Rwanda Genocide Stories : Fiction After 1994 [1 ed.] 9781781384824, 9781781381946

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Rwanda Genocide Stories Fiction After 1994

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures, 38

Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures Series Editors EDMUND SMYTH Manchester Metropolitan University

CHARLES FORSDICK University of Liverpool

Editorial Board JACQUELINE DUTTON University of Melbourne

LYNN A. HIGGINS Dartmouth College

MICHAEL SHERINGHAM University of Oxford

MIREILLE ROSELLO University of Amsterdam

DAVID WALKER University of Sheffield

This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary French and francophone cultures and writing. The books published in Contemporary French and Francophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural and social developments which have taken place over the past few decades. All manifestations of contemporary French and francophone culture and expression are considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.

Recent titles in the series: 24 Louise Hardwick, Childhood, Autobiography and the Francophone Caribbean 25 Douglas Morrey, Michel Houellebecq: Humanity and its Aftermath 26 Nick Nesbitt, Caribbean Critique: Antillean Critical Theory from Toussaint to Glissant 27 Edward Welch and Joseph McGonagle, Contesting Views: The Visual Economy of France and Algeria 28 Rosemary Chapman, What is Québécois Literature?: Reflections on the Literary History of Francophone Writing in Canada

31 Celia Britton, Language and Literary Form in French Caribbean Writing 32 Raylene Ramsay, The Literatures of the French Pacific: Reconfiguring Hybridity: The Case of Kanaky-New Caledonia 33 Jane Hiddleston, Decolonising the Intellectual: Politics, Culture, and Humanism at the End of the French Empire 34 Margaret C. Flinn, The Social Architecture of French Cinema, 1929–1939 35 Martin Munro, Writing on the Fault Line: Haitian Literature and the Earthquake of 2010

29 Pierre-Philippe Fraiture, V. Y. Mudimbe: Undisciplined Africanism

36 Kathryn A. Kleppinger, Branding the ‘Beur’ Author: Minority Writing and the Media in France

30 Andrew Asibong, Marie NDiaye: Blankness and Recognition

37 Ruth Bush, Publishing Africa in French: Literary Institutions and Decolonization 1945–1967

N icki H itchcott

Rwanda Genocide Stories Fiction After 1994

Rwanda Genocide Stories

LIV ER POOL U NIV ERSIT Y PR ESS

First published 2015 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L69 7ZU Copyright © 2015 Nicki Hitchcott The right of Nicki Hitchcott to be identified as the author of this book has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data A British Library CIP record is available print ISBN 978-1-78138-194-6 cased epdf ISBN 978-1-78138-482-4 Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

A genocide is not just any kind of story, with a beginning and an end, between which more or less ordinary events take place. Boubacar Boris Diop

Contents Contents

Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 Rwandan Fiction

29

2 Tourists

55

3 Witnesses

80

4 Survivors

109

5 Victims

134

6 Perpetrators

160

Conclusion 191 Bibliography 205 Index

221

Acknowledgements Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust, which funded a twelve-month Research Fellowship that gave me the time to write this book. The Trust also provided me with a travel grant for my research trip to Rwanda in April 2014. My passion for Rwanda was initially stimulated by the work of Nottinghamshire-based NGO, The Aegis Trust (www.aegistrust. org). Aegis’s tireless commitment to educating and campaigning about genocide and mass atrocities in Africa and around the world remains my inspiration. I would particularly like to thank James Smith and Steve Robinson for their support of my research projects based in Rwanda. In Rwanda, I was helped by Jean-Damascène Gasanabo, Director of the CNLG Research and Documentation Centre on Genocide in Kigali, who facilitated my access to the Kwibuka 20 commemorations. I also thank Rwandan scholar Jean-Chrysostome Nkejabahizi for sharing his knowledge and his time with me. At the National University of Rwanda, librarians Gertrude Izabiriza and Jean Semukanya were kind enough to open up the Rwanda collection for me at a time when it would normally have been closed. I hope that this book will find its way onto the shelves of that extremely important collection. In the diaspora, Rwandan writers and critics Cyrien Kanamugire, Benjamin Sehene and Josias Semujanga have all assisted my research. I would also like to thank Christine Fréour at Editions Persée for putting me in touch with Kanamugire. At the University of Nottingham, I am privileged to work with my two friends and mentors Rosemary Chapman and Diana Knight. Their critical judgment, wisdom and generosity have been invaluable to me. Beyond Nottingham, Lorna Milne, David Murphy, Zoe Norridge and Dominic Thomas have all given me tremendous support and encouragement at different stages of the project. Many other people have

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provided good company and useful sounding boards during the writing of this book: Laura Apol, Clare Asti, Katie Attwood, Kathryn Batchelor, Ananda Breed, Jayne Carroll, Charles Forsdick, Catherine Gilbert, Lea Guetta, Sam Haigh, Juliet John, Christian Kelleher, Petra Links, Anne Mueller, Mary Noonan, Sheila Perry, Jean-Xavier Ridon, Katherine Shingler, Lyn Thomas and Caroline Williamson. Working with Anthony Cond and his team at Liverpool University Press is always a pleasure, and I am delighted to be publishing with LUP again. I also offer my sincere thanks to Bronwen Pugsley for finding a suitable image for the cover of the book. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my parents, Elizabeth and Peter Coates, and my sister, Anna Hitchcott, for always taking an interest in my work. Finally, I thank Richard Matthews, whose love and support have made it all possible, and Jake and Conor Matthews for bringing me so much joy.

Introduction Introduction

On 6 April 1994, a Falcon 50 jet carrying Rwandan President Juvénal Habyarimana was shot down by two surface-to-air missiles just as it was preparing to land in Kigali International airport. All the passengers, including the Rwandan President and the new President of neighbouring Burundi, Cyprien Ntaryamira, were killed. The shooting down of the President’s plane is widely acknowledged as the opening event in the story of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, now officially known as the Genocide against the Tutsi. It was immediately followed by 100 days of the most horrific massacres imaginable, in which as many as 1 million Rwandan people were brutally tortured and killed, often by friends, neighbours and even members of their own families.1 Yet the fact that the President was murdered is perhaps the only point on which there is no disagreement or ambiguity. All the other elements in the story, including who was responsible for shooting down the plane, are constantly being questioned and rewritten in both fictional and non-fictional versions of what happened in Rwanda. This book does not purport to provide a final account of the 1994 genocide, nor should it. Rather, it recognizes that, as Christopher Taylor notes, the genocide in Rwanda ‘will always defy all but partial and contradictory understanding’ (185). Furthermore, the attempt to reduce the story of the genocide to a single version of the truth is, of course, impossible, since each person will have experienced the events differently and on their own terms. For current Rwandan President Paul Kagame, there is little room for ambiguity in the narrative of the genocide. In response to those who attempt to revise or deny the established facts, Kagame writes, ‘Genocide 1 For accounts of the history of the genocide, see Braeckman (1994), Des Forges (1999), Prunier (1999), Mamdani (2001) and Semujanga (2003).

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happened in broad daylight, and the population knows who is guilty and who is innocent of genocide crimes’ (xxiii). While it is extremely important to continue to combat genocide denial, the Rwandan government’s attempt to reinforce a monolithic, simplified version of the story suggests that subject positions during the genocide are always easy to identify. Writers of fiction, on the other hand, present individual subject positions as anything but straightforward. Indeed, their alternative, imagined versions of the story sometimes contest the official narrative of the genocide. It is these imagined stories about the 1994 genocide in Rwanda that are the subject of this book. The master narrative of the genocide begins, then, with the attack on Habyarimana’s jet. As soon as the plane was shot down, the Rwandan army along with the Interahamwe militia began to erect roadblocks all over the capital, Kigali, and lists of prominent politicians opposed to Habyarimana and extremist Hutu ideology were immediately distributed. Then the massacres began, spreading quickly across the country. Tutsi and moderate Hutu were the targets of brutal mutilations and killings, mostly using machetes, clubs studded with nails, hammers, axes, hoes, spears and knives. Military weapons such as hand grenades and automatic weapons were also sometimes used, but the majority of the victims were hacked to death. Degradation was a strong feature of the violence, with women and men forced to perform humiliating acts, often of a sexual nature, before being slaughtered. Gender-based violence was rife in attacks on women and girls, many of whom were raped, sexually tortured or kept as sex slaves by the génocidaires (Burnet, 62–63). More than half of all rape victims were infected with HIV, since HIV-positive men were systematically used as a weapon of genocide (Amnesty International, 3). One of the first high-profile victims was Rwandan Prime Minster Agathe Uwilingiyimana, who was raped with a Fanta bottle before being killed with her husband, Ignace Barahira. Ten Belgian UN peacekeepers who were guarding the Prime Minister were also captured, tortured and killed, their bodies ‘cut into so many pieces that when Dallaire [force commander of the peacekeeping UN Assistance Mission for Rwanda] first saw them he could not make out how many soldiers he was looking at’ (McGreal, 2008). During the thirteen weeks that followed, around 1 million Rwandan people were brutally slaughtered, left to die or thrown into lakes, rivers, latrines and large pits dug expressly for the purpose of concealing the evidence. During the genocide, images of piles of mutilated corpses, of bodies being dragged from rivers with missing limbs, of orphaned children

Introduction

3

crying appeared on television screens across the globe, but most of the world beyond Rwanda chose to look away. Just as shocking as the facts of the genocide itself were the ignorance and indifference of the rest of the world in the face of what was happening. As Senegalese author Boubacar Boris Diop succinctly puts it, ‘Rwanda n’intéressait personne’ [nobody was interested in Rwanda] (2003: 73). During the genocide, viewers around the world preferred to watch the FIFA World Cup then taking place in the US. According to Susan Moeller, visual media coverage of the Rwanda genocide amounted to only thirty-two minutes of airtime on the major US evening news broadcasts over the entire month of April 1994 and ‘only one percent of the television public was interested in the genocide’ (283). Of the small number of people who were following the news about the African Great Lakes, the majority dismissed what was happening in Rwanda as a ‘tribal’ conflict between Hutu and Tutsi rather than recognizing it as a carefully planned and systematic attempt to exterminate the Tutsi population (Melvern, 2007). Diop explains that, before he visited Rwanda in 1998 to write about the genocide, his image of the country consisted of: les tueries entre Hutu et Tutsi, le ciel paisible au-dessus des collines, des marchandes de fruits au bord des routes, bref, la vie reprenant ses droits en attendant de nouvelles tueries, naturellement inévitables, entre Hutu et Tutsi. (2007: 23)2 [killings between Hutu and Tutsi, the sky calm above the hills, fruit sellers on the roadside; in other words, life starting up again while waiting for the inevitable next round of killings between Hutu and Tutsi]

Although ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ are two terms that have become synonymous with the genocide, specialists of the Great Lakes region generally agree that they are, in fact, imagined identities (Freedman et al., 302). 3 Both groups share the same language, the same religion and the same customs (Lemarchand, 49–50). Whereas before the emergence of the Rwandan state, Tutsi and Hutu were what Mahmood Mamdani describes as ‘transethnic identities’, with ‘the Tutsi identity sufficiently 2 This and subsequent quotations, unless otherwise indicated, were translated from French into English by the author. 3 Some of the material that follows was previously published in my article ‘Rwanda, Ethnopolitics and Fiction’ (Hitchcott, 2014a). I am grateful to the editors of the Bulletin of Francophone Postcolonial Studies for permission to reproduce the material here.

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porous to absorb successful Hutu through ennoblement’ (74), colonization’s racialization of ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ created two distinct groups with the minority Tutsi becoming identified as a ‘race apart’ from the majority Hutu population (74; 87). As Alexandre Dauge-Roth notes, the effect of this racialization was to divide Rwandan society in terms of the ‘indigenous’, ‘inferior’, ‘uncivilized’ Hutu on the one hand, and the ‘foreign’, ‘superior’, ‘civilizing’ Tutsi on the other, a division that was to have ‘terrible long-lasting consequences’ (2010: 15). In his powerful but controversial study The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa, René Lemarchand traces the racialization of ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ through a series of pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial myths (49–68).4 The dominant myth, which has been manipulated by both imagined communities at different points in time is what is known as the Hamitic hypothesis, which led to the division of people in the Great Lakes region of Africa into two main groups: the Hamites and the Bantu or, in the case of Rwanda and Burundi, the Tutsi and the Hutu. 5 Grounded as it is in racist stereotypes, the Hamitic hypothesis is widely acknowledged as the source of an increasing ethnicization in Rwanda since the nineteenth century, and a key factor in the 1994 genocide. Introduced in Rwanda by the former Belgian colonial powers, the myth identifies the Tutsi as coming from outside sub-Saharan Africa and therefore closer to Europeans than the Bantu Hutu (Mamdani, 79–87; Dauge-Roth, 2010: 14–15). Diop alludes to this when in his novel Murambi survivor Siméon explains that: Dans le passé, les étrangers avaient dit aux Tutsi: vous êtes si merveilleux, votre nez est long et votre peau claire, vous êtes de grande taille et vos lèvres sont minces, vous ne pouvez pas être des Noirs, seul un mauvais hasard vous a conduits parmi ces sauvages. Vous venez d’ailleurs. (2001: 204) [In the past, the foreigners had said to the Tutsi, ‘You are superb, your noses are long and your skin is light, you are tall and your lips are thin, you cannot be blacks, a twist of fate led you to be among these savages. You come from somewhere else’ (2006: 170)] 4 Lemarchand’s work has been strongly criticized by the current Rwandan president (Kagame, xxiii–xxiv). 5 There is a third group of people in Rwanda, the Twa, who make up around 1% of the population and who are largely excluded from discussions of the genocide, such is the extent of the ethnic polarization after 1994 (Coquio, 2004: 26).

Introduction

5

The physical characteristics that had become associated with the Tutsi, particularly the size and shape of the nose, would be used by the killers in 1994 to identify the targets of the genocide. Under Belgian rule, the racialization of ‘Tutsi’ and ‘Hutu’ became embedded on both intellectual and institutional levels, with the Catholic Church and the colonial state reinforcing what they identified as ‘Hamitic racial supremacy’ through a series of wide-ranging administrative reforms. These reforms included separate education for Hutu and Tutsi, the replacement of all Hutu chiefs by Tutsi, and culminated in the issuing of ethnic identity cards based on the 1933–34 colonial census (Mamdani, 88–102). These cards later became ‘facilitators of killing’ (Stanton, 214), making it easy for the génocidaires to identify their victims.6 While ethnic identity was, as Diop suggests above, ostensibly based on differences in physical characteristics, distinctions were also made on the grounds of class, with wealthier Hutu who owned ten or more cattle being classified as Tutsi (Mamdani, 98). What had begun as a rather arbitrary, albeit politically motivated system of social classification, quickly developed into the racialized division of Rwandan society. This racialization led to increasing resentment on the part of many of the marginalized Hutu who, under Grégoire Kayibanda, formed the Hutu emancipation movement, Parmehutu.7 Parmehutu’s racialized version of history, in which the Hutu had been enslaved by the foreign Tutsi, is brilliantly dramatized in the anonymous rallying cry, ‘La Calvalcade’ [Stampede], in Abdourahman Waberi’s, Moisson de crânes [Skull Harvest] (43–52). As the Rwandan people, particularly the Tutsi, began to call for independence from Belgian rule, so Parmehutu began to promote the idea of Hutu nationalism, strongly supported by the Catholic Church and increasingly also by the Belgian authorities, who felt betrayed by the desire for independence among the Tutsi they had promoted for so long. Tensions between Hutu and Tutsi started to escalate and, in 1959, when it was falsely reported that a Parmehutu militant had been killed by Tutsi conservatives, violent reprisals against Tutsi began (Prunier, 1999: 66). While the events of 1959 are euphemistically referred to as 6 According to Gregory H. Stanton, the abolition of ethnic identities was included in the Arusha peace agreement and new cards were printed, but never issued (214). 7 Parmehutu was also known as Parmehutu-MDR (Mouvement démocratique républicain).

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the Rwandan ‘Social Revolution’, they were really, as Gérard Prunier has shown in his seminal history of the genocide, an ethnic transfer of power (1999: 67).8 In 1960, the first post-independence government of Rwanda was elected, with the Hutu majority voting – unsurprisingly – for Hutu representatives. In 1961, Parmehutu leader Kayibanda became the first democratically elected President of Rwanda until he was ousted in 1973 in a military coup by Hutu General Juvénal Habyarimana. Violent attacks against Tutsi continued through these years with counter-attacks launched from outside Rwanda by exiled Tutsi, known by the Hutu as ‘Inyenzi’ [cockroaches], a nickname that subsequently became a powerful symbol of the 1994 genocide. Each time, the Hutu government responded to these attacks with further massacres of Tutsi while simultaneously introducing a system of ethnic quotas limiting the number of Tutsi to 9% in all sectors, including education. By 1990, at least 700,000 Tutsi had fled Rwanda to seek refuge in neighbouring countries.9 Then, on 1 October 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Army, the military wing of the exiled Tutsi group the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), launched an attack on Rwanda. This was the beginning of the civil war that helped fuel the extremist Hutu Power view that the Tutsi were not an ethnic minority, but an alien race that was not welcome and had to be eliminated. In August 1993, the Rwandan government signed an agreement in Arusha, Tanzania, for peace and power sharing with the RPF and a small UN peacekeeping force, UNAMIR, was sent to Rwanda, under the command of Roméo Dallaire. However, only a few months later, in January 1994, the Hutu Power newspaper Kangura, which had been explicitly inciting anti-Tutsi violence, published the words, ‘We will begin by getting rid of the enemies inside the country. The Tutsi “cockroaches” should know what will happen, they will disappear’ (Mamdani, 212). Throughout the 100 days of horror, Hutu extremists continued to manipulate the racialized myths of Tutsi difference to fuel ethnic hatred, mobilize the militia and systematically eliminate the Tutsi. Chilling examples of these imperatives can be found in the infamous ‘Hutu Ten Commandments’, published in Kangura in December 1990, inciting Hutu to spread the ‘Hutu Ideology’ and to have no mercy on the Tutsi. Any Hutu who married a Tutsi or was the business partner 8 Prunier’s study was first published in English as The Rwanda Crisis: History of a Genocide (1995). 9 Precise figures are not known. See Prunier (1999: 82–84).

Introduction

7

of a Tutsi was to be identified as a traitor, often punishable by death.10 In other words, the Hamitic myth that had created a racialized society in Rwanda had been translated by Hutu Power into what Lemarchand describes as ‘a coherent body of categorical imperatives’ (60). Just as Kangura published articles calling for acts of violence, so the so-called independent radio station, Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) broadcast false information intended to create fear among the Hutu and encourage violence against the Tutsi (Melvern, 2006: 55).11 RTLM became the voice of Hutu Power, broadcasting propaganda against Tutsi and all Hutu who associated with them. RTLM also gave out the names of individuals deemed to be enemies of the Hutu nation, who later became targets of the genocide (Des Forges, 2007: 45). Hutu Power’s presentation of the genocide as an ‘ethnic war’ played into the hands of the members of the international diplomatic community, who were reluctant to acknowledge that a genocide was occurring in Rwanda (Chrétien, 59–60). Only on 10 June 1994, when the genocide was almost over, did the then US Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, finally recognize the killings as genocide (Stanton, 219). For two whole months, the rest of the world looked away. By refusing to use what Stanton calls ‘the G-word’, the international community avoided its duty to act (218–220).12 The failure to acknowledge that genocide was taking place in Rwanda extended to the African continent and included African intellectuals. Although Diop reminds us that Africans’ ignorance about the genocide can partly be explained by the fact that many people in the Francophone nations only learnt about the genocide through the French-language media, he nevertheless criticizes African artists and intellectuals who, he writes, dans le meilleur des cas […] ont détouré le regard et murmuré leur honte et leur écœurement. Le plus souvent, ils ont fait preuve d’une indifférence quasi-totale. (2003: 74) 10 The Hutu Ten Commandments are transcribed with a brief discussion in Berry and Berry (113–115). Stanton notes that ‘twenty other extremist newspapers also published regular hate propaganda against Tutsis’ (214). 11 RTLM started broadcasting just after Habyarimana had signed the Arusha accords in August 1993. 12 At ‘Kwibuka 20’, the commemoration ceremony for the twentieth anniversary of the genocide on 7 April 2014, current Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon apologized to the people of Rwanda for the UN’s failure to intervene during the genocide.

