Sharing the Burden of Stories from the Tutsi Genocide

Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire

Anna-Marie de Beer

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9783030420925
• eBook ISBN: 9783030420932
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book deals with literary representations of the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. The focus is a transnational, polyphonic writing project entitled 'Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire' (Rwanda: Writing by Duty of Memory), undertaken in 1998 by a group of nine African authors. This work emphasizes the Afropolitan cultural frame in which the texts were conceived and written. Instead of using Western and Eurocentric tropes, this volume looks at a so-called 'minority trauma': an African conflict situated in a collectivist society and written about by writers from African origin. This approach enables a more situated study, in which it becomes possible to draw out the local notions of ubuntu, oral testimonies, mourning traditions, healing and storytelling strategies, and the presence of the 'invisible'. As these texts are written in French and to date not all of them have been translated into English, most academic research has been done in French. This book thus assists inconnecting English-speaking readers not only to a set of texts written in French with significant literary and cultural value, but also to francophone trauma studies research.

© The Author(s) 2020

A.-M. de BeerSharing the Burden of Stories from the Tutsi GenocidePalgrave Studies in Cultural Heritage and Conflicthttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-42093-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Leaning on the Shoulder of Another

Anna-Marie de Beer¹

(1)

University of Pretoria, Pretoria, South Africa

Anna-Marie de Beer

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

I grew up in Rhodesia, during the Bush War. My father’s cousin and his wife were among the first ambush victims. At the time I was seven. I did not understand about colonialism, liberation wars, or the people’s Chimurenga,¹ neither the first one nor the second. I only saw the grief on my father’s face when he told me of the death of his beloved cousin.

I would eventually come to see that history and war are more complex than I had thought. In the end, it was literature that helped open my eyes. This has become increasingly important to me: how and what can literature teach us about different people’s perspectives, experiences, and pain? How did reading books such as Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions and NoViolet Bulawayo’s We Need New Names make me revise what I thought of a period, a people, and a place?

Years later, when I was already living in South Africa, a colleague pushed a slim volume into my hands and wistfully remarked how lucky I was to be able to read French. She had done me an enormous favor; it was Véronique Tadjo’s account of the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and it started me off on a journey that I am still on. That journey has led to this book, in which I am reflecting, not about literature and the Zimbabwean Liberation War, but about literature and the genocide in Rwanda.

I subsequently discovered that Tadjo’s book was one of several texts by authors, from across the continent, who had set off on their particular journeys to Rwanda, bravely attempting to see in their own ways what literature could do in the face of the collective and unimaginable trauma that we call genocide. Genocide is about dehumanization. Literature can be about rehumanization.

At a conference in 2014, I had the privilege of meeting Berthe Kayitesi.² She evoked the delicate relationship between survivors and those who listen to their stories, foregrounding the value of ‘learning with survivors’ as opposed to ‘learning from them’. She spoke of the ‘reconstruction’ of a survivor, made possible by ‘the presence of the other who is not a survivor’, another who has what she qualified as a ‘safe mind’.³ Similarly, in his testimony Révérien Rurangwa doubts whether it would ever be possible to pick oneself up again without accepting the outstretched hand of a friend and leaning on the shoulder of another (2006: 95).⁴ This focus on mutual responsibility is reminiscent of a comment made by Nocky Djedanoum on sharing the burden of mourning: ‘[P]erhaps it comes to us naturally, this modesty that requires of us to lean on the shoulder of another, one who reaches out a hand and wipes away our tears to ease our pain?’ (2000: 11; my translation).⁵ The crucial presence of another who listens appropriately to trauma has been widely debated and theorized⁶ and the comments made by Kayitesi , Rurangwa, and Djedanoum indeed echo the assertion that the activity of witnessing necessitates ‘the intimate and total presence of an other—in the position of one who hears’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 70–1).

Genocide is not only a form of extreme trauma that requires of us to listen to and narrate its stories; it is also mass trauma and the sheer scale of it demands a shared effort of representation. It asks that we invite as many voices as possible to participate in the dialogue, including those of the people who experienced it (victim, perpetrator, and bystander) and those of the people who listen to and read these stories.

Many researchers⁷ emphasize the importance of creating multivocal stories in order to narrate collective trauma affecting whole communities. They accentuate the importance of establishing a shared memory and re-examining and reinterpreting our histories together. Such a negotiation may provide us with ways to create space for the ‘contesting representations cobbled together from the often fragmented and clashing memories of survivors, perpetrators, witnesses and bystanders’ (Hinton and O’Neill 2009: 1). It could lead to a less ‘monolithic’ and more ‘complex and differentiated’ view of the society as well as a ‘plurality’ of perspectives on the origins and consequences of the genocide (Staub 2006: 877). This daunting process can hardly be envisaged without the mediating role of both art and the ‘intellectual witness’ (Hartman 1998: 37–40).⁸

At times, traumatized communities are not yet ready to tell their own stories, and others step up to help shoulder this heavy burden. The practice of speaking for another undoubtedly poses its own set of potential dilemmas including the danger of appropriating another’s story (James Dawes 2009: 396). When speaking on behalf of another, an inclusive approach where everyone’s account within the community is taken into account is essential because ‘no embodied speaker can produce more than a partial account’ (Alcoff 1991: 20). Such shared encounters may provide ways of complicating existing dominant and univocal narratives, allowing communities to problematize categorizations and harmful collective associations.

Reflecting on the value of engaging in a participatory mode in dealing with trauma that affects whole communities leads me to the notion of ‘récit dialogué ’,⁹ a term which refers to the creation of a shared narrative which is in fact woven together from parts of different individual stories (Gallimore 2009: 15–22). In this book, I set out to explore ways in which narratives of genocide perform such a récit dialogué , thus transforming the undertaking into a collective effort. I consider the written memory of this event and its heritage by accentuating the plurality of narrative voices and modes of storytelling that have emerged, informed by the premise that trauma on such a large scale requires not only multivocal representation but also multiple forms of listening. Such an approach seems to be necessary for restoration in a context where extensive trauma has taken place.

When I first became interested in reading genocide accounts, I assumed that it would be essential to place the texts in well-defined categories—testimonies versus fictional texts, secondary witness versus eyewitness accounts, and direct victims versus ‘absent’¹⁰ or ‘intellectual’ witnesses—forgetting, however, that it was just such categorization, binaries, and absolutes that had been so detrimental in the history of the Rwandan people. Certainly, in the aftermath of genocide, many of these boundaries are blurred and it seems to be more meaningful to situate these texts on a fluid continuum (Kerstens 2006). Berthe Kayitesi had already taught me, in her soft-spoken manner, that when dealing with genocide stories, one should never hierarchize people’s suffering, but rather provide a space to listen to them all.¹¹ The question I discovered was not so much who has the right to tell the story, although this is an interesting question, but how it can be told so that it invites dialogue, creates a multivoiced narrative, allows us to listen to the trauma of genocide, and involves the reader.¹²

Such a mode of joint, inclusive narrative becomes particularly interesting when explored thro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Leaning on the Shoulder of Another
• 2. Trauma and Storytelling in Africa
• 3. Journeys and Fables: Koulsy Lamko and Véronique Tadjo
• 4. Harvests and Bones: Abdourahman A. Waberi and Boubacar Boris Diop
• 5. Living in Shadows: Monique Ilboudo and Tierno Monénembo
• 6. Poems, Testimonies, and Essays: Nocky Djedanoum, Jean-Marie Rurangwa, and Vénuste Kayimahe
• 7. Conclusion: The Mythical Universe of Storytelling
• Back Matter