Undine Whande of purpose. They are asking their parents: What happened? They meet. First silence, then stories of victimhood, perhaps traces of harm in their families, harm done and harm received, and also some perpetrator heroism and bravado. This new generation is asking new questions, and they are bringing the past onto the community stage, if not yet the political stage. Founding history-oriented organizations and projects, they ignite the conversation about the past through trans-generational dialogues at village level, in universities, at memorial sites, bringing their questions into society in new ways. This is to say that dealing with the past always happens. People always remember. Perhaps they always also suppress, perhaps forget. Then they reremember and, in spite of repression and silences, memories resurface as a new generation comes of age and asks new questions. There is speech and silence according to the context and time. Transitional justice needs from us the skill to ‘read’ the phases of life that people who were violated are living through, not just freeze them into the moment of the violation. Life goes on, other things happen, everyday chores need attention. Victims of violation tend to have a heightened sense of memory as they approach their passing from this life. Those who violated usually also consider themselves to be victims, just from another time or place. As one generation prepares to pass on, the conversation about the past often suddenly regains traction and detail. Untold truths surface. This does not always seep into the public sphere, though. The political environment of the day matters, the levels of fear, denial and the risk of public telling. Often, the stories that are told in private, in families, are different from those that dominate in communities, which may yet again be different from those that dominate at societal level. Transitional justice in that sense is about creating a public moment in a collective for telling the story afresh of who this collective is and aspires to be. Transitional justice takes Ben Okri quite literally in its assumption that (truth)telling is transformative: ‘We live by stories, we also live in them. If we change the stories we live by, quite possibly we change our lives.’ There is a paradox here. While transitional justice is meant to mark an incision in time, a new beginning, a different era, it can at the same time be considered an effort at repairing and re-stor(y)ing ruptures across time. So possibly, the very rupture created by a radical change-over is another one that must then be attended to and mended later. Through violent conflict the connections in the web of life are interrupted, damaged, severed. Which connections? Relations among the living are damaged. 12 International Conference on Transitional Justice, Zimbabwe