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Rwanda Genocide Stories [at best looked the other way or muttered about how ashamed and sickened they were. Most of the time, they showed almost total indifference]

Indeed, Diop confesses to his own ignorance about the genocide when he explains that, before he travelled to Rwanda, he ne pensai[t] pas avoir quelque chose à dire sur ce qui était encore à l’époque pour [lui] le déchaînement d’une barbarie tribale regrettable mais quasi routinière. (2003: 76) [didn’t think he had anything to say about what for him was still at the time an explosion of tribal barbarity that, although unfortunate, was almost to be expected]

The guilt and shame felt by African authors like Diop when they began to realize that they too had failed to respond when hundreds of thousands of African people were being murdered in the most brutal ways imaginable is what created the impetus for the Fest’Africa literary mission ‘Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ [Rwanda: Writing with a Duty to Remember]. In 1998, this project sent a group of ten writers from all over the African continent to spend time in Kigali, where they would research, reflect upon and write about what happened in 1994. When the nine texts produced by the project were published in 2000, scholars and readers around the world began to take an interest in fictional writing about the genocide.13 Although a small number of other fictional texts had been published before 2000, it was the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ project that really put Rwanda genocide fiction on the literary map. In particular, the novels by Boubacar Boris Diop, Véronique Tadjo and Tierno Monénembo 13 The published texts are Boubacar Boris Diop (Senegal), Murambi: le livre des ossements (2001) [Murambi, the Book of Bones (2006)]; Monique Ilboudou (Burkina Faso), Murekatete, (2000); Tierno Monénembo (Guinea), L’Aîné des orphelins (2000) [The Oldest Orphan (2004)]; Koulsy Lamko (Chad), La Phalène des collines [The Moth of the Hills] (2002); Vénuste Kayimahe (Rwanda), France-Rwanda: les coulisses du génocide. Témoignage d’un rescapé [France-Rwanda: Behind the Scenes of Genocide. A Survivor’s Testimony] (2001); Jean-Marie V. Rurangwa (Rwanda), Rwanda: le génocide des Tutsi expliqué à un étranger [Rwanda: the Tutsi Genocide Explained to a Stranger], (2000); Véronique Tadjo (Côte d’Ivoire), L’Ombre d’Imana: voyages jusqu’au bout du Rwanda (Paris, 2000) [The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda (2002)]; Abdourahman A. Waberi (Djibouti), Moisson de crânes [Skull Harvest] (2000); and Nocky Djedanoum (Chad), Nyamirambo! (2000). Kenyan writer Meja Mwangi’s text has not been published.

Introduction

9

have since been adopted as key texts for learning about the genocide in Rwanda. All three have now been translated into English (Diop, 2006; Tadjo, 2002; Monénembo, 2004) and are taught in a number of universities in the UK and the US. While the historical and literary importance of the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ texts cannot be ignored, they have very much dominated the field of academic study, and little space has been given to other fictional works about the genocide. Studies of literary responses to the genocide (Coquio, 2004; Semujanga, 2008; Dauge-Roth, 2010; Soumaré, 2013) focus almost exclusively on the works produced by this project.14 Although, as Diop noted, many African artists chose to look the other way when the genocide was taking place, a steadily increasing number of African writers have since chosen to turn back to 1994 Rwanda in an attempt to record and understand what happened. This, of course, includes the important literary works published by the Fest’Africa travellers. However, it is my contention that there has been an overemphasis on this particular group of texts, resulting in the marginalization of the growing corpus of fictional works by authors born in Rwanda. Texts by post-genocide Rwandan authors such as Benjamin Sehene, Gilbert Gatore and even Prix Renaudot winner Scholastique Mukasonga have so far received far less attention from scholars and critics than the Fest’Africa novels; other writers such as Robusto Kana, Camille Karangwa and Anicet Karege have been completely overlooked. Such selective research risks reducing genocide fiction to a small number of texts written only by outsiders or what I have described elsewhere as ‘tourists with typewriters’ (Hitchcott, 2009b: 152). A term borrowed from the groundbreaking work of Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, ‘tourists with typewriters’ here refers to the significant number of writers, including most of the members of the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ group, who base their fictional works about the genocide on their experiences as visitors to Rwanda. This label can also be applied to popular writers from the developed world, such as Québécois journalist Gil Courtemanche, whose bestselling novel Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali (2000) has been translated into English as A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (2004) and turned into a feature film (Favreau, 2006). Others are best defined as armchair tourists with typewriters: for 14 While Semujanga (2008) and Coquio (2004) do make brief reference to a small number of other fictional works, their focus is predominantly on the Fest’Africa texts.

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example, British-born author Warren FitzGerald, whose popular novel The Go-Away Bird (2001), draws together the stories of Ashley Bolt, a self-harming British singing teacher, and Clementine Habimana, an orphaned survivor of the genocide. By his own admission, FitzGerald had not visited Rwanda before the novel was published.15 A small number of fictional works in English have begun to appear from writers based in Anglophone African countries. These include South African Andrew Brown’s Inyenzi: A Story of Love and Genocide, first published by the author in 2000 and then reissued with Zebra Press in 2007 (Samuel, 171), and Zambian Gaile Parkin’s popular novel, Baking Cakes in Kigali (2009). Inyenzi imagines the tale of a brave Hutu priest, Melchior, who attempts to challenge the Interahamwe and shelter displaced Tutsi in his church. Brown intersperses the narrative with invented journalistic and legal documents relating to the trial of Victor Muyigenzi for crimes of genocide at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). A former childhood friend of Melchior and head of the communal police, Victor ends up murdering the priest in his church along with most of the people Melchior was trying to protect. As its title suggests, Brown’s novel is also a love story, that of Melchior and Selena, a love that is forbidden both because Melchior is a priest and, in the context of the genocide, because Selena is a Tutsi. Selena survives and becomes a witness in the trial against Victor, the father of her rape baby. As Karin Samuel notes, Brown’s novel enables the reader to ‘engage in a type of participatory understanding of the genocide’ through focalization on the two main characters (176). Characterization is equally important in Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali, focalized on the figure of a Tanzanian migrant and baker, Angel Tungaraza, who, now living in the Rwandan capital, listens to the stories of her Rwandan customers, some of them survivors of the genocide. An imagined survivor’s story is central to Secrets no More by Ugandan woman writer Goretti Kyomuhendo, a very early example of Anglophone African popular fiction using the genocide as its starting point. Published very soon after the genocide, in 1999, Kyomuhendo’s novel tells the story of Rwandan refugee Marina, who, having witnessed the rape of her mother and brutal murders of her parents and siblings, flees to Uganda, where she is taken in by an old priest who runs an orphanage. Having survived the genocide, Marina finds it difficult to form relationships with men and suffers rape, 15 See the interview with the author at http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Go-AwayBird-Warren-FitzGerald/dp/0007317387, accessed 11 November 2014.

Introduction

11

unwanted pregnancy and a loveless marriage as she struggles to come to terms with her experience. In each of these works by Anglophone African writers from outside Rwanda, the emphasis on characterization demonstrates an attempt to solicit reader empathy. While identification with fictional characters can be useful for promoting cross-cultural understanding, an overemphasis on characterization can result in characters becoming more important than context. Brown confirms this when he describes Inyenzi as ‘written almost entirely from a characterisation perspective. The characters could have been in Sarajevo, or Burundi, or South Africa. I chose Rwanda because it felt like the untold story: but the characters were paramount for me’ (Samuel, 176). While these Anglophone African authors choose to privilege characters over context, this is generally not the case for Rwandan fictional responses to the genocide, most of them published in French. Where empathy is encouraged in the texts analysed in this study, it is often complicated through multidirectional focalization or moral ambivalence. Although the works by Parkin, Kyomuhendo and Brown are acknowledged and included as an important part of the corpus of genocide stories, the present book aims to offer a more Rwanda-centred perspective on the genocide. To this end, the book begins with a chapter on the evolution of fiction from Rwanda, which effectively begins after the genocide. Although the number of novels and short stories produced by Rwandan authors remains small compared to many other countries on the African continent, it is by no means insignificant. Prizewinning authors such as Mukasonga and Gatore are beginning to bring Rwandan fiction to the attention of readers around the world. Yet, despite the increasing presence of Rwandan authors on the international stage, and despite Rwanda now being a member of the Commonwealth, it was a novel about the genocide written by a Jewish-American author, Naomi Benaron, that was shortlisted for the 2013 Commonwealth prize.16 Benaron’s 2011 novel, Running the Rift, recounts the events of 1994 as experienced by an adolescent boy, Jean Patrick Nkuba, a gifted runner who hopes to represent Rwanda in the Olympic Games, but is injured escaping the slaughter. Winner of the third Bellwether Prize, awarded biennially for a novel that addresses issues of social justice, and chosen as one of Oprah Winfrey’s Best Books of 2012, Running the Rift 16 Rwanda became the 54th member of the Commonwealth group of nations in November 2009.

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has been very successful, particularly in the US.17 In an interview for Psychology Today, Benaron describes the biggest challenge in writing her novel as ‘trying to be true to a culture so different from my own and one that I started out knowing nothing about’. She continues: And then there was the whole issue of colonialism. I have never been comfortable claiming that mantle for myself, but if I wanted to appropriate the identity of someone from Rwanda, it was a role I had to come to terms with. I needed to approach the task with honesty, humility, and, above all, with respect. (Haupt, 2012)

While Benaron claims to be sensitive to the need to tell Rwandan people’s stories respectfully, her comments raise the important question of the suitability of non-Rwandan authors writing novels about 1994. What are the ethical implications of a non-Rwandan ‘appropriat[ing] the identity of someone from Rwanda’? Benaron was indirectly asked this question by a Rwandan man after presenting a paper at the Third International Conference on Genocide: ‘“Don’t you feel silly,” he asked, “Writing fiction about the Rwandan Genocide?”’ (375).18 While Benaron interprets the question as ‘a query into the nature of fiction itself’ (375), it also calls for her to examine her own position as an outsider writing about genocide.19 Rwanda’s story has for too long been told by outsiders: colonizers, missionaries, journalists, researchers, humanitarian organizations and non-indigenous writers of fiction. Even Rwandan survivor testimonies are, for the most part, written in collaboration with a Western interpreter or co-author (Hron, 2011: 133–134). In French, the most widely read accounts of the genocide are those included in Jean Hatzfeld’s bestselling Rwanda trilogy Dans le nu de la vie (2000) [Into the Quick of Life (2008)], Une saison de machettes (2003) [Machete Season (2005)] and La Stratégie des antilopes (2005) [The Antelope’s Strategy (2010)]. A journalist commissioned by the leftwing French newspaper Libération to report on the genocide in 1994, Hatzfeld has put together edited extracts from the testimonies of Rwandan survivors and perpetrators in a series 17 See the excerpts from reviews printed inside the front cover of the book and reproduced on the author’s website: http://naomibenaron.com/books/runningthe-rift-reviews, accessed 21 October 2014. 18 Benaron’s essay ‘Fiction and Social Responsibility: Where do they Intersect?’ is published at the end of the novel (375–381). 19 When Benaron asks herself the question, ‘who was I to tell the stories?’ (379), she responds by positioning herself as a descendant of Holocaust survivors.

Introduction

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of prizewinning volumes. 20 In English, the best-known book about the genocide is Philip Gourevitch’s journalistic reconstruction We Wish to Inform you that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families, first published in 1998. Subtitled Stories from Rwanda, this is a powerful account of the genocide that draws on the experiences of individual people, as presented through the eyes of an American journalist who lives in New York. 21 Gourevitch’s book was so successful that UK publisher Picador bought the rights to republish it in hardback in 1999 and then in paperback the following year. Also in 1999, Picador USA published one of the earliest fictional responses to the genocide, again by an American: Julian R. Pierce’s novel Speak Rwanda. In his prefatory ‘author’s note’, Pierce explains that ‘although aspects of the story were inspired by actual events, the characters, and incidents portrayed in the book are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously’. Thus, Pierce begins to move away from journalistic reportage to a more overtly fictionalized representation of the genocide while at the same time stressing the authenticity of his narrative by grounding it in ‘actual events’. Gil Courtemanche also attempts to legitimize his novel by claiming to have based his characters on real people. In the preface to Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali, he describes the text that follows as both a novel and a piece of journalism: Les personnages ont tous existé et dans presque tous les cas j’ai utilisé leur véritable nom. Le romancier leur a prêté une vie, des gestes et des paroles qui résument ou symbolisent ce que le journaliste a constaté en les fréquentant. (2003) [The characters all existed in reality, and in almost every case I have used their real names. The novelist has given them lives, acts and words that summarize or symbolize what the journalist observed while in their company (2004)]

Such an emphasis on truth in fiction is, of course, a risky business, particularly in the context of events that are difficult, if not to say impossible, to 2 0 Hatzfeld has also published Englebert des collines [Englebert From the Hills] (2014), the first-person narrative of Rwandan survivor Englebert Munyambonwa. 21 Philip Gourevitch is a staff writer at The New Yorker magazine. In his book Extreme Pursuits: Travel/Writing in an Age of Globalization, Graham Huggan analyses We Wish to Inform You as a piece of Western disaster writing (121–127). See Masterson (2013) for an interesting contrapuntal reading of Gourevitch and Marie-Béatrice Umutesi’s 2004 testimony, Surviving the Slaughter.

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imagine, and that genocide revisionists continue to deny. Courtemanche appears to show awareness of this problem when he notes that ‘certains lecteurs mettront sur le compte d’une imagination débordante quelques scènes de violence ou de cruauté. Ils se tromperont lourdement’ (2003) [‘Some readers may attribute certain scenes of violence and cruelty to an overactive imagination. They will be sadly mistaken’ (2004)]. On the other hand, although, as Courtemanche reminds us, the evidence of what happened in Rwanda in 1994 is easily available, the choice of fiction still begs the question: if a story is imagined then how can it be true? Despite his insistence on the authenticity of his novel, Courtemanche muddies the waters when, in defence of his choice of fiction, he writes that ‘C’est pour mieux dire leur qualité d’hommes et de femmes assassinés que j’ai pris la liberté de les inventer un peu’ (2003) [‘If I have taken the liberty of inventing a little, I have done so the better to convey the human quality of the murdered men and women’ (2004)]. 22 By suggesting that genocide victims somehow become more human through the process of being fictionalized, Courtemanche undermines his project and risks putting his own words in the mouths of the dead, a danger ironically predicted in his own dedication to Rwandan victims and survivors of the genocide: ‘J’ai voulu parler en votre nom. J’espère ne pas vous avoir trahis’ (2003) [‘I have tried to speak for you. I hope I have not failed you’ (2004)]. Thus, both Courtemanche and Pierce explicitly blur the lines between fiction and documentary, a blurring that is compounded in Speak Rwanda by Pierce’s decision to write his novel as a series of fictional first-person accounts from ten different Rwandan individuals who performed a range of roles in the genocide (survivor, victim, soldier, perpetrator, rescuer, refugee). Although the narrators are invented, their words are presented in testimonial form. Despite being fairly well researched, Speak Rwanda is an unsuccessful novel with not enough formal distinction between the different narratives to make them either credible or engaging. It is also something of an exoticist novel, packed with information about aspects of traditional Rwandan culture. According to Dawes, ‘It is as if Pierce collected as many attention-grabbing details as possible and foregrounded them throughout the novel for their cash value, so to speak’ (29). Speak Rwanda also devotes a disproportionately large 22 Here I take issue with James Dawes’s view of Courtemanche’s and Pierce’s work as ‘authentic’ novels about the genocide (29). Indeed, Dawes’s own compelling analysis of Sunday the Pool in Kigali as inverted racist fantasy would seem to contradict this claim (29–35).

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amount of space to describing the inhumane conditions in the camps and RPF prisons after the genocide, thereby providing a skewed, if not to say negationist, version of events. Of the four parts in Speak Rwanda, only the first deals with the genocide; the other three focusing on the aftermath, particularly the refugee camps such as Benaco in Tanzania, and Goma in former Zaire. Such an imbalance reflects the Western media’s decision to showcase the refugee crisis after the genocide when over 2 million Rwandans, many of them perpetrators, fled Rwanda, fearing for their lives. As Madelaine Hron notes, the attention given to the camps amounted to an ‘obfuscation of the genocide’, privileging Western humanitarian aid in the aftermath of a humanitarian crisis that had for the most part been ignored (2009a: 207). Despite its shortcomings, Pierce’s fictional reconstruction of the events of 1994 raises important questions for Rwanda genocide fiction, questions that will inform the chapters of this book. How do writers who did not live through the genocide tell the stories of those who did? How do their stories differ from those of the Rwandan people who experienced it first-hand? What are the ethical implications of telling other people’s stories of genocide? Or, to adapt Kalí Tal’s question in her influential study of trauma literature Worlds of Hurt, what happens when a writer who is not a survivor or a perpetrator retells (and revises) a survivor or a perpetrator’s story? (3). For Patricia Yaeger, telling other people’s stories amounts to the consumption of their trauma: ‘What happens’, she asks, ‘when we “textualize” bodies, when we write about other people’s deaths (or other people’s cultures) as something one “reads”?’ (29). With such questions in mind, Rwanda Genocide Stories will privilege discussion of the ways in which African writers tell the story of the genocide. Many of these, not unlike Julian Pierce, were geographical outsiders, either not from Rwanda or living in exile in 1994 and forced to witness what was happening from a considerable distance. However, they are at the same time very different from Pierce in that they are all insiders in relation to the history and culture of the African continent, and many of them are Rwandan. In other words, while it will draw on all the texts I have discovered that present themselves as fictional responses to the 1994 genocide, this book will privilege literature by black Africans, particularly Rwandan writers. Since the majority of the novels and short stories by Rwandan authors have been written in French, the study will focus mainly on Francophone texts. As such, the texts produced by the African writers in the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ group will form an important point of comparison with

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the Rwandan-authored fiction. By shifting the focus to include texts by authors born in Rwanda, this book attempts to set up a dialogue between African insiders’ and outsiders’ fictional representations of the genocide. In doing so, it attempts to resist the tendency for Rwanda’s story to be told from a predominantly (Western) outsiders’ point of view. Of course, the concepts of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ are not defined solely in terms of nationality or geographical location, but are complicated by each individual’s personal experience of the violence of the genocide. The key question driving the analyses in this book is that of the positionality of authors in relation to the genocide. How do issues of ‘ethnicity’, nationality, geographical location and family history affect the ways in which creative writers respond to what happened in 1994? And how do such factors lead to authors being positioned by others? Positionality is a key consideration when thinking about the genocide, which grew out of the enforced positionality of ethnopolitics in Rwanda and itself generated new subject positions. To this end, the book is organized around the four principal subject positions created by the genocide: witness, survivor, victim and perpetrator, categories that have particular connotations and have become fraught with political tension and ambiguity in the context of post-genocide Rwanda. While other subject positions can, of course, be identified, such as collaborator, bystander, rescuer and returnee, the four categories that emerge most strongly in works of fiction are the focus of the chapters in this book. Overlapping and sometimes difficult, if not impossible, to dissociate, these categories all reflect the ways in which, as Helen Hintjens notes, ‘political identities have been framed by stereotypes that seek to reduce all individuals to either victims or victimisers during the genocide and its aftermath’ (90). Who is recognized as a victim or a survivor is an important question in Rwanda and one that many writers examine in their fiction. Following Hintjens, this book will suggest that all post-genocide identities are political. It will also investigate the ways in which the Manichean polarization of ‘victims’ and ‘victimizers’ is reflected and reformulated through the tensions that reveal themselves in fictional texts. Of course, ‘victim’ can refer both to someone who died during the genocide and to an individual who was injured, raped, tortured, traumatized, but nevertheless survived. Although this book tends to use the category of ‘survivor’ (rescapé in French) to refer to those who were targeted and may have suffered at the hands of the génocidaires, but who managed to escape the killings, and that of ‘victim’ to refer to those who died, ‘victim’ is sometimes also used when

Introduction

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relating to the effects of the trauma of genocide on both perpetrators and survivors. In The Empire of Trauma, a study of the social history of trauma, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman convincingly show how the concept of trauma has evolved from a psychological category to a moral judgement which now ‘[serves] to identify legitimate victims’ (284). While they recognize the usefulness of trauma in enabling the social legitimation of victims’ suffering, at the same time Fassin and Rechtman show trauma to be a politically charged, moral category that determines who qualifies as a victim: The validity people are willing to accord to trauma in order to relate the experience of descendants of survivors of the Holocaust, of the Armenian or Rwandan genocide, of victims of slavery or apartheid, is not the validity of a clinical category but rather of a judgment – the judgment of history. (284)

In an attempt to resist making similar judgements, this book takes heed of Michael Rothberg’s warning about the dangers of adopting homogenizing categories of subject position in writing about traumatic experiences: Critics invested in revitalizing both trauma studies and postcolonial studies can contribute to such revitalization by developing differentiated maps of subject position and experience that neither eliminate distinctions nor seek to multiply particularities until all possibility of generalization disappears. (2008: 231)

On the one hand, all those writing about genocide can be classified as witnesses insofar as each text becomes a kind of testimony, albeit here a fictional one. On the other, a primary witness who escaped genocide will relate very differently to the events of 1994 from a secondary witness who (re)visited the country after the genocide was over. Furthermore, subject positions are not stable, but rather shift and overlap depending on context or point of view. For example, many texts also present those who perpetrated genocide as victims. Conversely, Hutu survivors can find themselves collectively identified as perpetrators in the Rwandan national consciousness. What my analyses of fictional texts will show is that survivor, witness, perpetrator and victim are all politically loaded categories that are often difficult, if not impossible to distinguish. What fiction does very well, of course, is stage the complexity and ambivalence of such categories, showing that the genocide in Rwanda

