ who’s so often created problems for her” (Wiebe and Johnson, 1998, p. 41), opening herself to be vulnerable in their relationship. In her receptivity and response, Johnson reveals not only a dialogic subjectivity imbedded in their collaborative relationship but also the transformative potential of dialogic subjectivity to open both partners to each other and turn them toward a hopeful future. In doing so, she reveals how the collaborative writing process itself causes her and Wiebe to discover and identify themselves in alternative, life-giving ways in and through their relationship.

First, and most obviously, Johnson responds to Wiebe with her own admission of guilt for her crime and responsibility for her story. Unlike Wiebe, Johnson never questions her guilt about her role in the murder of Skwarok or justifies it by reference to her traumatized past. Nor does she appear to expect that revisiting her past and her case in writing Stolen Life will change her legal sentence or bring justice to her people in a representative way. Instead, she seeks a less lofty and more personal goal: “To me, writing this book will release long hidden fears, dreams, hurts, love, pain,” she writes. “I’m doing this also in hopes of dealing with things that I never did before. Somehow maybe figure out some answers” (quoted in Nemeth, 1998, p. 64). Writing her story with Wiebe is a way for Johnson to address her guilt and personal trauma relationally with and for other people, beyond Wiebe’s sense of responsibility for her social justice. If Wiebe takes responsibility for Johnson’s crime in light of the past—situating it in the larger context of her familial trauma, national marginalization, and legal injustice—then Johnson bears responsibility for her crime in light of the future, in hopes of rebuilding what has been broken in her relationships and healing what has been wounded by her crime.

Based on her prayerful epigraphs that book-end Stolen Life, we can interpret the story in between as Johnson pouring out her life to bring understanding and healing to those she has wounded personally, as well as to offer hope to those who have experienced traumas similar to her own. She writes at the outset of the narrative:

Help me to make amends to all those I have harmed; Grant them love and peace, so that they may understand I am sorry; help me to share my shame and pain, so that others will do the same, and so awaken to themselves and to all the peoples of the world.

Through this initial prayer, she directs readers to interpret her story as a confession of guilt and a summons to relational reconciliation. She reinforces this posture of hope and renewal in her closing epigraph, where she writes, “Here I am, Medicine Bear Woman”—the one who heals. With this new identity, she signals an alternative subjectivity with and for others than the one that trauma has imposed on her: She chooses to be vulnerable and responsible to others, to give herself in humble disclosure for the sake of bringing reconciliation to her family and to heal others with her words.

Second, Johnson responds to Wiebe’s sense of responsibility by choosing to see him differently than he sees himself. In the face of their discordant subject positions—she a “marginalized Cree woman” and he a “powerful White man”—their coming together in collaborative relationship enacts a form of reconciliation and restoration that responds directly to Wiebe’s guilt for his own identity and his complicit oppression of her people. While Wiebe’s sense of himself as the kind of powerful White who has so often created problems for Johnson drives him to devote himself responsibly to her cause, it also subtly challenges him to engage with her fully because it preoccupies him with his own conflicted subject position. Johnson challenges this position in their relationship, and even surprises herself by her response: “In working with Rudy I never directly saw him as male. I never directly saw him as white. I laughed when it dawned on me half a year into [the book], ‘I’m supposed to be scared of you!’” (quoted in Sheremata, 1998, p. 28). Johnson witnesses Wiebe contrary to his self-perceptions and constrictive identity markers. In fact, she goes so far as to reconstitute his “powerful White” position in terms of his relational connection to her:

“Rudy was a kindred spirit,” says Johnson from the Okimaw Ohci Healing Lodge in Saskatchewan. “We were destined to meet in our lives. The spirit of Big Bear has been with Rudy for a long time, and it brought him and I together to accomplish what we had to do.” (p. 28)

In witnessing Wiebe as a kindred spirit, Johnson opens herself to him in the hospitality of dialogue and invites him into her life and family through their relationship. In doing so, she not only begins to free herself from the power of her trauma, she also begins to free Wiebe from the grip of guilt about his own identity so that they can relate with each other as people, beyond simplified categories of Self and Other, victim and oppressor, woman and man, Cree and Canadian.

From a stance of receptivity and response, Johnson chooses to be vulnerable and to trust Wiebe in their work together. Considering Johnson’s past of abusive interactions with men, her trust in Wiebe is nothing short of astounding. It contradicts her self-protective inclination to react with “apprehension, mistrust, and even hostility toward others” in her life (Rymhs, 2005, p. 102). Wiebe is exactly the kind of “powerful White” who would normally fill her with fear. Yet Johnson responds to Wiebe otherwise, engaging with him as a person. To choose to trust, even someone as trustworthy and full of integrity as Wiebe, is a response of courage and hope. It means moving from a state of apprehension and enmity into a space of openness and vulnerability in their collaborative relationship. Where Wiebe’s sense of unilateral responsibility reaffirms their respective subject positions and predictable power dynamics, Johnson’s mutual responsibility reconciles the disparity between their identities, crossing the problematic dichotomy that their differences create with her act of trust and vulnerability.

From my perspective, Johnson reveals that the dialogic nature of collaborative writing is much more ethically involved than simply offering a receptive and reciprocal framework for verbal interaction and narrative production. As an ethics, dialogue challenges our notions that responsibility only goes one way, from the writer to the vulnerable subject, and shifts our focus from the voice and agency of the victim to the relational kinship between the two co-laborers. Through this relationship, reciprocal responsibility has the potential to reconcile people, heal wounds, and offer hope for the future through and beyond the story of trauma. As a relational ontology (a way of being with and for others), dialogue challenges how we understand ourselves in our interactions with others. It has the potential to shift our view of others from their political position to their personhood, and to shift relational dynamics centered on power to ones that are centered on mutual receptivity and responsibility. While collaborative writing cannot ensure intersubjective dialogue, it does offer a fruitful and dyanamic space to explore alternative ethical possibilities for human relationships and narrative creation.