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was, as Lee Ann Fujii notes, ‘a process, not a clearly bounded event’ in which people ‘move between categories or occupy multiple categories at the same time’ (11). In my readings of genocide novels, I analyse these subject positions from a number of different angles. Firstly, I am looking at how these identities are constructed through fiction. How are the stories of survivors, witnesses, victims and perpetrators imagined or retold by writers of novels and short stories? Secondly, I am looking at how the authors position themselves in relation to these categories: do they assume the role of the literary witness or do they use fiction to pass judgement on perpetrators? And finally, I consider how the authors themselves are in turn positioned by the academic marketplace. How does the reception of, for example, a Hutu author affect the way we read his or her novel about the genocide? These complex positionings and repositionings are analysed using paratextual and biographical information alongside textual indicators such as genre, form, authorial intervention, narrative point of view and characterization. The notion of authorship is complicated in Rwanda genocide fiction, which necessarily often draws on and shapes other people’s stories of traumatic events into a fictional form. In considering the positions of authors, I have included a fifth category, that of the ‘tourist’ to identify those authors who are not Rwandan or who had no personal connection with the genocide. As discussed earlier, this label is a useful way of thinking about the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ group. While tourist writers, like indigenous authors, play an important role as witnesses of the events of 1994, their status as visitors affects the way they position themselves in relation to the genocide, which, I will argue, is powerfully articulated in their fictional texts. The positionality of readers and critics is also important since, as this book will show, they tend to be located outside Rwanda. Outsider perspectives dominate both the production and reception of fiction about the genocide, and a number of the fictional works invite readers to reflect on our own positions as tourists, witnesses or even perpetrators by association of the horrors of 1994. Underlying the different subject positions discussed in this book is the question of empathy. Is it really possible for outsiders to empathize with the experiences of those who have been traumatized by genocide? In Empathy and the Novel, Suzanne Keen recalls reading ‘the bad news about the massacres in Rwanda’ reported in the New York Times. She describes her own reaction to receiving the news as marked by a lack of empathy:

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I wondered whether the large number of victims impeded my response – a strong possibility. Or perhaps the dearth of white, middle-class, Englishspeaking, professional women like me among the victims short-circuited my empathy. I couldn’t identify with them [the victims]; they were too unlike me; their circumstances and their suffering were unimaginable. This despite the fact that I had read dozens of novels set in African countries during times of crisis and had felt the strong, spontaneous kind of character identification that I call reader’s empathy for fictional characters experiencing hunger, dispossession, rape, humiliation, and exile. (xxi)

What Keen suggests here is an interesting distinction relating to the possibility of cross-cultural empathy. Fiction, she argues, facilitates empathy in a way that news reports do not. Such a claim has important implications for the role fiction can play in enhancing intercultural understanding. As this book will show, many novels implicate their readers in the process of remembering the genocide: some by inviting them to participate through the kind of identification that Keen describes; others by encouraging them to act as witnesses or judges; and others by obliging them to acknowledge and share responsibility for the failure of the international community to come to Rwanda’s aid in 1994. By implicating readers, authors also encourage a range of emotional responses: empathy, of course, but also horror, revulsion and guilt. In doing this, the present book suggests, fictional responses to the genocide invite readers to play an active part in commemorating and understanding the events of 1994. Like all creative works about traumatic experiences, genocide fiction is a paradoxical genre insofar as it attempts to imagine that which is defined as impossible to imagine. For Anne Whitehead, the growth of trauma theory since the early 1990s has ‘provided novelists with new ways of conceptualizing trauma and has shifted attention away from the question of what is remembered of the past to how and why it is remembered’ (3). However, the application of trauma theory to postcolonial texts is not without its problems. Whereas for Whitehead, trauma fiction shares with postcolonialism a concern with privileging voices that were previously marginalized, repressed or forgotten (82–83), the usefulness of trauma theory for understanding postcolonial traumatic experiences has already been discussed at some length, notably in the essays included in Stef Craps and Gert Buelens’ important special issue of Studies in the Novel (2008) devoted to ‘The Postcolonial Trauma Novel’ and in Craps’s more recent book, Postcolonial Witnessing:

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Trauma out of Bounds (2013). In the introduction to their co-edited special issue, Craps and Buelens condemn trauma studies as Eurocentric and ethically ineffective (2). Craps continues the discussion in the introduction to his own study, Postcolonial Witnessing, listing the four main ways in which, in his view, canonical trauma theory fails to promote the cross-cultural ethical engagement evoked by Cathy Caruth in her much-quoted essay ‘Trauma and Experience’ (11). For Craps, trauma theory fails in its marginalization of non-Western cultures; its uncritical adoption of Western definitions of trauma and recovery; its privileging of a trauma aesthetic of formal disruption and aporia; and its general disregard of cross-cultural connections beyond the developed world (2–6). Although Craps is keen to stress that, in his view, trauma theory is not ‘irredeemably tainted with Eurocentric bias’ (4), he contends on more than one occasion that ‘trauma theory should take account of the specific social and historical contexts in which trauma narratives are produced and received, and be open and attentive to the diverse strategies of representation of resistance that these contexts invite or necessitate’ (5; 43). His book is concerned with reshaping and redirecting trauma theory to make it ‘more inclusive and culturally sensitive’ (38). While Craps’s list of the four key failings of trauma theory provides him with a useful way of structuring his book, the list can be reduced to two central concerns: trauma theory’s failure to take proper account of cultural differences and its overemphasis on a particular aesthetic model of cultural production. While Rwanda genocide novels are indisputably narratives of trauma, they mostly do not demonstrate what critics identify as the trauma aesthetic. In The Holocaust and the Postmodern, Robert Eaglestone defines Holocaust testimony as refusing easy readerly identification, playing with narrative framework and characterized by interruptions and temporal disorder (2008a: 42–45). Such formal disruption attempts to communicate what many see as the impossibility of writing about trauma while at the same time attempting to convey the experience of the traumatic event (Whitehead, 82). Sharing Eaglestone’s emphasis on formal aesthetics, Whitehead identifies a number of key features in fictional narratives of trauma as distinct from testimonial trauma texts, notably intertextuality, repetition and a dispersed or fragmented narrative voice (84–88). Literary realism, Whitehead argues, ‘may not be suited’ to conveying the ‘unreality of trauma, while still remaining faithful to the facts of history’ (87). What Whitehead alludes to here is the ethical anxiety about the aporia of trauma, which Roger Luckhurst has criticized as leading to an overemphasis on

Introduction

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formal experimentation and the accompanying implication that ‘formal choices that do not find ways of figuring [the] aporia become unethical’ (89). The suggestion that traumatic events can only be represented in ‘anti-narrative modernist forms’ is also challenged by Jill Bennett and Roseanne Kennedy, who claim that, ‘Although it may be persuasive theoretically, in practice it is surprisingly prescriptive, and blind to the cultural contexts in which practices of representation and commemoration are produced and enacted’ (10). As Luckhurst points out, this limiting emphasis on formal radicalism is something of a contradiction in terms (89). To avoid this contradiction, he recommends moving the focus away from narrative rupture towards what he calls ‘narrative possibility’, which he defines as ‘the potential for the configuration and reconfiguration of trauma in narrative’ (89). This more inclusive definition of trauma texts allows Luckhurst to extend what is quickly becoming the ‘canon’ of trauma fiction, which consists only of formally experimental, non-realist narratives, to include a wide range of texts including popular novels and the realist fiction that Whitehead deems potentially unsuitable. Like Luckhurst, some postcolonial critics have also challenged this emphasis on aporia and formal experimentation in trauma fiction, pointing to the different techniques used by postcolonial authors to represent traumatic experiences. While some authors espouse (post) modernist textual strategies, others write within a realist and/or indigenous literary tradition (Craps and Buelens, 5). Significantly, only a tiny number of authors of fiction about the Rwanda genocide attempt to convey its unspeakable nature through experiments with form. Moreover, none of them are Rwandan. Conversely, as this book will show, many writers of genocide fiction create what Hron, writing about Hatzfeld, characterizes as an ‘excess of meaning’, which she defines as a ‘plethora of details, surplus of explanations or multiplicity of perspectives’ (2011: 126). The text that perhaps best reflects what trauma studies defines, prescribes even, as the ‘traumatic aesthetic’ is Waberi’s Moisson de crânes, which the author presents as generically indeterminate, a hybrid: ‘l’essai, le témoignage, mâtiné de fiction’ [an essay, a testimony crossed with fiction] (2004). Such textual hybridity is, however, a common, if not a defining feature of travel writing (Korte, 15). Like Véronique Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana, Moisson de crânes can be defined as a travel narrative in which Waberi positions himself as the traveller at the centre of his text (see Chapter Two). Unlike Tadjo, however, Waberi explicitly raises the question of ethical anxiety around fictionalizing genocide,

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paraphrasing in his preface Adorno’s over-quoted dictum about poetry after Auschwitz (14). 23 In his text, Waberi emphasizes what he describes as the inadequacy of language to write about genocide. Words, he writes, are ‘de pauvres béquilles mal assurées, toujours à fleur de déséquilibre’ [poor, unsteady crutches, always just about to topple over] (15), but he adds that these clumsy props are all we have to generate any hope in the world. Talking about this text in an interview with Eloïse Brezault, Waberi rearticulates his concerns about writing fiction about the genocide when he explains that this is the first time he has written a preface, pour dire que je n’étais pas arrivé, avec les armes de la seule fiction, à tout comprendre, à tout ressentir pour ensuite expliquer au lecteur. (2007) [to show that, armed only with fiction, I wasn’t able to explain everything to the reader because I hadn’t been able to understand or experience it all myself]

Waberi’s inability to find or produce a coherent explanation for the genocide is formally reflected in the fragmented nature of the narrative, which combines short stories, travelogue and impressionistic vignettes woven around quotations from other writers including Aimé Césaire, Wole Soyinka and Primo Levi. In two of the texts by Rwandan authors, Scholastique Mukasonga’s ‘Le Deuil’ [‘Mourning’] and Joseph Ndwaniye’s La Promesse faite à ma sœur [The Promise I Made My Sister], the unspeakability of the genocide is communicated by the authors’ decision to leap over 1994, focusing instead on the before and after (see Chapter Three). For the most part, however, fiction from Rwanda does not embrace the trauma aesthetic, despite what is widely acknowledged as the unimaginable and unspeakable nature of the genocide. On the contrary, the dominant form is historical realism, many novels presenting themselves as docufiction. All the works of fiction are set within what is immediately identifiable as Rwanda either during or after the genocide. While the country itself is only named in the title of a small number of texts, the narratives are scattered with references to known places, dates, recorded historical events and real people’s stories. In other words, one of the distinguishing characteristics of the works of Rwanda genocide authors is a common desire to record and remember exactly what happened in 1994. Even Waberi, who prefaces Moisson de crânes with the disclaimer that his 23 Waberi attributes Adorno’s words to Romanian poet Paul Celan.

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book is mainly fictional and does not claim to offer any explanations, punctuates his narrative with Rwandan cultural and geographical points of reference, including the Sainte Famille church (36), home of the infamous alleged genocide priest Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka (see Chapter Six). Even Koulsy Lamko’s magical-realist novel La Phalène des collines [The Moth of the Hills] emphasizes the importance of history when the narrator of the introduction concludes that ‘ici, je n’ai qu’un seul droit: celui de la paraphrase de l’histoire’ [here, I have only one right: the right to paraphrase history] (12). Fiction about the genocide in Rwanda cannot be read independently of the historical processes that contributed to the genocide. This book will show that a pressing need to remain faithful to the facts of history overrides any concern with configuring aporia. Another key feature of the development of trauma theory has been a focus on the Holocaust as a touchstone for a range of different traumatic experiences. Although interesting comparisons can and have been drawn between the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and the Holocaust in Europe, not only by historians and critics, but also by writers of fiction themselves, I am conscious of the dangers of homogenizing genocides. 24 As Dominick LaCapra suggests in Writing History, Writing Trauma, appropriating the experiences of Rwandan people into a kind of global culture of trauma can have serious consequences: The significance or force of particular historical losses (for example, those of apartheid or the Shoah) may be obfuscated or rashly generalized. As a consequence one encounters the dubious idea that everyone (including perpetrators or collaborators) is a victim, that all history is trauma, or that we all share a pathological sphere or a ‘wound culture’. (2001: 64)

While there are many similarities between the genocide against the Jews in Europe and that against the Tutsi in Rwanda, there are also many important differences. For this reason, the specificity of the Rwandan context is emphasized throughout this book. On the other hand, as Rothberg suggests, a multidirectional approach to understanding genocide is not necessarily a limiting one since, although they are differentiated, postcolonial landscapes of violence are ‘neither entirely homogenous, nor entirely particularistic’ (2008: 232). The possibilities of such an approach will be discussed in Chapter Five. 2 4 See Luckhurst (65–71) for a discussion of debates on the uniqueness of the Holocaust.

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Rwanda Genocide Stories does not aim to read novels and short stories about the Rwanda genocide as ‘trauma texts’, but rather as commemorative fictional responses to the particular social and historical event that was the 1994 genocide. As such, it does not analyse works of Rwanda genocide fiction through the exclusive, often Eurocentric lens of canonical trauma theory. While sometimes engaging with the work of analysts of trauma culture, such as LaCapra and E. Ann Kaplan, this book uses what can be broadly defined as an interdisciplinary, text-oriented approach, combining insights from current research in the already interdisciplinary fields of genocide studies and cultural studies with close readings of fictional texts. While valuable work is being done by those critics who continue to promote trauma studies as an important field with the potential to inform and contribute to postcolonial studies in the future (e.g. Bennett and Kennedy, 2003; Whitlock and Douglas, 2009; Craps, 2013), the cultural and aesthetic biases of trauma theory have not yet been completely overcome. 25 In other words, following Mineke Schipper’s definition of ‘inclusive criticism’, I attempt to read African texts about the genocide on their own terms, that is by emphasizing the particular contexts of their production. For Schipper, the approach of the inclusive critic ‘is that of the open-minded critic who is not bent upon including or excluding texts according to his own value system, but who reads literary texts from within the contexts from which they originated’ (50). The identity of the author is also central to my analysis, which considers the problematics of writing to be as important as the problematics of reading. Whereas Corinne Moncel, writing about some of the Fest’Africa novels, argues strongly for a separation of the artist and the citizen (2000b: 10), this book suggests that, in this particular context, the two cannot be separated. As Tal succinctly puts it, ‘the author’s identity matters’ (18). The relationship between authors and the subjects of their fiction is not an easy one, particularly when writing about genocide. For Cameroonian writer Patrice Nganang, some of the ‘Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ writers come close to pure insensitivity in their texts (287). Although Nganang is not specific about which particular authors he regards as insensitive, his remarks remind us of the problematic nature of outsiders writing as insiders. Authors share a sense of ethical responsibility to Rwandan victims and survivors, which often manifests itself in 25 For a brief engagement with trauma theory in relation to a Rwandan novel, see my reading of Gilbert Gatore’s Le Passé devant soi (Hitchcott, 2013).

Introduction

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an implicit – or sometimes explicit – anxiety about the role of fiction in commemorating the genocide, particularly among those authors who are not survivors themselves. Writing about his earlier novel set in Rwanda, Le Cavalier et son ombre [The Cavalryman and his Shadow], Diop points to what he identifies as a clash between the real and the imaginary (2003: 77). 26 Published before he had set foot in Rwanda, Le Cavalier et son ombre is condemned by Diop himself as a purely literary experience, born out of what he describes as his ignorance about the genocide combined with authorial vanity (2007: 25–27). Reflecting on this novel, Diop emphasizes what he now sees as the importance of respecting the facts in fiction about the genocide: Avant d’aller au Rwanda, je ne me sentais tenu à aucun respect pour les faits. Il m’était difficile de comprendre ceux pour qui écrire se résumait à dire: voici la vérité. Chercher à susciter le doute me paraissait bien plus excitant. (2003: 77–78) [Before going to Rwanda, I didn’t feel any need to respect the facts. It was difficult for me to understand those for whom writing was a matter of saying ‘this is the truth’. Finding ways of creating doubt seemed much more exciting to me]

Having spent time in Rwanda, Diop now feels it is impossible to write about the genocide without visiting the country. In his view, there is a big difference between ‘un roman sur le génocide écrit de loin, dans le confort des habitudes quotidiennes, et un autre, écrit celui-là dans l’odeur de la mort’ [a novel about the genocide written from afar, in the comfort of familiar daily routines, and another one written in the smell of death] (2003: 77). He writes that: cheminer parmi les ossements et discuter avec les rescapés nous a rendus à la fois plus humbles et plus conscients de ce que nos livres pouvaient faire pour lutter contre le mal. (2003: 78) [making our way among the bones and talking with survivors made us more humble and more conscious of what our books could do to fight against evil]

Here, Diop also highlights the fact that all fiction about the genocide in Rwanda is based to some degree on witness accounts of what happened in 1994. In the case of those writers who, like Diop, participated in 2 6 A later, modified version of this essay is published in Diop’s collection L’Afrique au-delà du miroir [Africa Beyond the Mirror] (2007).

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the Fest’Africa ‘Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ mission, they too position themselves and their texts as witnesses, but always in the knowledge that they are not themselves survivors. As Chapter Two of this book will demonstrate, the written texts produced by the Fest’Africa initiative are powerful examples of the way in which writing about the genocide forces authors to interrogate themselves and the legitimacy of their art. Behind this central issue of authorial anxiety lies the ethical question of who has a right to write about the genocide. While some research has focused on Rwandan testimonial literature, notably Dauge-Roth’s Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda (2010), there have so far been very few academic studies of fictional responses by Rwandans themselves. Indeed, many of the texts included in the present book have never been analysed before. Three other studies of Rwanda genocide fiction have been published in French (Coquio, 2004; Semujanga, 2008; Soumaré, 2013), all of which focus predominantly on the texts produced by the Fest’Africa ‘Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ mission. By placing the Fest’Africa works of fiction near the beginning of my own study, I recognize the literary significance of this group of texts, some of which are beginning to form part of what could be identified as a canon of Rwanda genocide fiction. Yet, as my analysis will show, the status of these works is an ambivalent one. This ambivalence is acknowledged by the authors themselves, both within their narrative responses to the genocide and in their published interviews and articles about Rwanda. Tierno Monénembo signals this when, in the preface to his novel L’Aîné des orphelins [The Oldest Orphan], he writes that ‘Si le génocide rwandais est irréfutable, les situations et les personnages de ce roman sont, eux, fictifs pour la plupart’ [While the reality of the Rwandan genocide cannot be denied, the situations and the characters in this novel are, for the most part, fictitious]. Here, in a sentence, Monénembo encapsulates the difficulty of writing fiction about the genocide. Writers feel a responsibility to tell ‘the truth’, to demonstrate that what happened in Rwanda in 1994 was indeed a genocide. Yet, at the same time, as creative writers, they are committed to producing works of fiction in which most, but not all, of what they write is imagined, invented. Of course, the inherent contradiction between reality and fiction is not exclusively felt by the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ authors. Rather, it informs all the novels and short stories created in response to the 1994 genocide discussed in this book. Through the course of my analysis, a dialogue emerges between

Introduction

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the Fest’Africa writers and their colleagues in Rwanda, one that reveals many shared concerns. In particular, the texts and their authors raise the fundamental question that is central to this book, which is: How can the genocide be represented in fiction? Is fiction an appropriate medium for remembering events so horrific that they surpass our imagination? How can fiction be an appropriate record of the truth? What contribution can fiction make to commemorating genocide? So, this book will consider the possibilities and limitations of fiction about the genocide in Rwanda, the ethical implications of writing and reading stories about 1994. This is not in any way to suggest that writing fiction is an illegitimate means of remembering the genocide, but rather to raise the questions that face all the authors whose texts are analysed here. In her study of testimony and fiction, Marie Bornand discusses the legitimacy of writing testimonial fiction. In her view, legitimacy is established through the ways in which fictional texts encourage the participation of the reader who, through the work of imagination and interpretation, becomes what Bornand describes as ‘un partenaire actif dans la transmission d’une mémoire, dans l’élaboration d’une chaîne du témoignage [an active partner in the transmission of a memory, in the development of a chain of testimony] (129). Engaging the reader as an active participant in the process of remembering what happened in Rwanda in 1994 will emerge as a key feature of fictional responses to the genocide. While many of the textual strategies identified by Bornand in her study of French post-war fiction are not those used by writers of stories about the Rwanda genocide, this book will show that readers of Rwanda genocide fiction are also directly implicated and challenged, in a number of different ways.

chapter one

Rwandan Fiction Rwandan Fiction

When Rwandan woman author Scholastique Mukasonga was awarded the Prix Renaudot in November 2012, the French media focused on ‘la surprise générale’ [the widespread surprise] that ‘une quasi-inconnue’ [a virtual unknown] should be awarded such a prestigious French literary prize, particularly as her novel, Notre-Dame du Nil [Our Lady of the Nile] had not originally appeared on the final shortlist (Clermont, 2012).1 While this event undoubtedly says more about the politics of literary consecration in France than it does about fiction from Rwanda, the fact remains that Rwandan literature is not well known either outside or inside the country, a situation that a group of Rwandan academics describes as catastrophic and unjustified (Nkejabahizi et al., 7). In a more recently published article, one of these academics, Jean-Chrysostome Nkejabahizi, draws attention to the lack of attention paid to literature in contemporary Rwanda (2012). Based in the Department of Modern Languages at the National University of Rwanda (NUR) in Butare, Nkejabahizi explains that, until very recently, there was no published anthology of Rwandan literature and no literary journal based in the country (61). Indeed, Nkejabahizi’s research identifies only thirteen academic articles and not a single book-length study of Rwandan literature published after 1994. The reasons for this are discussed only briefly in what is a very short article with a long and useful bibliography. However, Nkejabahizi does identify the almost complete absence of a publishing infrastructure in Rwanda, the lack of literary events and conferences, and the loss of a number of important Rwandan literary critics as a consequence of the genocide. 2 Of those Rwandans working 1 Mukasonga also won the 2012 Prix Ahmadou Kourouma and the French Voices Award for Notre-Dame du Nil. 2 Nkejabahizi cites the examples of former NUR academics François-Xavier

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on literature at NUR before 1994, Nkejabahizi cites only Rwandan exile Josias Semujanga, now a professor at the University of Montreal, as an academic who continues to write about Rwandan literature. In an attempt to counter what he acknowledges as his own pessimism about the status of literature in his country, Nkejabahizi has co-edited the first ever Anthologie de la littérature rwandaise moderne [Anthology of Modern Rwandan Literature] published by NUR’s own press in 2009. Produced with financial support from UNESCO so that it could be used as a textbook in Rwandan schools, the anthology presents extracts from eleven novels and eight short stories by Rwandan authors as well as from a selection of testimonies, poems and plays. This important book is evidence of the diversity of Rwandan literature despite, as this chapter will show, works of fiction only really beginning to appear in the last twenty years. In what follows, I outline the evolution of fiction by Rwandan authors, from before the 1994 genocide to the present day. Post-genocide fiction really begins with Aimable Twagilimana’s pre-genocide novel Manifold Annihilation (1996), published in English. The most recent published text at the time of writing is Vénuste Kayimahe’s 450-page novel La Chanson de l’aube [The Song of Dawn] (2014). In the light of Nkejabahizi’s negative assessment of the Rwandan literary scene, I also trace and explain the slow emergence of book culture before and after the genocide and, in doing so, highlight some of the challenges facing creative writers in present-day Rwanda. Written fiction by Rwandan authors is a very recent phenomenon; before 1994, Rwandan literature existed mainly in the oral forms of poetry and songs in the Kinyarwanda language. 3 Romuald Fonkoua claims that although there were some written accounts of life in Rwanda before the genocide produced by exiled members of the Tutsi diaspora such as Antoine Ruti, these are rarely acknowledged or discussed, an absence Fonkoua explains by the minority position of the country in the Great Lakes region and in Africa more generally (2003: 68–69).4 For Munyarugerero and Joseph Nsengimana. Munyarugerero is now exiled in France and is the author of Réseaux, pouvoirs, oppositions, la compétition politique au Rwanda [Networks, Power, Opposition: Political Competition in Rwanda] (2003). Nsengimana is currently serving as an ambassador for the government of Rwanda. 3 As this book focuses on fictional responses to the genocide, I do not discuss poetry here. 4 On the back cover of Nemo (1979), the publisher’s blurb presents Ruti as born

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a long time, the only author to be read outside Rwanda was J. Saverio Naigiziki, whose voluminous semi-autobiographical novel Mes transes à trente ans: escapade ruandaise [The Agonies of Being Thirty: A Rwandan Escapade] was first published in 1950 and reproduced in a new, edited version in 2009 (Munyangeyo, 2011). This book is generally recognized as the first great work of literature by a Rwandan author; Naigiziki’s short 1954 three-act play, L’Optimiste [The Optimist] is less well known, although it was the first published play from Rwanda. The other Rwandan writer with an international reputation is the Catholic priest, poet and philosopher Alexis Kagame, who produced a vast number of written works in both French and Kinyarwanda, including volumes of stories and poems transcribed from the oral tradition (Adekunle, 60). Kagame died in 1981. More recently, Edouard Gasarabwe embarked on a similar project, publishing several volumes of traditional stories (1988; 1999; 1997; 2000; 2002), including a bilingual publication in French and Kinyarwanda, Blanchette et ses chevreaux face aux dangers du monde: conte français pour le Rwanda [Blanchette and her Kids Against the Dangers of the World: A French Tale for Rwanda]. 5 Although published literacy rates, particularly among young people, are reportedly high for a sub-Saharan African country, Rwanda does not yet have an established national culture of reading fiction.6 Rwandan author Joseph Ndwaniye explains that literature was not an integral part of his childhood education, a gap he blames on the fact that Rwanda was a colony of Belgium rather than France: Nous les Rwandais n’avons pas toujours la culture du roman. Ce pourrait être un reproche adressé aux colons belges, celui de ne pas nous avoir transmis cette culture-là: les colonies françaises ont eu ce bénéfice. On ne m’a jamais fait lire de livres et je n’ai pas eu de cours de littérature. Mais il faut dire qu’il n’y avait pas de bibliothèque dans l’école, donc tout cela relevait d’un domaine inaccessible. (Beullens and Corbeel, 2013)

in 1942 in Belgian East Africa, a graduate of the University of Kinshasha and working for a mining company. 5 Despite the singularity of ‘conte’ in the title Blanchette et ses chevreaux face aux dangers du monde: conte français pour le Rwanda, the text is a bilingual collection of short stories for young readers. 6 In 2012, Rwandan literacy levels were reported to stand at around 70% for adults and 84% for young people aged between fifteen and twenty-four. See Mugisha (2012).

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Rwanda Genocide Stories [We Rwandans still don’t have a culture of reading novels. We could put the blame on the Belgian colonizers for not having passed on that culture: the French colonies did have that privilege. I was never made to read books and I wasn’t taught about literature. But it has to be said that there was no library in our school so all of that was a no-go area]

In present-day Rwanda, national literature still does not form an important part of the secondary school curriculum in which only a few poems are taught (Nkejabahizi et al., 14). The curriculum, Nkejabahizi and colleagues explain, fails to be regularly updated, and prose fiction and drama are not included at all: ‘En ce qui concerne par example le roman, le théâtre, la nouvelle, c’est le blackout total’ [As far as novels, theatre, short stories are concerned, it’s a total blackout] (14).7 For a long time, books were not easily obtainable in Rwanda, but this is beginning to change. Recounting his first trip to the Rwandan capital in 1998, Djiboutian author and member of the Fest’Africa group Abdourahman Waberi commented on the lack of bookshops in the capital, concluding that ‘celle de Caritas [la librairie catholique] est la seule digne de ce nom’ [Caritas (the Catholic bookshop) is the only one worthy of the name bookshop] (68). When he returned a year later, in 1999, he recorded his delight on discovering the new headquarters of the Librairie Ikirezi Bookstore (81). Opened in 1998 by Dutch émigré Chiel Lijdsman in the Kacyiru district of Kigali, Ikirezi has since opened a second bookstore in Goma, DRC and is planning to develop home delivery of books and online sales.8 In December 2013, the first Caravane du Livre [Travelling Book Fair] circulated in the Great Lakes region promoting book culture.9 One of the organizers of the book fair, Ishyo Arts Centre, has provided an important platform for contemporary arts, including literature, in the Rwandan capital since May 2007.10 In September 2014, Ishyo Arts launched its Espace Madiba, a library 7 According to Mukasonga, her novel Notre-Dame du Nil is now taught as part of the French curriculum at Green Hills Academy in Kigali (Ceulan, 2013). 8 www.ikirezi.biz/about.html, accessed 13 July 2015. 9 Organized by the Great Lakes writers’ association Sembura, based in Burundi, and the Rwandan Isyho Arts Centre in collaboration with Ikirezi Bookstore and the Savoir Plus Faire Plus Bookstore in Burundi, the ‘Caravane du livre’ spent four days in Rwanda visiting schools and leading workshops with young writers, actors and artists. These included Rwandan actor, author and playwright Dorcy Rugamba. 10 http://ishyo.wordpress.com/about/, accessed 15 January 2014.

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dedicated to African and Caribbean literature located in the Kigali International School in Kimihurura. Within this slowly developing book culture, however, Rwandan authors remain very much in the margins. In April 2014, Caritas did not stock any Rwandan fiction in English or French, focusing instead on school textbooks and religious publications. In Ikirezi, the bigger of the two bookshops, the only two works of fiction by Rwandan authors were Ndwaniye’s La Promesse faite à ma sœur and Mukasonga’s Notre-Dame du Nil. The dominance of the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ texts in genocide fiction was again evident in Ikirezi, which held copies of the English translation of Fest’Africa writer Monénembo’s L’Aîné des orphelins alongside the original French versions of fellow travellers Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana and Waberi’s Moisson de crânes. The lack of genocide fiction in Kigali bookshops in April 2014 was all the more surprising as the city was preparing for ‘Kwibuka 20’, a series of large-scale national and international commemorations for the twentieth anniversary of the genocide. Despite the lack of novels in the bookshops, there was nevertheless an important attempt to include literature in the Kwibuka 20 programme in the form of a Café Littéraire held on 6 April 2014 in the Rwanda Revenue Building. This event included appearances from three of the Fest’Africa writers, Boubacar Boris Diop, Koulsy Lamko and Monique Ilboudo, along with Rwandan author Mukasonga and exiled Rwandan critic Semujanga. Also invited was Gilbert Rwabigwi, Executive Director of the Youth Literacy Organization (YouLi), which in March 2013 launched The Poetry Project 19.11 This project produced a compilation of twenty poems entitled Telling Our Own Stories: Poems by Rwandan Youth 20 Years after the Genocide (2014). YouLi was founded in 2009 by a group of high school students with the initial aim of producing a cultural review edited by young people. Since then, this student-led not-for-profit organization has gone from strength to strength, leading successful workshops on writing and publishing across the country and producing a number of literary magazines, including, most recently, The Pen Review, the first issue of which was published in May 2014, containing fourteen short pieces of creative writing written by young people from Rwanda and published online with open access.12 The Café Littéraire also presented readings and a performance piece 11 http://www.youth-literacy.org, accessed 4 June 2014. 12 http://www.youth-literacy.org/blog, accessed 4 June 2014.

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directed by Dalila Boitaud and was followed by a sale of books, including a self-published collection of short stories, Une saison au cœur d’Afrique [A Season in the Heart of Africa], by Congolese writer Louis Munyaburanga Basengo. Now living in Rwanda, Munyaburanga is Secretary of the Rwandan Writers’ Association, La Plume d’or, and member of the African Great Lakes Writers Association, Sembura. This association of writers from Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo was created in Kigali in February 2010 and now has its base in Burundi. In 2011, Sembura published two books, the first of which is a literary anthology that predates the volume by Nkejabahizi and colleagues, but which is not dedicated exclusively to literature from Rwanda. In fact, Emergences: Renaître ensemble [Emerging Together: Rebirth] (Plateforme, 2011) contains texts by only five Rwandan writers: poems in French by Jacques Buhigiro and Kalisa Rugano; short stories by Augustin Gasake (in French) and Timothy Njoroge (in English); and an extract from John Rusimbi’s English-language novel By the Time She Returned (1999). Sembura also has a strong political agenda and, in 2011, presented to representatives from the Ministries of Culture in each of the three countries a ‘plaidoyer en faveur de la politique du livre et de la promotion des lettres dans la région des Grands Lacs Africains’ [plea for a policy on books and the promotion of literature in the African Great Lakes region]. In this paper, the writers make a substantial number of recommendations in four key areas: the teaching of languages and literature; the production, promotion and dissemination of literature; the status of writers in the Great Lakes; and national and regional book culture.13 Among the recommendations, the authors call for the establishment of local publishing industries, national libraries and archives, literary prizes, festivals and competitions, and the removal of import taxes on books. Whereas government ministers explain the lack of book culture as a consequence of the precarious economic situation of the countries of the African Great Lakes, the Sembura recommendations echo Diop’s suggestion in his introduction to their anthology that ‘le désert culturel est peut-être davantage la cause que la conséquence de la misère économique et sociale’ [the cultural desert is perhaps more the cause than the consequence of economic and social poverty] (2011: vii). As such, the Sembura paper opens with a statement of the 13 http://sembura.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/plaidoyer-dc3a9finitif.pdf, accessed 5 June 2014.

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conviction, unanimement partagée par la Plateforme, que l’affaiblissement actuel des performances linguistiques et littéraires entraîne des conséquences inévitables sur le développement culturel et ­socio-économique de la région. [conviction, unanimously shared by the Platform, that the current weakness of linguistic and literary performance has inevitable consequences for the cultural and socio-economic development of the region]14

As these writers explain, culture and development are inextricably linked. Yet, although some important progress has been made since Sembura delivered its paper in April 2011, Rwanda still has a long way to go in terms of a national book culture. Many of the recommendations presented by Sembura in 2011 have still to be realized across the Great Lakes region. While government initiatives and NGOs like the Isaro Foundation work to promote reading and writing in Rwanda, writers themselves have very little support.15 The lack of established local publishing houses means that local authors are often compelled either to publish their work at their own expense or not be published at all. Material Books is a small independent publisher that aims to promote East African fiction in English, particularly short stories. Established by UK-based academic Kate Haines, Material Books describes itself as ‘passionate about distributing books as widely and cheaply as possible, helping to build a culture of reading in Rwanda’.16 Unfortunately, Material Books has not yet managed to produce any published texts. The educational branches of UK publishers Cambridge University Press and Macmillan now have branches in Kigali, as does East African Publishers, whose headquarters are in Nairobi, Kenya, but none of these publishes fiction. Books produced by foreign publishers are very expensive in Rwanda, as most are imported from abroad.17 The high prices of books in Rwanda, combined with the lack of an indigenous publishing infrastructure, make it very difficult for a writing culture to emerge. Even the new national public library is affected by the cost of buying books, which no doubt explains why, there too, fictional texts by contemporary Rwandan authors 14 http://sembura.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/plaidoyer-dc3a9finitif.pdf, accessed 5 June 2014. 15 http://www.isarofoundation.org, accessed 5 June 2014. 16 http://materialbooks.wordpress.com, accessed 15 January 2014. 17 While YouLi has begun to publish open access online journals, electronic publishing has yet to make a major impact in Rwanda.

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are conspicuous by their absence. Housed in a beautiful new building, the library opened in 2012 in the capital, Kigali, and a programme is now underway to bring books to rural communities through the rollout of a national mobile library project.18 Yet, the majority of the fictional texts in the library’s holdings are from the US and France, the French collections provided in the form of a ‘French corner’, consisting of the holdings of the former Centre Culturel franco-rwandais [Franco-Rwandan Cultural Centre], which has now become the Institut français du Rwanda [French Institute of Rwanda]. In April 2014, Ikirezi bookshop’s fiction shelves were similarly dominated by Folio paperbacks by authors from Europe, mainly from France. The lack of visibility of Rwandan authors in bookshops and the library exacerbates their marginal status, even among the reading public in their own country. Although modern literature is published in all three languages of Rwanda (Kinyarwanda, French and English) as well as in Swahili, the mother tongue of many of the post-genocide returnees, the majority of adult fiction is currently written in French, as until 2008 French was the principal language of instruction in schools (Samuelson and Freedman, 191). In fact, French and Kinyarwanda were the only two official languages until 1996, when the RPF government added English to the list (Samuelson and Freedman, 192). Since 2008, the Rwandan education system has been moving towards providing all secondary school teaching in English, with French taught as a foreign language. The same policy applies in higher education, except in courses in French and Francophone studies. In the longer term, this significant change in linguistic policy will undoubtedly have a considerable effect on literary production by the descendants of survivors of the 1994 genocide. For the time being, however, the majority readership of Rwandan fiction is based in the Francophone world, more particularly in metropolitan France, Belgium and French Canada. When asked in an interview if she might one day write books in Kinyarwanda, Mukasonga replied, ‘Of course, I’d love to write in Kinyarwanda. But who would publish me? In Rwanda, even though English is now the official language, my readers are still mainly French speakers’ (Ceulan, 2013). Comments such as this point to the complex question of the language of memory in Rwanda. Whereas survivors and perpetrators testify about their experience in Kinyarwanda, the majority of published fictional commemorations have been written in French. 18 http://www.edc.org/newsroom/articles/books_move, accessed 15 January 2014.

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Publication in the Rwandan national language of Kinyarwanda is generally limited to school textbooks, religious works and storybooks for children. Although Rwanda unusually has only one official African language, spoken by all, European colonization relegated Kinyarwanda to the status of an oral language so that, until very recently, texts in Kinyarwanda have tended to exist only in performance. Nkejabahizi and colleagues identify theatre as an important genre in Rwanda, particularly as plays do not need a publisher to reach an audience, and their diffusion has increased through the expansion of theatre and soap opera on television and, more particularly, on radio (12). Competitions run by organizations such as Radio France Internationale have in the past contributed to greater interest in short stories as a genre (Nkejabahizi et al., 13). However, the editors of the Anthologie de la littérature rwandaise moderne remain rather sceptical about the birth of what they describe as a new kind of novel in Kinyarwanda: short texts of thirty to forty pages that have begun to appear in Kigali bookshops, which they suggest could have been produced for reasons of cost, but could also be the result of a lack of writing talent (Nkejabahizi et al., 12). Despite such cynicism, the future of Rwandan literature undoubtedly lies in texts published in the national language.19 The first independent, not-forprofit Rwandan publishing house, Editions Bakame, was founded after the genocide to promote a culture of reading among children and young people and publishes the majority of its titles in Kinyarwanda. Its founder, Agnes Gyr-Ukunda, views reading about Rwandan culture in the national language of Rwanda as a way of promoting healing among children traumatized by genocide. 20 Unsurprisingly, the scarcity of printed Rwandan fiction before the genocide continued in the decade immediately after 1994. As Rwanda struggled to rebuild itself after the extraordinary devastation of the genocide, art and literature were not high priorities. That said, a small number of fictional works by Rwandans did began to appear, but most of them written by authors who were not actually living in the country at the time of the genocide. It is significant that, of the Rwandans who have chosen to write fiction, only a very small number had personal experience of the events of 1994. Those writers in exile who witnessed the killings through the media or by telephone often only learned of the 19 The most prolific Rwandan author, Julienne Mukarugira, published four novels in Kinyarwanda before she disappeared into exile (Nkejabahizi et al., 144). 2 0 www.bakame.ch/fr.assocation/, accessed 4 December 2013.

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death of their loved ones second-hand. The majority of the Rwandan novelists writing about the genocide fall into this category, which Alain Gauthier, President of the Belgian association Collectif des Parties Civiles pour le Rwanda (CPCR), describes as ‘like being dead among the living’ (African Rights and Redress, 73). 21 Many exiles, including fiction writers Benjamin Sehene and Mukasonga, returned to Rwanda after the genocide to find out what had happened to their families, but none of them chose to stay. Of the tiny number of novelists who experienced the genocide first-hand, none is currently living in Rwanda. Unlike the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ collection published in 2000, the Rwandan novels that were published in the first ten years after 1994 failed to make much of an impact on the international literary scene. In fact, for a long time, the only Rwandan writers discussed by journalists or academics were those genocide survivors, mostly women now living in Europe, who wrote about their personal experiences of the horror in the form of testimonies (e.g. Kayitesi, 2004; Kayitesi, 2009; Mukagasana, 1997, 1999; Mukasonga, 2006, 2008; Mujawayo and Belhaddad, 2004; Mujawayo, 2006). Whereas most of the early testimonies were written in French, the first two Rwandan novels published after the genocide both appeared in English. Published in 1996 by US-based academic Aimable Twagilimana, Manifold Annihilation is to my knowledge the first published work of post-genocide fiction by a Rwandan author, although it was written before the events of 1994. 22 Written in English in the first person, Manifold Annihilation is the story of office clerk Jean Mahoro’s fascination with the mysterious Victor Kalinda, who appears to Jean in a dream naked, dead and hanging from a tree, and whom he later meets 21 The CPCR was established to privately prosecute and raise awareness of genocide fugitives. Their campaign has been relatively successful in Belgium, Switzerland and France where, in March 2014, the work of the CPCR led to the successful and high-profile prosecution of Pascal Simbikangwa, former Rwandan intelligence chief and captain of the Presidential Guard. In other European countries, including the UK, individuals are not permitted to instigate criminal investigations against suspected perpetrators (African Rights and Redress, 82–83). 22 Audrey Small uses the example of Twagilimana to demonstrate the speed with which fictional texts began to appear after the genocide (201). While it is true that Manifold Annihilation was published in 1996, the text is signed and dated 1993. Twagilimana finished the novel while studying for his PhD at Buffalo State College, State University of New York (SUNY), where he has been Professor of English since 1995.

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in a bar in Kigali. Set in the period leading up to Habyarimana signing the draft Arusha agreement for power sharing in Rwanda in August 1993, the novel is hauntingly prophetic. Although the manuscript for the novel was finished in December 1993 and ends on an optimistic note, the narrator’s reflection on what the future holds for Rwanda reads like a chilling prediction of the genocide: Who will we blame thirty years from now if we don’t carry out the democratization process in progress? If it fails, like decolonization failed thirty years ago, we’ll see new wars, burnings, killings, accusations and arrests, and the return of stories with their patterns of unfolding, their spirals of violence. (Twagilimana, 232)

When we read the novel with hindsight, the genocide seems inevitable, as Twagilimana describes the early 1990s as a time of ever-increasing tensions in Rwanda. Furthermore, the narrative is littered with the events that have now become part of the official history of the genocide, such as the 1959 Social Revolution; the RPF invasion; the Tutsi pogroms including the Bagogwe massacre; 23 and the publication of the Hutu Ten Commandments. More generally, the novel emphasizes the repressive nature of what it ironically refers to as the ‘Republican monarchy’ in which individuals are arbitrarily arrested, jailed, beaten, tortured and sometimes sentenced to death for ‘undermining the [social] revolution’ (Twagilimana, 30) or for collaborating with the enemy forces of the Inkotanyi (RPF), the latter based on alleged possession of weapons or maps of Rwanda. 24 Retrospectively, the title of the novel, Manifold Annihilation, also takes on a deeper significance, referring not only to what the text describes as the multiple destruction of an individual, symbolized by Mahoro’s dream of Kalinda as a broken man hanging from a tree, but also to the attempt that was made only four months after this novel was completed to systematically annihilate the entire Tutsi population. Rather surprisingly, Manifold Annihilation appears to have been overlooked by critics of Rwandan literature. 25 Although not strictly 23 The Bagogwe were a pastoral Tutsi community living in the north-west of Rwanda, many of whom were killed in revenge attacks after the RPF took control of Ruhengeri in January 1991 (see Prunier, 1999: 169–170). 2 4 Originally the name for the king’s army in nineteenth-century Rwanda, ‘Inkotanyi’ was the name the RPF used for its soldiers (Prunier, 1999: 481–482). 25 Like Small (201), Josias Semujanga (2008: 11) makes brief mention of the novel in a footnote.

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speaking a novel about the 1994 genocide, Twagilimana’s novel is an important text not only because of the early date of its publication (only two years after the genocide), but also for its metanarrative on the role of the Rwandan writer and of storytelling more generally. Throughout the novel, the narrator-protagonist, Jean Mahoro, presents Rwanda as a nation filled with stories: he and his fellow office workers meet together each day to share rumours and gossip. Mahoro himself wants to write a novel about Victor Kalinda, but is all too aware of the dangers involved in writing anything in what is presented as an oppressive regime of censorship and control. Although the public in the novel take rumours to be truth, writers accused of being ‘vendor[s] of falsehoods’ (181) can find themselves sentenced to death. Recalling the work of other African writers, such as Sony Labou Tansi and Ahmadou Kourouma, Twagilimana’s postcolonial Rwanda is a magical realist world where, as Dr Seneza tells Mahoro, ‘realities are fictions, and fictions realities. The attributes of reality have been leveled with those of fiction. You can’t separate them anymore’ (169). Set in an environment where it has become impossible to distinguish fiction from reality, Manifold Annihilation emphasizes the importance of telling stories that challenge the official narrative. Recounting the events of 4 October 1990, when Habyarimana’s government launched an attack on Kigali, which it then claimed was the work of the RPF, Mahoro comments: Again, my account is diametrically different from the official history, but mine is just a story and not ideology. Maybe we would be better off if we just forgot all those reports which don’t talk about reality but make up the official history. Their history is written with manacles. (98)

What Twagilimana seems to be doing here is setting the agenda for the fiction that comes after the genocide. Although only a small number openly criticize the government, many writers challenge the simplified division of Rwandan society into victims and perpetrators, often implicitly organized along ethnic lines, as I discuss below. Manifold Annihilation is a rare example of a Rwandan novel in English. The other early Anglophone novel is By the Time She Returned (1999) by returnee John Rusimbi, who published a second novel, The Hyena’s Wedding, in 2007. Having spent many years in exile in Uganda, Rusimbi returned to Rwanda in 1994 and initially worked as head teacher of Nyamata High School. After joining the Ministry for Youth and Culture in 1996, he became a member of the Rwandan transitional government

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between 2001 and 2003 (Rusimbi, 1999: back cover). A portrait of life in a refugee settlement in Uganda told from the perspective of a young Rwandan girl named Kaitesi, By the Time She Returned is described by Rusimbi in his Introduction as ‘a critical analysis of the destitution, degradation and misery suffered by Rwandans in exile’ (vii). Although many of them, like Kaitesi and her brother, were born in Uganda, the Banyarwanda (Rwandan) refugees in the novel are marginalized by the local population as ‘despicable, foreign and intolerable’ (60). Set in the 1970s to 1980s, By the Time She Returned makes occasional reference to the history of the Rwanda genocide, particularly the 1959 massacres that accompanied the so-called Social Revolution and led so many Tutsi to flee or be driven out of Rwanda. 26 Against the background of the Ugandan Civil War, it also sketches out the beginnings of the rise of the RPF within the Ugandan National Resistance Army (NRA). Led by Yoweri Museveni, ‘the chief rebel’ in the novel, the NRA eventually managed to recruit many Rwandan exiles to join their struggle, particularly as they increasingly found themselves targeted as potential NRA sympathizers and threats to national security. When, towards the end of the novel, Rusimbi describes Kaitesi’s decision to join the Rwandese Refugee Welfare Foundation (RWWF), he gives her the revolutionary name Garuka, meaning ‘Return’. 27 As the author’s full name is stated on the back cover of the book as John Garuka Rusimbi, the reader surmises that Kaitesi’s story is a fictionalized version of his own experience. The novel ends with the RPF on the brink of invading Rwanda. What both these early examples of Rwandan novels demonstrate is the grounding of fictional texts in verifiable historical reality that is common to almost all novels and short stories written in response to the genocide, not only those written by Rwandans. 28 By sprinkling their texts with references to real people, places and events, authors of genocide fiction attempt to negotiate the unbelievable nature of the atrocities that took place and at the same time challenge the wave of genocide denial 2 6 See Waugh (12–16) for a description of the experiences of Rwandan refugees in Uganda at the time. 27 The RWWF, founded in 1979 by the exiled Rwandan Tutsi community in Uganda, very quickly developed into the Rwandese Alliance for National Unity (RANU), which later became the RPF (Waugh, 16). 28 One important exception is Gilbert Gatore’s Le Passé devant soi (2008a), in which the relationship between fiction and reality is deliberately blurred. See Hitchcott (2013).

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that has risen since 1994. In the introduction to his novel Le Chapelet et la machette: sur les traces du génocide rwandais [The Rosary and the Machete: Finding the Traces of the Rwanda Genocide], Camille Karangwa emphasizes the importance of recognizing his fictional work as based on fact: Il est regrettable de voir que certaines personnes nient toujours ou minimisent sciemment le génocide rwandais. […] Les faits que nous relatons vont certainement émouvoir ceux qui n’ont pas vécu de telles atrocités. Ce n’est pourtant pas ni le goût de la fiction ni la caprice de l’imagination. C’est la triste vérité que nous devons connaître et reconnaître. (6–7)29 [It is unfortunate to see that some people still deny or knowingly minimize the Rwandan genocide. […] The facts that we recount are certainly going to upset those who did not live through such atrocities. However, it is neither for the love of fiction nor a whim of the imagination. It is the sad truth that we should know and recognize]

Written in response to the role of the Catholic Church in the genocide, Karangwa’s novel is to my knowledge the earliest post-1994 work of fiction by a Rwandan author writing in French. It was published in 2003 in Pretoria, South Africa, where the author now works as a professional translator. The novel appears to be the first and only publication produced by Editions du jour, a publishing house launched in January 2003 by Karangwa himself to produce works that ‘portent essentiellement sur le génocide rwandais de 1994 dont elle [la maison d’édition] entend perpétuer la mémoire’ [are essentially concerned with the 1994 Rwandan genocide, whose memory it aims to perpetuate] (122). 30 Karangwa, a former lecturer at Byimana College in Rwanda, appears to be a genocide survivor. His novel ends with a series of photographs of the traces of the genocide alluded to in the novel’s subtitle. These include the remains of the author’s primary school in Nyamiyaga; a picture of the place where he was born, in which everything has been totally destroyed; and the partially demolished structure of his grandfather’s house. The images are juxtaposed with a picture of a Hutu house, which as the caption reveals was left intact, completely untouched by the genocide. The very personal nature of the photographs is echoed in Karangwa’s dedication 29 Rurangwa makes a similar statement against genocide denial in the postscript to Au sortir de l’enfer (196). 30 I have not been able to trace any other texts published by Editions du jour.

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to the memory of the members of his family he lost in the genocide, among them his sister, Césarie, who we learn was sent to her death by her own husband. Perhaps surprisingly, given the very intimate nature of the framing of the text, Karangwa’s novel is not based on his personal experience, but rather tells the story of two fictional perpetrators, ‘des prototypes des gens qui ont existé ou qui vivent encore aujourd’hui’ [prototypes of people who did exist or who are still alive today] (7): Father Dominique, a Belgian priest who colluded with the génocidaires and then fled back to Belgium, and Célestin Gahinda, a Rwandan head teacher and activist in the MRND. 31 Having led groups of militiamen in countless brutal massacres, Gahinda ends up repenting and confessing to all his crimes. Karangwa’s novel invites comparison with Rwandan exile Benjamin Sehene’s Le Feu sous la soutane: un prêtre au cœur du génocide rwandais [Fire beneath the Cassock: A Priest at the Heart of the Rwandan Genocide], published two years later, in 2005. 32 Both authors were driven by a desire to expose the way in which Catholic priests participated in the genocide. Whereas Karangwa explicitly hides the names of the real-life priests on whom his novel is based, his introduction does mention Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka of the Eglise Sainte Famille in Kigali, the inspiration for Sehene’s novel. Probably the most famous Rwandan priest in the story of the genocide, Father Wenceslas has been living and working with impunity in France since 1994. Despite having been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) on four counts of genocide and sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia in Rwanda, Wenceslas not yet been brought to trial in France (Hitchcott, 31 Led by former President Juvénal Habyarimana, the MRND was created in 1974 and was the only legal party in Rwanda until 1991. When opposition parties were legalized in 1991, the MRND changed its name from Mouvement révolutionnaire national pour le développement’ [National Revolutionary Movement for Development] to Mouvement républicain national pour la démocratie et le développement [National Republican Movement for Democracy and Development], keeping the same acronym. See Eltringham (80) for discussion of this name change. 32 In some of my previously published work, I claimed Le Feu sous la soutane as the first Francophone genocide novel by a Rwandan author. My discovery of Karangwa’s novel now obliges me to withdraw that claim. Both Le Chapelet et la machette and Karege’s Sous le déluge rwandais also precede Gatore’s Le Passé devant soi (2008a) as early Francophone novels by Rwandan authors who experienced the genocide first-hand.

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2012: 21–22). Sehene has actively followed the Wenceslas case since it began and has published two articles openly criticizing France’s failure to bring the priest to account (Sehene, 2007a; 2007b). Although Sehene creates a fictional priest named Father Stanislas in his novel, the back cover blurb of Le Feu sous la soutane confirms that: inspiré d’une histoire vraie, ce roman raconte, au cœur du génocide rwandais, les affres psychologiques et la déchéance morale de Stanislas, un prêtre hutu accusé de viols et de crimes contre l’humanité. [based on a true story, this novel, set in the depths of the Rwandan genocide, tells of the psychological torment and moral degradation of Stanislas, a Hutu priest accused of rape and crimes against humanity]

A fairly transparent reconstruction of the Wenceslas story, Le Feu sous la soutane takes the form of the fictional first-person narrative of Father Stanislas, a refugee Rwandan priest from an unnamed church in Kigali who, now in prison in the South of France, accused of crimes against humanity, confesses to his own involvement in the genocide. Both Karangwa’s and Sehene’s novels are powerful examples of the fascination with perpetrators that is found in many works of genocide fiction (see Chapter Six). They also raise important questions about the failure of justice to deal satisfactorily with crimes of genocide. For survivors, justice is an essential component of the healing process necessary for recovery from their trauma and, as Tom Ndahiro reminds us, ‘an integral element in the process of reconciliation’ (246). One of the main obstacles to reconciliation is Rwandan ethnopolitics. As long as only the Tutsi are officially recognized as the victims or survivors of the genocide, many Hutu remain excluded from the official narratives of remembrance. Among the Hutu are, of course, many perpetrators of crimes against humanity, but there are also Hutu heroes who protected their Tutsi neighbours, Hutu witnesses to reprisal killings by RPF soldiers and Hutu victims who were killed simply because they looked like Tutsi or were married to Tutsi. Those Hutu who refused to participate in the genocide or who were themselves targets are generally referred to as ‘Hutu moderates’, a term which attempts to distinguish them from the Hutu extremists. 33 One Rwandan who presents himself as a so-called Hutu moderate is Anicet Karege, author of Sous le déluge rwandais [Beneath the Rwandan Deluge] (2005), a political novel based closely on his own life before and during the genocide. An active member 33 See Eltringham (75–99) for a critical analysis of the concept of ‘Hutu moderates’.

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of the Rwandan human rights NGO RIPRODHOR, now living in exile in Lyon, Karege remained in Rwanda after 1994, working for Radio Rwanda until 2001. 34 He was dismissed from his job as a journalist after broadcasting a press release from LIPRODHOR about the inhumane conditions in Nsinda prison in Kibungo (Berqué, 197). Karege is one of the most prolific authors from Rwanda and has also published two essays, one on the role of the media in the genocide (2004), the other on human rights in Rwanda (2009), along with two further novels, Entre brouillards et ténèbres [Between Fog and Shadows] (2010) and La Chute du monarche boiteux [The Fall of the Lame Monarch] (2012). Sous le déluge rwandais is the only novel set during the genocide and presents a fairly brutal account of some of the atrocities committed. Most of Karege’s narrative is set in the early 1990s and so makes a fascinating complement to Twagilimana’s Manifold Annihilation discussed above. Like Twagilimana, Karege portrays Rwanda under Habyarimana as an undemocratic, politically corrupt country, a theme that continues in his later, satirical novel La Chute du monarche boiteux, which ends with the thinly disguised shooting down of the President’s plane that marked the beginning of the genocide. Sous le déluge rwandais tells the story, in the first person, of a teacher, Gustave Giraneza (Gégé), a Hutu from the south of the country who is repeatedly arrested, then imprisoned and tortured for ‘outrage envers le chef de l’Etat’ [insulting behaviour towards the head of state] (2005: 115). Released after eight months, Gégé leaves prison to find his country in the midst of civil war. Depressed and traumatized by his prison experience, he becomes a Red Cross coordinator in the refugee camps. While the genocide itself takes up only the final three chapters, Karege’s novel provides an important new perspective on 1994 from the point of view of a representative of the Hutu who resisted the génocidaires. Those who opposed the massacres were often killed themselves (Burnet, 93). Despite not always being automatic targets of the genocidal campaign, Hutu moderates like Karege’s first-person narrator Gégé were also threatened and lived in fear of Hutu extremists. 35 34 RIPRODHOR (Réseau international pour la promotion de la défense et des droits de l’homme au Rwanda) was created in 2002 by former members of LIPRODHOR (Ligue rwandaise pour la promotion et la défense des droits de l’homme) now living in Europe, the US and Canada. 35 One of the first high-profile ‘moderate Hutu’ to be killed was Prime Minister Agathe Uwilingiyimana (see Introduction).

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A similar link between author and Hutu narrator-protagonist is found in Joseph Ndwaniye’s autofictional text La Promesse faite à ma sœur (2006). 36 Like his first-person narrator, Jean Seneza, Ndwaniye travelled back to Rwanda in 2003, seventeen years after he had left to work as a medical laboratory assistant in Belgium. The novel follows him on a journey through his native land in which he seeks to discover what happened to the different members of his family during the genocide. His twin brother Thomas he finds in prison accused of participating in the killings, while his sister Antoinette was murdered along with her husband and two sons. The novel thus presents us with a family that functions as a kind of microcosm of the post-genocide division of Rwandan society, described by the narrator’s mother as ‘un triangle tragique avec une fille assassinée, un fils assassin présumé et un deuxième fils en train de jouer les juges’ [a tragic triangle, with a daughter assassinated, a son presumed to be a killer and another son having to play judge and jury] (182). According to Rwandan ethnopolitics, Jean Seneza as a Rwandan Hutu would tend to be associated with perpetrators rather than victims. Yet, as an exile, he cannot be held responsible for any crimes that members of his family or his ‘ethnic group’ might have committed. Moreover, as the complex family triangle he finds himself confronted with suggests, the divisions between victims and perpetrators are not easy to identify. One of the findings of this book will be the ways in which authors of fiction challenge ethnopolitical associations in post-genocide Rwanda and also question preconceived notions of innocence and guilt. Ethnopolitics forms an important subtext in Jean-Marie Vianney Rurangwa’s Au sortir de l’enfer [Exiting Hell] (2006) which, like many other fictional texts, dramatizes the contradiction between the arbitrary nature of ethnicity in Rwanda and its deadly consequences. At the beginning of the novel, questions of ethnicity dominate the life of journalist Jean-Léonard Benimana, whose sister is refused a university place because she is a Tutsi and who himself is worried that the woman he is attracted to might be a Hutu. His sister Marie is portrayed as a Tutsi extremist, paradoxically rejecting all Hutu as racist ‘gorilles’ [gorillas] (59). After his own experiences in the genocide, Jean-Léonard 36 The novel was originally published in the ‘For intérieur: Ecritures autobiographiques’ series by Belgian publisher Les Impressions Nouvelles. It is currently being promoted by crowdsourcing publisher Les Editions Méhari, also based in Belgium. See http://editions-mehari.viabloga.com/news/la-promessefaite-a-ma-sœur-2, accessed 28 August 2014.

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for a while refuses to define himself as either Hutu or Tutsi, stating simply that he is Rwandan. However, at the end of the novel, when asked ‘la terrible question qui le rendait toujours mal à l’aise’ [the dreaded question, which always made him ill at ease], Jean-Léonard explicitly identifies himself as Tutsi (176). This is a novel about a survivor’s recovery from the horror of witnessing his entire family being tortured and killed. After the genocide, Jean-Léonard leaves Rwanda to study in Belgium, falls in love with a Mauritian woman and then is unexpectedly reunited with his first wife, Jeanne-Laurette, whom he had been forced to abandon in 1994, believing her dead. Like Karege, Rurangwa does not spare the details of the brutalities of genocide, but describes in graphic details the ‘unspeakable’ that some other writers circumvent. A former RPF activist, Rurangwa clearly has a mission to speak the truth about the genocide. As he states in his postscript, Au sortir de l’enfer is ‘un texte de fiction sur fond de vérité historique’ [a fictional text based on historical truth] that he wants to be read as a testimony (197). Here Rurangwa aligns himself with the other writers of early Rwandan fiction, reminding the reader of the truth of his fiction despite the oftenshocking nature of its content. The emphasis on revealing and recording the truth becomes more overtly politicized through the years, with some Rwandan writers turning to fiction to critically examine the role of the RPF during and after the genocide. This trend begins with Rusimbi’s second novel, The Hyena’s Wedding: The Untold Horrors of Genocide (2007), which focuses on the challenges posed by the drive for reconciliation after 1994. The youth solidarity camps set up by the Government of National Unity fail in the novel in parallel with the personal life of the narrator-survivor, Musonera Kiroko. Having served in Rwanda’s transitional Government of National Unity from 2001 to 2003, Rusimbi attempts to present in his novel a balanced view of the difficult decisions that had to be taken in the decade after the genocide. In particular, the novel ends with the true story of Froduald Karamira, Interahamwe leader and Vice-President of the MDR, famous for the ‘Hutu Power’ speech he made in October 1993 (Eltringham, 90). 37 In 1997, Karamira was found guilty of genocide and crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to death and publicly 37 The MDR (Mouvement démocratique républicain [Republican Democratic Movement]) was founded in 1991 when opposition parties became legal in Rwanda. It is no coincidence that it took its name from Kayibanda’s Hutu emancipation party, Parmehutu-MDR (see Introduction).

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executed by firing squad in Nyambirambo Stadium on 24 April 1998. 38 The decision to sentence Karamira to death was, as Rusimbi notes in his introduction to the novel (2007: v), widely criticized by the international community. 39 Rusimbi’s description of the killing is followed by a string of bad omens (a thunder storm, a miscarriage, illness and a blackout) suggesting a pessimistic vision of the future for Rwanda at the end of the twentieth century. Published almost ten years after the execution of Froduald and in the same year that the death penalty was abolished in Rwanda, The Hyena’s Wedding could be read as a retrospective warning about the difficulties that would face the RPF government in the years after the genocide. Three Rwandan writers focus specifically on the Rwandan Patriotic Front, although their novels are set at different times and have very different political agendas. The action of Anicet Karege’s second novel, Entre brouillards et ténèbres (2010), takes place after the genocide while Robusto Kana’s Le Défi de survivre [The Challenge to Survive] (2009) focuses on the role of the RPF’s army, the RPA, in stopping the génocidaires. Robusto Kana is the pseudonym of Cyrien Kanamugire, a former journalist and ex-member of the RPF who is now a refugee in Canada.40 Although Le Défi de survivre is not a great novel, marred as it is by clumsy writing and poor editing, it is nevertheless a fascinating insider’s account of the role of the RPF in 1994. Kana’s training as a journalist is evident in the novel’s attention to detail. Described as a historical novel, the book contributes more to history than it does to fiction, providing as it does detailed information about military tactics and operations. Nevertheless, it does attempt to draw some fictional characters against the politico-historical backdrop, focusing on the story of an RPF soldier, Michel (Mike) Tabaro, whose family is targeted by the génocidaires. The book draws its title from the RPF codename used for the deployment of RPA troops that occurred when the third battalion, known as ‘Rukaga’, left its garrison in the Rwandan parliament building 38 http://www.internationalcrimesdatabase.org/Case/1032/Karamira/, accessed 25 June 2014. See also Karamira’s profile on Trial Watch: http://www.trial-ch.org/ en/resources/trial-watch/trial-watch/profiles/profile/580/action/show/controller/ Profile.html, accessed 25 June 2014. 39 See the Amnesty International document: http://www.amnesty.org/en/ library/asset/AFR47/012/1998/en/a5de58de-dab9-11dd-80bc-797022e51902/ afr470121998en.html, accessed 15 October 2013. 40 Correspondence with Cyrien Kanamugire, 30 January 2014.

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on 7 April 1994 and entered officially into the war that eventually ended the genocide (Kana, 2009: 66).41 Kana’s own support for the RPF and its military wing is unambiguously voiced through his characters. For example, when Mike’s sister, Claire, is rescued from Hitimana, the militiaman who has taken her as his ‘wife’ in exchange for 3,000 Rwandan francs, the RPF soldier tells her, ‘Nous ne tuons pas des innocents sans défense. […] Nous ne sommes pas des criminels’ [We don’t kill innocent, defenceless people. […] We are not criminals] (187).42 Although the novel ends on an ominous note, with a storm cloud breaking over the refugee camps in Goma, Kana’s pessimism relates to the return of the génocidaires from the camps rather than any concern for the governance of Rwanda after liberation. Vénuste Kayimahe’s voluminous novel La Chanson de l’aube (2014) paints a similarly positive picture of the RPF’s army. Like Kana, Kayimahe devotes long passages of his novel to descriptions of the RPA’s battles to stop the genocide. Of all the novels in the corpus, Kayimahe’s contains the most fully developed RPF characters who demonstrate not only courage and honour, but also doubts and fears. Although individual soldiers question their mission and are sometimes overwhelmed by feelings of impotence, an overall picture emerges of the RPF as the saviours of the Rwandan people: une armée de va-nu-pieds [qui] s’est levée pour défendre le faible et persécuté, et s’auréoler du coup de l’étoffe de héros, d’anges protecteurs. (461) [a barefooted army that rose up to defend the weak and the persecuted, and at the same time took on the glow of heroes or guardian angels]

One particular scene depicts the RPF soldiers rescuing wounded babies whose mothers have been slaughtered, placing them in pagnes which they tie around their waist ‘tels des mamans-kangourous’ [like mummy kangaroos] (138). Here, the text is filled with emotive language, conveying the personal debt of gratitude towards the RPF felt by many survivors of the genocide. Kayimahe himself is a survivor. Indeed, La Chanson de l’aube is something of a landmark novel as it is the only work of fiction to have been written by a member of the Fest’Africa collective who is also a 41 The RPF soldiers had set up camp in the parliament building (the CND). See also Kayimahe (2014: 101–112) for a description of the RPA offensive. 4 2 Three thousand Rwandan francs are worth approximately £3.

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genocide survivor.43 Starting from the story of young couple, Mireille and Laurien, who are separated when the latter is arrested and imprisoned as an alleged RPF sympathizer, the novel follows Laurien’s liberation and subsequent decision to join the rebel army, where he takes on the nom de guerre of Lionceau [Lion Cub]. Although a good soldier, Lionceau struggles with the horrors of the genocide, sometimes to a point that his fellow soldiers identify as madness. Meanwhile, Mireille, hunted by the génocidaires, is forced to abandon the couple’s baby son under an acacia tree. She is eventually captured and, when Laurien/Lionceau finally finds her, she is already dead, having been gang raped and tortured, a stake inserted into her vagina. The novel also deals with the aftermath of genocide, particularly the trauma of survivor-rescuer Lionceau, who is finally reunited with his son and finds happiness with Esther, the woman who had looked after the baby. While the novel ends on an optimistic note, what emerges is a critique of the hypocrisy of Rwandan society after the genocide in which, the novel suggests, forgiveness and reconciliation are promoted over and above the care and rehabilitation of those who survived (see Chapter Four). Described as a ‘roman témoignage’ [testimonial novel], Kayimahe’s text is clearly informed by his own experience of surviving the genocide. In 2001, Kayimahe published his testimony as France-Rwanda: les coulisses du génocide [France-Rwanda: Behind the Scenes of Genocide].44 Having worked for more than twenty years at the French Cultural Centre in Kigali, Kayimahe found himself abandoned by his employer when the French authorities chose to evacuate all the French staff at the Centre, leaving him behind. Fortunately, Kayimahe was saved from certain death by Belgian soldiers and managed to flee with some of his family to Kenya, where he later learnt about the deaths of many of his relatives, including his daughter and his mother. Thirteen years later, Kayimahe published, La Chanson de l’aube, his first novel. The text is divided into three parts: Paradise, Hell and Earth. The second and longest section: ‘Dans l’enfer des hommes’ [In the hell of men], recounts the genocide and interweaves the fictional story of Laurien and Mireille 43 At over 460 pages, La Chanson de l’aube is also the longest novel written about the genocide. 4 4 Kayimahe’s testimony was also the basis of a documentary film, Rwanda: récit d’un survivant [Rwanda: A Survivor’s Tale] (2001) directed by Robert Genoud and Vénuste Kayimahe. Still images from the film are included at the beginning of the book.

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with those of real people who had key roles in 1994. Italicized chapters are inserted into the narrative to document the historical events, focusing in particular on the movements and actions of the liberating army. In Kayimahe’s version, the RPF soldiers take on the status of superheroes, realizing the impossible in defeating the Rwandan government’s forces and the Interahamwe militia. A rather different perspective on the RPF is offered in Anicet Karege’s second novel, Entre brouillards et ténèbres (2010). Following Sous le déluge rwandais’s criticism of the Habyarimana years, this second novel positions Karege even more strongly as an author with a political agenda: this time, to expose not only the truth about what happened in 1994, but also the crimes against humanity committed by the RPF in the aftermath of the genocide. Here, Karege begins to risk being labelled a genocide denier. Such a reading might be supported by Karege’s decision to dedicate his first novel, Sous le déluge rwandais, to his former classmates from the Kabgayi seminary, an alleged hotbed of Hutu nationalism before 1994 (Carney, 130). Karege also refuses to use the word ‘genocide’ in this novel, although the term does appear in Entre brouillards et ténèbres. Set in 1996, Entre brouillards et ténèbres paints an unequivocally negative picture of post-genocide Rwanda and of the Government of National Unity in particular.45 The novel opens with Tutsi survivor Fidès Iribagiza who, having separated from her Hutu husband, Fidèle Ndengera, during the genocide is now living in the marital home with an RPF ‘afandi’, whom she knows by the name of Baryana.46 Both survivor and liberator are presented in an extremely unsympathetic light: Fidès tells her new partner that her husband is dead and, at Baryana’s suggestion, agrees to send her two daughters from her previous marriage to an orphanage; Baryana is a brutal partner who insults, beats and rapes Fidès. When Fidès finally gathers up the courage to try to end her relationship with him, he tells her she has to leave her marital home to make room for the wife and four children she never knew he had. Through his portrayal of this unhappy, failed relationship, Karege conveys the disillusionment of some Rwandan people after 1994. 45 The Rwandan Government of National Unity was established by the RPF on 17 July 1994. 46 Karege explains that the term ‘afandi’, meaning ‘military leader’, was introduced into Kinyarwanda with the RPF victory in 1994 (2010: 19). It is originally a Swahili word (‘afande’) used as a mark of respect when addressing a senior member of the armed forces. See also Kana (2009: 46).

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None of the books discussed above has had a great deal of literary or commercial success. However, this tells us more about the literary marketplace than it does about the intrinsic value of any of these texts. Even, as I mentioned at the outset, prolific Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga’s first novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, which like her other testimonial texts and short stories, is published by Gallimard, was barely acknowledged before it unexpectedly won the Prix Renaudot. Before this, Mukasonga had published a significant number of other books, including two works of testimony, Inyenzi ou les cafards [Inyenzi or Cockroaches] (2006) and La Femme aux pieds nus [The Barefoot Woman] (2008), plus a collection of short stories, L’Iguifou: nouvelles rwandaises [Iguifou: Rwandan Short Stories] (2010), all in Gallimard’s prestigious ‘Continents noirs’ [Dark continents] series. As Notre-Dame du Nil deals with the 1973 massacre of the Tutsi that led to Mukasonga and her family’s exile, it is not included as a principal focus of this study of novels about 1994. I shall, however, discuss Mukasonga’s collection of short stories, L’Iguifou, published in 2010. Although the majority of the stories are, like Mukasonga’s earlier works, concerned with the post-independence persecution of Tutsi displaced to Nyamata, where she and her family lived before migrating to Burundi, the final story, ‘Le Deuil’ [‘Mourning’], focuses specifically on 1994, describing an exiled woman’s journey back to Rwanda to trace the remains of her family members who were all slaughtered in the genocide. Before Mukasonga’s unexpected success with the Renaudot, the best-known Rwandan writer in France was Gilbert Gatore, whose novel Le Passé devant soi [The Past Ahead] was published in 2008. Promoted by her publisher as a survivor, Mukasonga makes an interesting point of comparison with fellow Rwandan in exile Gatore, whose prizewinning novel has been a source of much controversy in the literary world.47 Born in 1981, Gatore left Rwanda with his family in 1994 when they fled to Zaire (now the DRC) and later settled in France. As a Rwandan novelist with personal experience of the genocide, Gatore might be identified as an authority on the events of 1994, yet his text suggests a highly ambiguous relationship with the country of his birth. Rwanda is never named in Le Passé devant soi, which is composed of two parallel narratives, one that of a perpetrator, the other a survivor. The novel has been criticized for encouraging readers to sympathize with a fictional member of the militia who brutally kills many people, including his own 47 See Chapter Three for a discussion of Mukasonga’s status as a survivor.

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father. Furthermore, Gatore’s position as a writer has been complicated by public accusations that his own father is Pierre Tegera, an exiled Hutu living in France and charged with crimes of genocide (Coquio, 2010: 262; Lacoste, 2010: 351–353). What we might call ‘The Gatore Affair’ raises important questions about who is a ‘Rwandan author’, or perhaps who is allowed to be a ‘Rwandan author’ in the eyes of the rest of the world. It also leads us to reflect on what seems to be emerging as a ‘canon’ of Rwanda genocide fiction that includes the non-Rwandan participants in the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ project, but mostly excludes writers born in Rwanda. Like Gatore, some writers find themselves rejected by critics for ethnopolitical reasons. This book rejects the view that an author’s ethnicity has any bearing on his or her legitimacy as a writer of genocide fiction. On the other hand, those who use fiction to effectively deny the genocide by focusing only on RPF war crimes will not be considered here. While the majority of texts support the official RPF government’s version of the events of 1994 as a genocide against the Tutsi, fictional writings about the genocide also include a small number of negationist narratives. These authors, who are either non-Rwandans or Hutu, argue the case for a theory of ‘double genocide’ and accuse the Tutsi-dominated RPF of carrying out a counter-genocide against the Hutu, a charge that current President Kagame has rightly condemned as ‘morally bankrupt’ (xxiii). For example, Rwandan exile Maurice Niwese’s novella Celui qui sut vaincre [He Who Knew How to Conquer] puts the RPF on trial for war crimes before and after the genocide through the story of a leaked recording of a government meeting (20–39). Karege adopts a similar stance in his second novel, Entre brouillards et ténèbres, which focuses on the crimes of the RPF and the Kibeho massacre, also suggesting a revisionist response to the genocide.48 By not including such novels in my discussion of fictional responses to the genocide, I do not aim to suggest that war crimes were not committed by the RPF, but rather to acknowledge that such narratives come close to genocide denial. RPF war crimes did not represent a systematic attempt to eliminate the Hutu population and so cannot, as writers like Niwese suggest, be identified as crimes of genocide. Often included in this revisionist group of writers is the more ambivalent testimony of Hutu refugee Marie Béatrice Umutesi, Fuir ou mourir au Zaïre. Le vécu d’une réfugiée rwandaise (2000) 48 In April 1995, RPF soldiers killed an estimated 4,000 refugees in a single day in a camp near Kibeho (Prunier, 1999: 430–431).

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[Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire (2004)], which is not included in this study as it is not a work of fiction.49 To date, only four Rwandan literary texts have been translated into English, two of them by Hutu authors: Umutesi’s testimony, Surviving the Slaughter (2004) and Gatore’s The Past Ahead (2012), both published by North American university presses. The decision to commission these two translations raises interesting questions about how Rwandan literature is presented to the Anglophone world. Only one Tutsi author’s work is now available in English: Mukasonga’s short story ‘Le Deuil’ from L’Iguifou has been published in translation, in The New Welsh Review (Mukasonga, 2013) and, after the Prix Renaudot, her novel Notre-Dame du Nil has now appeared in English translation with not-for-profit US publisher Archipelago (Mukasonga, 2014). The tiny representation of Rwandan authors in the Anglophone book market perpetuates what I identified in my Introduction as the problem of Rwanda’s story being told by outsiders. Although the literary successes of writers like Gatore and Mukasonga have brought some attention to authors of fiction from Rwanda, the genocide novels that are the most widely read and studied, in both English and French, are those by Diop, Monénembo and Tadjo, the three most famous writers who participated in the 1998 Fest’Africa project ‘Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’. The following chapter looks at all the texts produced by this groundbreaking literary mission to consider how the authors negotiate their positions as outsiders writing about the genocide.

49 Although Aliko Songolo criticizes the exclusion of Umutesi’s text from critical studies of literature about Rwanda (Songolo, 2005), he does not consider the implications of its rare status as a Rwandan text in English translation. Umutesi’s book has also been translated into Dutch, Spanish and Catalan (Tripp, 89) and was the subject of special issue of African Studies Review in December 2005.

chapter two

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Only four years after the genocide, in 1998, a group of ten African writers from eight different countries, including two Rwandans, travelled to Kigali as part of the commemorative literary mission ‘Rwanda: Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ to reflect upon and write about what happened in 1994. Although, as discussed in the Introduction, a small number of genocide novels and testimonies had appeared before this initiative, the nine published texts that emerged as a result of the project really mark the birth of African literature about the Rwanda genocide. The project was conceived during the 1996 meeting of Fest’Africa, the annual Lille-based festival of African literature created by journalists Maïmouna Coulibaly and Nocky Djedanoum. One of the participants, Boubacar Boris Diop, describes how the execution of Nigerian author and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa in November 1995 prompted the writers present at the festival to reflect on their impotence in the face of such brutality, a feeling that, as Diop explains, developed into an increasingly pressing need to be heard (2003: 75).1 Discussions then followed with the Rwandan community in Paris, culminating in the decision to send a group of authors from different African countries to Rwanda to spend time as writers in residence. 2 The ten writers were Boubacar Boris Diop from Senegal, Nocky Djedanoum and Koulsy Lamko from 1 Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists were charged with murder and hanged on 10 November 1995. Saro-Wiwa had campaigned against the exploitation of his native Ogoniland by the oil giant Shell (see his Genocide in Nigeria: The Ogoni Tragedy). His execution was widely condemned around the world and led to Nigeria being suspended from the Commonwealth. 2 South African sculptor Bruce Clarke and filmmakers Samba Félix N’Diaye from Senegal and Cameroonian François Wokouache also joined the Fest’Africa mission (Diop, 2003: 75).

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Chad, Monique Ilboudo from Burkina Faso, Abdourahman Waberi from Djibouti, Tierno Monénembo from Guinea, Véronique Tadjo from Côte d’Ivoire, Meja Mwangi from Kenya and first-time authors Vénuste Kayimahe and Jean-Marie Vianney from Rwanda. 3 Funded by the Fondation de France and the French Ministry of Cooperation, the group spent two months in the summer of 1998 in the Rwandan capital, where they met survivors, prisoners, journalists and representatives of NGOs, and gave talks at the national university and in schools (Diop, 2003: 75). They also visited the genocide memorials that had been constructed at a number of the places where large-scale massacres occurred, including the building planned for a technical boarding school in Murambi and the churches in Nyamata and Ntarama. These sites were to become major sources of creative inspiration for all the fictional texts produced by the project. Four novels (Diop, 2001; Ilboudo, 2000; Monénembo, 2000; Lamko, 2002) two travel narratives (Tadjo, 2000; Waberi, 2004), two essays (Rurangwa, 2000; Kayimahe, 2001) and a collection of poetry (Djedanoum, 2000) were first published in 2000.4 Three of these texts, Diop’s Murambi, le livre des ossements [Murambi, The Book of Bones], Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana [In the Shadow of Imana] and Tierno Monénembo’s L’Aîné des orphelins [The Oldest Orphan], have subsequently been translated into English. The authors were also invited, along with artists, performers and academics, to a meeting of Fest’Africa in Kigali and the Rwandan university city of Butare in the summer of 2000, followed by further events in the French cities of Lille and Paris in November that same year. The Fest’Africa 2000 events in Kigali and Butare included not only those who took part in the 1998 initiative, but also a range of other African artists and writers whose work draws on the horror of the Rwanda genocide. Among them were South African sculptor Bruce Clarke, responsible for the Garden of Memory in Kigali, and Malagasy author Raharimanana, whose short story collection Rêves sur le linceul [Dreams about the Shroud] reconsiders Madagascar 3 Rwandan playwright and theatre director Tharcisse Kalissa Rugano was initially part of the project, but ultimately decided not to participate. 4 Ilboudo’s Murekatete is only seventy-five pages long, but is labelled a novel. Meja Mwangi’s novel Great Sadness remains unpublished, as do two further texts written by Rurangwa: a play, Butera Bwa Bugabo ou Fils d’un survivant [Butera Bwa Bugabo or Son of a Survivor] and a volume of poetry, Laissez-le vivre [Let Him Live]. See Rurangwa (2006: 196).

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through the lens of the Rwanda genocide. 5 This relatively high-profile series of events included the inauguration of the Garden of Memory at Nyanza-Kicukiro near Kigali, a screening of François Woukouache’s film Nous ne sommes plus morts [We are No Longer Dead] and the performance of a play written by one of the members of the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ group, Chadian dramatist Koulsy Lamko, whose Corps et voix, paroles rhizomes [Bodies and Voices: Rhizome Words] consisted of excerpts from several of the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ texts, adapted for the stage (Dauge-Roth, 2010: 93–95). Focusing on all the fictional texts produced by the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ mission, this chapter proposes a reading of these authors as literary dark tourists, particularly as their published texts are all inspired by the genocide memorials they visited during their time in Rwanda. It discusses the ways in which the Fest’Africa novels and travel narratives reveal an awareness of the authors’ own ambivalent positions in relation to what happened in Rwanda. In doing so, it begins to highlight fictional traces of authorial and ethical anxieties about writing about the genocide. Against the texts produced by these genocide tourists I read a novel by what I term a ‘native tourist’, Joseph Ndwaniye, an exiled Rwandan whose own journey back to Rwanda after 1994 informs the story of his protagonist Jean Seneza in La Promesse faite à ma sœur. Although Ndwaniye’s novel presents a different version of Rwanda from the Fest’Africa fiction, both types of visitor find themselves in a difficult moral and emotional space, which is conveyed through their common focus on touristic experiences to emphasize the horror of the genocide. The two travel narratives, Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana and Waberi’s Moisson de crânes, both strongly emphasize the subjectivity of the author as a foreign visitor in Rwanda. Both combine short fictional pieces with personal reflections that are presented in the form of a travelogue. Tadjo frames her text with her two journeys to Rwanda, which she deliberately inscribes ‘within the colonialist mythology of Africa as a “heart of darkness”’ (Hitchcott, 2009b: 158). In doing so, Tadjo interrogates her own position as an African tourist in post-genocide Rwanda. Between her travel diaries, she places four fictional pieces that focus on the afterlife of genocide. Similarly, Waberi organizes his travel narrative around the two journeys he made to Rwanda in 1998 and 1999. Packed with quotations and references to other writers’ works, Waberi’s short text reads as a poetic, impressionistic patchwork that vividly captures 5 See Coquio (2004: 161–164) for an analysis of these events.

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what he describes as this ‘petit pays tout en escarpements, collines, vallées et lacs, aujourd’hui mué en terre de peines et d’ossuaires’ [small country full of escarpments, hills, valleys and lakes, now transformed into a land of grief and ossuaries] (35). For Waberi, as his title suggests, Rwanda has become a land of skulls and bones, a view he shares with fellow traveller Diop, whose title also reflects the vast numbers of bones now on display in the genocide memorials. Listed as one of Africa’s 100 best books of the twentieth century, Diop’s ‘book of bones’ tells the story of Cornelius Uvimana, a Rwandan who returns from twenty-five years in exile in Djibouti to his birthplace, Murambi, in July 1998, in an attempt to find out what happened to his family in 1994. Having embarked on this journey believing that almost his entire family had been slaughtered, leaving his uncle, Siméon Habineza, as the only survivor, Cornelius discovers that his father, Joseph Karekezi, is not only still alive but was also the engineer of the horrific massacre commemorated by the Murambi memorial.6 Murambi also features strongly in Ilboudo’s novel, Murekatete, in which the eponymous narrator survives gang rape and near-death at the hands of the Interahamwe, rescued by her future husband, Venant, an RPF soldier. In an attempt to come to terms with the trauma they both suffer as a result of their experiences of the genocide, Venant and Murekatete decide to take a tour of the genocide sites. It is after visiting Murambi that Venant’s mental and physical health begins to deteriorate. He starts drinking, taking drugs and having sex with other women. One night, having thus far been unable to consummate his marriage because of his wife’s trauma, Venant rapes Murekatete. Ashamed of what he has done, Venant leaves his wife who, by the end of the novel, is suicidal and dying of AIDS. In Lamko’s and Monénembo’s novels, the setting moves to another memorial site, Nyamata, more particularly the church in which around 10,000 people were slaughtered on 10 April 1994. Whereas the firstperson narrative of La Phalène des collines [The Moth of the Hills] begins inside the church where the eponymous moth-narrator is born out of the corpse of a genocide victim, Monénembo’s L’Aîné des orphelins ends in Nyamata when it is revealed that Faustin, the orphan of the title, 6 An estimated 50,000 men, women and children who had taken refuge in the buildings of what was intended to become the Murambi Technical School were starved of food and water for two weeks before being brutally murdered and thrown into mass graves (African Rights, 2007).

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is in fact a survivor of the genocidal massacre that took place there. Both novels take the form of fictional testimonies given by individuals who lived through the genocide. Monénembo presents a teenage boy sentenced to death for killing another boy he found having sex with his sister and who is traumatized by his experience of genocide. In Lamko’s novel, the narrator is a dead queen, now reincarnated as a moth, whose story bears close resemblance to that of real-life victim Theresa Mukandori. Of all the texts produced by the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ project, these last two privilege the fictional aesthetic over the historical reality of 1994. Yet both are clearly grounded in the context of an identified massacre, one that is now commemorated in the form of a national genocide memorial. As these brief synopses show, one of the striking features of the Fest’Africa fictional texts, particularly the novels, is their shared preoccupation with memorials. Since the genocide, the Rwandan government has constructed a number of public memorials at various sites around the country where large-scale massacres took place. Genocide tourism is now very much part of the growing Rwandan tourism industry, the memorial sites receiving tens of thousands of visitors every year, most of them on organized tours from Europe and North America. The best known is the Kigali Genocide Memorial in the Gisozi quarter of Kigali, which is managed by UK-based NGO the Aegis Trust and opened in 2004 on the tenth anniversary of the genocide. Aegis has also worked with the Rwandan National Commission for the Fight against Genocide (CNLG)7 to build a memorial museum on the former site of the Murambi technical school, where 50,000 people were massacred in April 1994. The new memorial at Murambi opened in May 2011, replacing a temporary museum that had previously exhibited around 800 corpses preserved in lime. It was the original makeshift museum along with what have now become permanent memorials at the churches in Nyamata and Ntarama that provided inspiration for the Fest’Africa writers in 1998. Each of the memorials contains large numbers of body parts – skulls, bones and skeletons – along with clothing and personal items that belonged to the dead. Each has now also become part of the Rwandan tourism industry with many tour operators now offering the possibility of combining a wildlife safari with a visit to one or more of the memorial sites. 7 The acronym reflects the original French name of the commission (Commission nationale pour la lutte contre le génocide) before Rwanda adopted English as the principal language of education and governance.

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Rwanda has been a high-end tourist destination since the end of the colonial period (Halen, 195). In 2012, it received over 1 million visitors, generating 282 million US dollars in income from tourism (Aglietti, 2013). Known as the land of a thousand hills, Rwanda’s exceptional natural beauty is emphasized in Zambian writer Gaile Parkin’s popular novel Baking Cakes in Kigali, which gives much space to descriptions of its lakes, volcanoes and mist-covered hills. In terms of tourism, Rwanda is most famous for its population of rare silverback mountain gorillas in the Volcanoes National Park and is presented in the Bradt travel guide as ‘the world’s premier gorilla-tracking destination’ (Briggs, vii). Gorillas are mentioned in a number of the genocide novels, most notably in Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana, where the true story of the murder of a group of gorilla trackers in 1999 frames the narrative of Tadjo’s own travels in Rwanda and establishes the parallel between author and tourist that will be developed in this chapter. In Parkin’s novel, two of the Tanzanian ex-pat protagonist Angel’s children, are taken to see the gorillas by one of their neighbours, despite Angel’s personal view that gorilla tracking is for ‘Wazungu’ [White people] (258). Although a foreigner herself, Angel functions as a critical commentator on the tourism industry in Rwanda. When her husband invites her to join him and a colleague on a visit to the Murambi memorial, she implicitly challenges the recent growth in genocide tourism, asking him, ‘Why do you want me to look at bones?’ (69) and shudders at the thought that ‘the past [is] not a safe place to visit in this country’ (70). Unlike Angel, the Fest’Africa authors looked at lots of bones. Although their mission was a literary one, they effectively travelled around Rwanda as genocide tourists, participating in what is recognized as ‘arguably the most extreme form’ (Beech, 207) of dark tourism, or tourism of the ‘darkest kind’ (Hohenhaus, 142). A term first coined by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley (2000), ‘dark tourism’ describes travel to a range of sites or tourist attractions associated with death and disaster.8 Whereas most tourists in Rwanda are what Peter Hohenhaus calls ‘casual’ dark tourists (145), visiting the genocide memorials on organized side-trips generally added on to a gorilla safari, the Fest’Africa party travelled around Rwanda with the sole purpose of finding out about the genocide. As a group of African authors on a tour of Rwanda, the party represented an unconventional set of visitors. But, as an organized tour of a country 8 The term ‘thanatourism’ is sometimes used in preference to ‘dark tourism’ because of the latter’s pejorative implications (Friedrich and Johnston, 303–304).

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that, in 1998, was not a popular tourist destination, the visit bore some resemblance to a specialist package holiday. In other words, as I mentioned in the Introduction to this book, the Fest’Africa writers were a group of genocide ‘tourists with typewriters’ (Holland and Huggan, 2000; Hitchcott, 2009b). Diop explains that he was hoping to come back from Rwanda with a kind of travel journal (2007: 23).9 Similarly, in an interview about Moisson de crânes, Waberi states that Il est clair que j’avais également le désir de faire du ‘travel writting’ [sic], d’utiliser ce genre qu’on utilise très mal en français – mises à part quelques exceptions comme Nicolas Bouvier, Jean Rollin … J’avais envie – et j’ai toujours envie d’ailleurs – de faire une sorte de ‘travel writing’ à la V. S. Naipaul par exemple. (Brezault, 2007) [It’s clear that I also wanted to do some ‘travel writing’, to use a genre that it very badly used in French – apart from a few exceptions like Nicolas Bouvier, Jean Rollin … I also wanted – and indeed, I still want – to do ‘travel writing’ like V. S. Naipaul, for example]

This desire to be a travel writer explains why Waberi, like Tadjo, presents his Rwanda text as a travelogue punctuated by flight details, names of places and people visited, and descriptions of his journeys. In her discussion of the ethics of fiction, Martina Kopf notes the importance of travel in a number of the Fest’Africa texts, identifying those by Diop, Lamko and Tadjo as examples in which the authors mediate their own travel experiences through the inclusion of a traveller or group of travellers who also visit Rwanda in the late 1990s (74). Although Kopf does not discuss the texts by Ilboudo and Waberi in her article, both these authors also place themselves as travellers in their texts, explicitly so in the case of Waberi, who includes his own notes and observations from July 1998, and implicitly in Ilboudo’s Mureketate, as I shall discuss later in this chapter. The exception might appear to be L’Aîné des orphelins, as Kopf’s analysis suggests (75). However, the genocide tourist is present here too in the guise of Monénembo’s character Rodney, an English TV cameraman sent by the BBC to film ‘ce qu’ils appellent les sites du génocide. Les sites industriels, les sites touristiques, maintenant les sites du génocide!’ (2000: 99) [‘what they 9 This section of Diop’s essay is a slightly revised version of his earlier piece ‘Ecrire dans l’odeur de la mort’ [Writing in the Smell of Death], published in Lendemains. In the earlier text, Diop refers to his intended text about Rwanda as ‘un simple récit de voyage’ [a simple traveller’s tale] (2003: 76).

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call the genocide sites. Industrial sites, tourist sites, now genocide sites!’ (2004: 59)]. Each of the Fest’Africa authors interrogates the figure of the dark tourist as a way of examining the ambiguity of their own position in relation to the genocide. As John Urry reminds us, the tourist gaze is an intrusive and generally unwelcome gaze into other people’s lives (9). Gazing at the evidence of other people’s inhumane deaths is more unwelcome still and explains some Rwandans’ initial hostility to the Fest’Africa party, whose reason for being in their country they were unable to understand (Moncel, 2000a). In L’Ombre d’Imana, Tadjo uses a first-person description of a visit to one of the key genocide memorial sites at Ntarama church to express her own discomfort. Here a survivor takes visitors on a tour of the exhumed skeletons of some of the 5,000 people who were massacred there. Uncomfortable with her own tourist gaze, Tadjo attempts to reverse it by imagining how the guide views the visitors examining the bones of the dead: Il ne comprend pas ce que nous venons chercher ici, ce qui se cache dans notre cœur. Quel motif inavoué nous pousse à regarder les yeux grands ouverts la mort dénaturée par la haine? (2000: 26) [He cannot understand what we have come here to seek, what is concealed in our hearts. What hidden motive drives us to gaze wide-eyed at death distorted by hatred? (2002: 15)]

Clearly it is Tadjo herself who wonders what she is doing there, but she projects her own self-critical reflection onto the guide, for whom the skeletons are permanent reminders of the horror he survived. Tadjo’s response to the church is marked by ambivalence. On the one hand, she acknowledges the important function of the memorials that she and the other writers visit to find out about the genocide. On the other, she is deeply troubled by what she experiences as the touristic consumption of the genocide. Finding herself in the ambiguous position of a dark tourist in Rwanda, Tadjo questions the function of the memorials she visits: ‘Ce n’est pas un mémorial’, she writes of Nyamata church, ‘mais la mort mise à nu, exposée à l’état brut’ (2000: 23) [‘This is not a memorial but death laid bare, exposed in all its rawness’ (2002: 12)]. Unlike Tadjo, Lamko explicitly resists identifying himself as a genocide tourist, explaining in an interview with Sylvain Marcelli that ‘le tourisme de l’horreur ne se définit que par l’attitude de celui qui visite, par ce qu’il ressent devant ces corps momifiés’ [dark tourism is defined only by the attitude of the person visiting, by what he feels when faced with those

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mummified corpses] (in Coquio, 2003: 24). Rejecting what he sees as the self-defining identity of the dark tourist, Lamko does not position himself as a tourist at all in his text. Yet, a level of reflected personal discomfort is implied through the moth-narrator’s scathing descriptions of visitors to the church. Just as Tadjo projects her own anxieties onto the memorial guide, so Lamko’s moth can be read as voicing the author’s own self-criticism. Like Tadjo’s travel narrative, La Phalène des collines openly challenges the appropriation and voyeuristic consumption of dead bodies in the memorials. It does so through the depiction of a party of foreign investigators commissioned to investigate the role of the French government in the genocide. This group, as Dauge-Roth points out, is a reference to the French government’s 1998 inquiry into France’s role in the genocide headed by former French Defence Minister Paul Quilès (2010: 138). In Lamko’s novel, the leader of the group, the ironically named ‘musungu aux bajoues d’opulence’ [musungu with the opulent jowls], is assisted by Pelouse, a woman of Rwandan origins born and living in France, who acts as scribe, photographer, guide and translator.10 She is also the goddaughter and niece of the dead queen now reincarnated as the moth-narrator of the novel. Although they have a clearly defined political agenda, the musungu’s party is barely distinguishable from that of a group of dark tourists. In a manner reminiscent of the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ mission, the ‘scribouillards’ [pen-pushers] travel around Rwanda visiting memorial sites and taking notes. Apart from Pelouse, who stays in a small budget hotel, they all stay at the iconic luxury Hotel Mille Collines and are all visiting the country for the very first time. Even Pelouse, born in France, has never been to Rwanda before, though the musungu nevertheless insists that ‘on a besoin de votre regard, vous qui êtes de ce pays, pour mieux apprécier les événements’ [we need your eye, as you’re from this country, so that we can better understand the events] (Lamko, 94). The assumption that Pelouse’s gaze is somehow more ‘authentic’ because her parents were Rwandan is quickly debunked in the novel by her reincarnated aunt’s failure to recognize her niece: ‘Que diable pouvait venir glaner une Négresse avec un appareil photo?’ [What the hell would a Negress with a camera be hoping to get out of this?] (24) the moth wonders, her difficulty in understanding what a black woman would be doing taking photographs of the exhibited corpses crystallizing the morally ambiguous position of dark tourists in Rwanda, a position that 10 Musungu means ‘white person’ in Kinyarwanda.

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becomes more complicated still when, like the Fest’Africa party, the visitors are black. Although all the Fest’Africa writers of fiction are identified as outsiders, their status is not the same as those dark tourists who are on holiday in Rwanda and who are, for the most part, white. Tadjo acknowledges this difference when she writes in L’Ombre d’Imana, ‘Oui, je suis allée au Rwanda mais le Rwanda est aussi chez moi’ (2000: 49) [‘Yes, I went to Rwanda but Rwanda is also here in my country’ (2002: 37)]. Similarly, for Lamko, Rwanda has become: La cristallisation de tout ce que nous avons vécu dans notre foutu continent, comme j’aime bien le dire. C’est la réédition en plus ample de beaucoup de contradictions et de beaucoup de démons que vivent nos divers pays. Je ne vais pas citer ici toutes ces histories [sic], le Biafra, le Sierre Léone, le Tchad. Tous nos pays connaissent ce type de réaction. (Kalisa, 2005: 274) [The crystallization of everything we’ve gone through on what I like to call our fucked up continent. It’s the supersized version of the many contradictions and demons that our different countries experience. I’m not going to quote all the stories here, Biafra, Sierra Leone, Chad. All our countries are familiar with this type of reaction]

For Lamko and Tadjo, Rwanda is not so very different from their birth countries, Chad and Côte d’Ivoire; it is both familiar and unfamiliar. As Tadjo explains, ‘Tout est tellement comme chez moi que cela me brise le cœur’ (2000: 19) [‘Everything is so similar to my own home that it breaks my heart’ (2002: 9)]. Despite the painful familiarity, however, the writers are not at home: Tadjo’s passport is retained at Immigration and she later has to retrieve it from the Ministry for National Security. In other words, the non-Rwandan African writers are both outsiders and insiders; each finding themselves in the position of what Mauritian-born British traveller Shirin Housee describes as ‘a travelling self that is always questioning, or subject to question by, its own positionality’ (137). This shifting positionality is echoed in L’Ombre d’Imana by contradictions in the ways in which Tadjo is received by people living in Rwanda: one woman tells her that her black gums make her look like a Tutsi; others stare at her with surprise when she passes them in the street. African art dealers see her as someone with money; perhaps a member of the expatriate community in Kigali, where there is a healthy market for locally produced statues and masks. What the texts reveal is that, although these writers’ black skins mean that they can travel around the

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country as invisible tourists, their participation in the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire project’ means that they are easily identified as outsiders. It is this tension between insider and outsider status that generates anxiety in the texts. For Tadjo, this anxiety is strongly articulated through her first-person narrative. As Dauge-Roth remarks, Tadjo ‘does not hesitate to question the legitimacy of her authorial ability to fulfill a duty to remember since she exposes the flawed status of her belated and foreign position of enunciation’ (2010: 108).11 Tadjo sees herself as she imagines the memorial guides see her; one of a catalogue of types: Il [le guide] observe les visiteurs, en les jaugeant, les évaluant, les dépouillant de leurs masques. Il sait tout de suite les cataloguer: ceux qui vont détourner les yeux face au spectacle de la mort exposée, ceux qui vont se révolter, ceux qui vont pleurer, ceux qui vont rester silencieux, ceux encore qui vont poser des questions, stylo à la main, ceux qui cherchent à rationaliser, à comprendre, ceux qui vont lui donner de l’argent et ceux qui n’oseront pas, ceux qui écriront: ‘Plus jamais ça!’ (2000: 24–25) [He [the guide] is observing the visitors, weighing them up, studying them closely, stripping them of their masks. He can categorise them straight away: those who will avert their gaze from the spectacle of death laid out before them, those who will be shocked, those who will weep, those who will remain silent, those who will ask questions, pen in hand, those who will seek to rationalize, to understand, those who will give him money and those who will not dare, those who will write: ‘Never again!’ (2002: 14)]

As black Africans, the authors are all too aware of the difficulties in viewing Rwanda through an external gaze, yet this is the gaze they are obliged to adopt when they find themselves participating in the unavoidable element of voyeurism involved in visiting what Chris Rojek calls ‘sensation sights’: These are places in which violent death has occurred, and to which sightseers travel both physically and through reverie. As ongoing or recent major dislocations of life-routines, they permit much higher levels of voyeuristic participation than travelling to cemeteries or monuments. (63)

What is particularly striking in Tadjo’s text is the absence of imagined descriptions of the excessive violence that characterized the genocide. She restricts herself to straightforward accounts of what she sees and 11 See also Hitchcott (2009b).

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hears and so attempts to prevent her readers from indulging in a form of literary dark tourism. In the text, there is an implied allusion to Tadjo’s authorial refusal to indulge the sensation-seeking tourist gaze when she reports one of the other visitors complaining to the guide that some blood has been washed off the walls: ‘Vous n’auriez pas dû nettoyer le sang, on ne voit presque plus rien!’ (2000: 26) [‘You shouldn’t have cleaned the blood off, you can hardly see anything any more!’ (2002: 15)]. Finding herself obliged to look at the bloodstains in order to acknowledge the horrors of the genocide, Tadjo interrogates the legitimacy of this kind of commemoration. Lamko also questions the motives of people who visit genocide sites in Rwanda as he himself did. Speculating on Pelouse’s motive for visiting the memorial, the moth suggests that it might be greedy self-interest: ‘l’irréfrénable appétit du monde de l’opulence’ [the insatiable appetite of the world of opulence] (24). The use of cannibal imagery to critique dark tourism becomes even more explicit when Lamko’s moth-narrator condemns the modern world as: friand des misères d’hommes à déguster par procuration d’écrans et d’objectifs de caméras. Cannibalisme non avoué! Et encore plus tendre, plus onctueux quand c’est du Nègre qu’on bouffe, la succulente négraille en steak tartare … ! (25) [partial to people’s misery tasted by proxy through camera screens and lenses! And how much more tender and more unctuous when it’s Negro that’s being gobbled up, succulent Nigger meat in a steak tartare … !]

Tellingly, ‘steak tartare’ reappears later in the text, when the musungu with the opulent jowls orders one for his dinner at the Hotel Mille Collines. It is no coincidence that the reader learns about the musungu’s mission – to exculpate the French government for their role in the genocide – while he waits for his steak tartare to arrive. Recalling the moth-narrator’s portrait of tourists gobbling the raw ‘Nigger’ meat, the steak tartare clearly references the inhumane exploitation of Rwanda by France. Pelouse, who joins him for a glass of wine while he eats, is forced to listen to the musungu’s attempts to exonerate France, interspersed with such racist comments as ‘Nous aimons bien tous les Africains’ [We really like all Africans] (95). The scene ends with Pelouse symbolically vomiting in his face. For Lamko, France has a cannibalistic relationship with Rwanda, feeding off its misery for international prestige and power. This cannibalistic attitude, the novel suggests, is also that of the tourists who

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hungrily consume the shocking remains of the genocide. The metaphorical link between dark tourism and cannibalism is also found in Ilboudo’s novel Murekatete, when it describes the narrator-protagonist and her husband Venant leaving the Nyamata church memorial. Murekatete describes a group of visitors she had seen in the church now drinking and eating in a nearby bar: Après avoir parlé de massacres, de viols, de cœurs grillés et de sang humain bu, ce groupe mangeait et buvait avec un grand appétit, comme si de rien n’était. Scène banale du tourisme du génocide. (66) [After talking about massacres, rapes, grilling human hearts and drinking blood, that group were eating and drinking with enthusiasm, as if nothing had happened. An everyday scene of genocide tourism]

By linking the Interahamwe’s cannibalistic practices during the genocide to the visitors gorging themselves in the bar, Ilboudo implicitly condemns herself and the other members of the Fest’Africa mission as parasites of genocide since they too visited the memorials as tourists consuming other people’s pain.12 Indeed, this self-identification of the writers as cannibal-tourists is echoed in the voices of some Rwandan schoolchildren they met during their stay. The children told them: Vous n’étiez pas là lorsqu’on préparait le génocide. Vous n’avez pas été là pendant quatre ans. Et maintenant vous venez vous servir de notre génocide pour nourrir vous livres! (Moncel, 2000a) [You weren’t here when the genocide was being planned. You haven’t been here for four years. And now you want to feed off our genocide in your writings!]

One of the principal ways in which tourists consume the lives (and deaths) of others is by capturing images on camera to show friends and relatives back home. In La Phalène des collines, Pelouse is charged with taking photographs for the musungu’s French delegation. Though photography is no longer allowed at any of the Rwandan sites, except the Kigali Genocide Memorial, where an authorized permit is now required, guides actively encouraged visitors to take photographs when the memorials first opened. Hohenhaus speculates that this change 12 The bloodthirsty, cannibalistic behaviour of the Interahamwe is a recurring theme in survivor Kayimahe’s novel La Chanson de l’aube. Militiamen are described eating roasted human hearts and intestines (156), and making kebabs from foetuses cut out of their mothers’ wombs (202).

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in policy results from ‘anxieties over ethics’ (150), pointing to what Philip Stone calls ‘the moral ambiguities of dark touristic practices’ (60). Significantly, in La Phalène des collines, the photographs Pelouse takes of Nyamata church completely fail, leaving her without a single image of the skeletons and skulls exhibited there. Later, Pelouse loses her camera and film in Kigali city during a storm. Of course, there are many photographs of the genocide memorials in global circulation, particularly on the Internet, but Pelouse’s failure to produce any pictures of the delegation’s tour causes us to question the appropriateness of photographing the remains of the dead. In her influential study Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag highlights the connection between exoticism and photography: The more remote or exotic the place, the more likely we are to have full frontal views of the dead and the dying. Thus postcolonial Africa exists in the consciousness of the general public in the rich world – besides through its sexy music – mainly as a succession of unforgettable photographs of large-eyed victims, starting with figures in the famine lands of Biafra in the late 1960s to the survivors of the genocide of nearly a million Rwandan Tutsis in 1994 […]. These sights carry a double message. They show a suffering that is outrageous, unjust, and should be repaired. They confirm that this is the sort of thing which happens in that place. The ubiquity of those photographs, and those horrors, cannot help but nourish belief in the inevitability of tragedy in the benighted or backward – that is, poor – parts of the world. (2003: 63–64)

While Sontag is referring here to the media images that circulated during and immediately after the genocide, this same ambiguous exoticism continues in the genocide tourism industry. Claudine Vidal makes this point when writing about the Rwandan memorials, which she compares with the uncritical reproduction of images of dead Rwandan bodies by the Western media (2004). She writes that photographs of victims are reproduced in what she describes as a voyeuristic manner, sometimes accompanied by the gruesome story of a genocide survivor. These images create a generation of armchair dark tourists who can view the horrors of the genocide from the comfort of their own homes. In Vidal’s view, such pictures contribute nothing to educating the rest of the world about the genocide: Il n’y a guère de chances […] pour que le spectacle horrifiant des morts leur apprenne quoi que ce soit sur le génocide, sinon qu’au Rwanda aussi, les hommes sont capables du pire. (2004)

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[There is hardly any chance that the horrifying spectacle of dead bodies teaches them anything at all about the genocide, except that in Rwanda too, people are capable of the worst]

The morally ambiguous nature of genocide tourism in Rwanda leaves the Fest’Africa writers in a difficult position. While some, like Lamko, attempt to make a distinction between themselves and the visitors they portray, the ethical difficulties of writing fiction about genocide underlie each of the text’s preoccupations with memorials, tourism and consumption. In L’Aîné des orphelins, Monénembo satirizes another medium for the consumption of suffering, the one through which most of the world witnessed what was happening in 1994: television. BBC cameraman Rodney makes films about humanitarian disasters such as an earthquake in Columbia, a monsoon in India and mass killings in Somalia. As Monénembo explains to Faustin, ‘Rodney est partout où ça va mal. Rodney est un médecin qui arrive en souhaitant que ça aille pire encore’ (2000: 98) [‘Rodney is everywhere there’s trouble. Rodney is a doctor who arrives hoping things are even worse’ (2004: 59)]. Here, the comparison of Rodney with the contradictory image of a medical doctor who wants his patients’ conditions to deteriorate hints as what Monénembo suggests is the dubious morality of this kind of documentary filmmaking. When Faustin is unable to understand what Rodney is doing in Kigali, for, in his view, there is nothing left to film in Rwanda now that the genocide is over, Rodney tells him, ‘Qu’est-ce que tu veux, brother, les morts sont de grandes stars, même quand il ne leur reste plus que le crâne’ (2000: 99) [‘What can I say, mon frère, the dead are big stars, even if all they have left is their skull’ (2004: 59–60)]. As Leshu Torchin notes in her discussion of filmic representations of the genocide, there is ‘high public demand for images of atrocity’ (119).13 When they first meet at the Méridien hotel in Kigali, Rodney asks Faustin to find him a prostitute. Then, when Faustin falsely claims that he has already worked for ‘Hirlandais’ [‘Hirish’] television and knows all the genocide sites, Rodney recruits him as a guide for the documentary film crew. Through the encounter with Rodney, Monénembo draws a parallel between sex tourism and dark tourism with Faustin acting as 13 The cynicism of the media about the genocide is also highlighted in Pierce’s Speak Rwanda when a journalist informs RPF captain Stephen Mazimpaka that the two reasons TV crews poured into Rwanda were the small size of the country and the fact that journalists were already filming in Somalia and South Africa (118–119).

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guide for both types of leisure pursuit, despite not being old enough to drink beer in the bars where prostitutes look for business and despite never having left his birthplace of Bugesera before the genocide.14 The exploitation becomes complicated, however, as Faustin becomes not only the guide, but also the subject of the film. When he tells the crew that he is an orphan whose parents are now ‘avec les autres crânes’ (2000: 105) [‘with the other skulls’ (2004: 64)], he realizes that this makes him all the more interesting to them. So begins his performance as a traumatized survivor of the genocide. Under Rodney’s direction, Faustin embarks on a tour of ‘discovery’ for several TV crews, including the BBC and CNN, retracing what he claims to be the story of his parents’ murders: Dans des endroits où je n’avais jamais mis les pieds, je reconnaissais tout de suite la masure calcinée d’où l’on avait extrait mes parents; la cour entourée d’hibiscus où on leur avait coupé les jarrets; la vieille brasserie de bois où l’on avait grillé leur cœurs et leurs intestins avant de les assaisonner de piment pour le déjeuner des assaillants qui s’étaient montrés les plus braves. (2000: 109) [In places where I had never set foot, I’d immediately recognize the charred hovel my parents had been dragged out of; the yard filled with hibiscus where their hamstrings had been slashed; the church hall where they had been murdered; the old wooden brewery where their blood had been used to make banana beer; the stove where their ears and intestines had been roasted and seasoned with peppers to serve as meals for the attacking forces, who had proved to be the bravest. (2004: 66)]

Some of the filmmakers are visibly moved to tears by Faustin’s stories. He responds with more lies, pretending to identify his parents’ killers among a group of unknown prisoners and telling tales of his own heroic escape from genocide. Of course, the irony here – and the brilliance of the novel – is that Faustin really is a survivor, although this is not revealed until the end and is complicated by his mixed parentage (see Chapter Four). But in describing Faustin exploiting those who want to make an ‘authentic’ spectacle of the genocide, Monénembo mocks the voyeuristic commodification of the horror of 1994. He also places the reader in the position of the voyeur who tries to make sense of Faustin’s story. Like the TV crew, we wonder whether Faustin is a survivor or a 14 Rurangwa also makes reference to Rwanda as a destination for sex tourists in Au sortir de l’enfer when he describes the young Tutsi waitresses in the hotel Chez Martin (2006: 65).

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perpetrator. Is he Tutsi or Hutu? What really happened to his parents? When these questions are finally answered in the description of the massacre at Nyamata church that closes the novel, the real story is far more shocking than any that Faustin had invented. Just as Monénembo mocks the film directors from around the world weeping at Faustin’s invented stories through Rodney’s exploitation of the genocide, so Lamko’s moth-narrator watches with contempt as tourists scrutinize her remains: Ces mufles, ces clowns de tout acabit qui avaient fini par me prendre pour une pièce de musée, qui me visitaient, reniflaient ma carcasse, se bouchaient les narines ou se laissaient surprendre par la nausée, tous m’irritaient profondément. (23) [These yobs, these clowns, all much of a muchness, who had ended up taking me for a museum piece, who visited me, sniffed my carcass, blocked their noses or were overcome by nausea, they all irritated me profoundly]

Here, the irony is that the narrator’s skeleton has indeed become a museum piece, as did that of the real-life victim Theresa Mukandori, on whose story the dead narrator is based. Mukandori’s mutilated body, impaled in the vagina, was formerly displayed in Nyamata church and had a profound effect on all the members of the Fest’Africa group.15 Like Tadjo, what Lamko criticizes here is not only the inappropriate behaviour of genocide tourists, condemned by the moth-narrator as ‘yobs’ and ‘clowns’, but also the transformation of sites of mass violence and death into memorial museums. In Rwanda, the authorities’ decision to put such corpses on display has been controversial. For example, the exhibition of mummified corpses at Murambi was criticized for ‘fail[ing] to provide a culturally sensitive memorial to the slaughter of one million people’ (Laville, 2006). Writing about the same two churches at Nyamata and Ntarama that were visited by the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ collective, Vidal explains that ‘la conception de ces mémoriaux donnait au génocide une immédiate évidence, physique et émotionnelle’ [these memorials were designed to give the genocide an immediate presence both physical and emotional] (2004). As Vidal suggests, the Rwandan authorities are strongly committed to exhibiting bodily remains in order to resist revisionism and prevent future violence, but also in order to have a powerful impact on visitors from around 15 See Chapter Five for a detailed discussion of Theresa Mukandori.

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the world. In their view, the justification for unearthing corpses from the mass graves and putting them on display is precisely to ensure that the truth is not forgotten and the genocide never happens again (Cook, 291–292). However, many Rwandans consider it inappropriate to exhibit genocide victims in this way, as the dead in Rwanda are traditionally buried (Williams, 42). Criticisms of the Rwandan genocide memorials are reflected in Lamko’s satirical critique of Nyamata as ‘cet horrible cimetière-musée’ [this horrible cemetery-museum] in La Phalène des collines (26). Here, the moth-narrator’s descriptions of the ways in which visitors rummage through the bones portray the memorial as a place in which the humanity of the victims appears to have been completely forgotten. Lamko presents the corpse’s transformation into a moth as a reaction to all the tourists visiting the site, some of whom will not leave the skeletons alone, others challenging the guide over the number of people massacred in the church. Of course, not all the tourists behave with disrespect. The moth describes visitors displaying a range of emotions: holding back tears; becoming angry with indignation; feeling guilt and solidarity; but also turning their heads away in disgust at what they see (24). Such physical and psychological responses are not uncommon among genocide tourists (Beech, 220), and some of the authors’ own reactions are invoked in the Fest’Africa fictional texts. Most commonly, the visual impact of the spectacle of genocide is recreated in these writings, leaving the reader in the same uncomfortable position of the voyeur in which the writers found themselves. Other sensory experiences are also invoked, particularly smell. In Moisson de crânes, Waberi notes that often all that is left of victims are fragments: De toutes ces familles exterminées, il ne reste qu’un bout de squelette dans ce qui resterait d’une robe de paysanne, une mâchoire ou un fragment de crâne – pas de quoi allumer la lumière intérieure qui gît en chacun de nous. Rien que la mort puante, gangreneuse. (58) [Of all those exterminated families, all that is left is a piece of skeleton in what remains of a countrywoman’s dress, a jawbone or a fragment of a skull – not enough to light the internal flame that lies in each of us. Nothing but stinking, gangrenous death]

In this implied criticism of an unnamed memorial, Waberi suggests that the exhibition of piles of broken body parts makes it difficult to visualize the victims and so hinders empathy. What the visitor experiences, he claims, is not recognition of the humanity of those who died, but simply

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the stench of death.16 In Murambi, Cornelius finds the smell of Nyamata church so intolerable that when he enters crypt number two at the back of the church, he is ‘littéralement projeté à l’extérieur par l’odeur épouvantable qui s’en dégageait’ (Diop, 2001: 90) [‘literally propelled outside by the stench that came from within’ (2006: 74)]. For Carol Crawshaw and John Urry, tourists appropriate other people’s memories through their bodies: ‘Part at least of what is remembered consists of certain bodily configurations, especially as they relate to touch, hearing and smell as well as sight’ (179). This concept of tourism as bodily appropriation is useful for an analysis of the fictional manifestations of dark tourism in the writings of the Fest’Africa group. For Tadjo and Diop, like Waberi, it is the smell of death that is one of the strongest sensory experiences. Tadjo describes the way in which La puanteur infecte les narines et s’installe dans les poumons, contamine les chairs, infiltre l’esprit. Même plus tard, plus loin, cette odeur restera dans le corps et dans l’esprit. (2000: 23) [The stench infects our nostrils and settles inside our lungs, contaminates our flesh, infiltrates our brains. Even later on, far away, this smell will linger in our bodies and our minds (2002:12)]

Similarly, when reflecting on his participation in the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ project five years later, Diop describes it as ‘Ecrire dans l’odeur de la mort’ [Writing in the Smell of Death] (2003). This notion of an enduring, unforgettable stench is projected in Diop’s novel onto the figure of Cornelius who, when he leaves Murambi, takes the smell of the dead bodies away with him. Back in Kigali, the narrator writes that ‘l’odeur âcre des corps en décomposition restait comme une petite boule de puanteur se diluant dans son sang’ (2001: 91) [‘The acrid odor of decomposing bodies remained like a stinking little ball, diluting slowly in his blood’ (2006: 75)]. Having willingly looked at the dead bodies laid out on tables, Cornelius has become infected with the smell of the memorial. He has consumed the genocide, but it in turn has begun to consume him. As Zoe Norridge notes, ‘the visiting witnesses are transformed by their experiences, physically changed by what they see, smell and hear’ (2012: 158). 16 Compare this with the emphasis on the stench of the massacre at Nyamata as described by Kayimahe’s ‘Eradicator’, who initially takes pleasure in the smell and sight of ‘la boucherie’ [the butchery] but ultimately finds it overwhelming (2014: 126).

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Like Cornelius, the Fest’Africa writers left Rwanda changed by the experience of witnessing the afterlife of genocide, an experience that was very much centred around visits to what are now tourist attractions. In their critique of the voyeuristic exploitation of the genocide through tourism and the media, the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ authors reveal their own frustration at finding themselves looking at Rwanda through the dark tourist’s gaze. Almost all the texts present travelling to post-genocide Rwanda as a transformative experience but, like all secondary witnesses, the writers and narrators are never totally transformed. Instead, they are left with feelings of guilt and frustration that they cannot – and did not – do anything to change what happened in 1994. As Sontag suggests, ‘the frustration of not being able to do anything about what the images [of suffering] show may be translated into an accusation of the indecency of regarding such images, or the indecencies of the way such images are disseminated’ (2003: 105). The Fest’Africa writers are critical of memorial processes in Rwanda, but at the same time reflect critically on their own role as writers of commemorative fiction about the genocide. Like the memorials, their texts raise important questions about where commemoration ends and exploitation begins. How can we write about mass murder, rape and mutilation in a manner that does not exploit the dead or appeal to the voyeuristic dark tourist in us all? For Tony Walter, literature mediates violent death in much the same way as the sites of dark tourism: ‘I can visit First World War battlefields, or I can read a novel about their pity and their pain’ (44). Kenneth Harrow, on the other hand, makes a clear distinction between genocide memorials and literary texts: ‘with or without the guides the shrines [in Rwanda] function to canalize our reactions and understandings into a fixed narrative of the genocide – one that seems almost to write itself’ (41). While fiction and memorial sites indisputably function in different ways, there are interesting similarities, some of which will be considered in the discussion of commemoration in Chapter Five of this book. One of the common points to emerge from the preoccupation with memorials in the Fest’Africa texts is the ambiguous position of both writer and reader of genocide fiction. Just as the authors and their characters experience emotional – and sometimes physical – discomfort as they enter memorials like Murambi, Nyamata and Ntarama, so the reader of these novels and travel narratives shares the painful space of simultaneous proximity and distance in relation to the genocide. Readers become dark tourists themselves, visitors to the physical memorials as

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imagined by the writers and visitors to the literary memorials that the texts themselves represent. By contrast, memorials hardly feature at all in fictional texts written by Rwandan authors, who also tend not to share the Fest’Africa group’s anxieties about commemorating genocide through fiction. One Rwandan author does, however, use the trope of tourism and travel in order to articulate the ambivalence of his own position in relation to post-genocide Rwanda. In La Promesse faite à ma sœur, Ndwaniye presents a narrator with a touristic relationship with Rwanda, the only example of such a text in the Rwandan-authored corpus. Having lived in Belgium for many years before the genocide began, Ndwaniye’s autofictional narrator, Jean Seneza, returns to Rwanda after 1994 to find out what has happened to his relatives. Like Cornelius in Murambi, Jean’s personal experience of the genocide was limited to watching it on television, in this case from the comfortable armchair of his family home in Brussels. When, in 2003, Jean returns to Kigali, the text emphasizes his feelings of geographical and emotional distance from the Kibingo hill where he grew up and his anxiety about returning there. When he steps off the plane at Kigali airport, Jean immediately feels both an outsider and an insider in the country he left in 1986 to go and study in Belgium. At first, he finds it too hot: ‘J’eus l’impression d’être dans une fournaise’ [I felt like I was in a furnace] (46), but he also considers kissing the ground, as Pope John Paul II did when he returned to his native Poland, to express his happiness at being back. Jean’s ambivalent relationship with Rwanda is clearly articulated when he states, ‘J’eus l’impression d’être un étranger alors que j’étais dans mon pays’ [I felt like a foreigner although I was in my own country] (47). Having returned to a country that he no longer recognizes, transformed as it is by the experience of genocide, Jean becomes a native tourist. He stays in a luxury villa in the ex-pat area of Kiyovu near the Mille Collines hotel and describes being treated like a head of state. When, watching television, he is greeted by the ghosts of the dead members of his family, Jean feels reassured and welcomed to Rwanda, yet he is also conscious that his Belgian wife and children back in Brussels would have a very different reaction to the ghosts. His distance from his native culture is reinforced as he imagines what his dead grandmothers would think of him brushing his teeth with toothpaste. Rwanda is no longer familiar to Jean. The country he finds on his return has changed so much that he feels he no longer has a place there. Just as he has now become a foreigner in Rwanda with a European

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salary and a Belgian lifestyle, so Rwanda has become foreign to him, totally transformed by genocide. La Promesse faite à ma sœur portrays Jean as having lost his points of reference, initially unable to locate the places or the people he frequented in the past. Feeling completely lost in his birth country, he decides he needs ‘un guide pour me maintenir sur les rails’ [a guide to keep me on track] (66). While he does manage to track down some of the people he knew before he left, most have either died from AIDS or were killed in the genocide; others have permanently left Rwanda. Almost nobody recognizes Jean, but they know his name. When he returns to the house that had been his family home, he can no longer find the graves of his father and younger brother, who had been buried in the garden, symbolizing Jean’s inability to find his roots. The novel describes the narrator’s experience of a personal sense of rupture as he finds himself unable to reconcile the present and the past (114). Unsurprisingly, given the autofictional nature of the text, Jean’s rediscovery of Rwanda after the genocide appears to mirror that of Ndwaniye himself, as he explains: Oui, il était difficile de me distancier, dans La Promesse faite à ma sœur, de mon histoire familiale et du génocide. Lorsque tu as connu le Rwanda auparavant, tu ne peux pas y aller, même vingt ans plus tard, sans ressentir les absences et les changements induits par cette tragédie. (Beullens and Corbeel, 2013) [Yes, it was difficult to distance myself, in La Promesse faite à ma sœur, from my family history and from the genocide. When you knew Rwanda as it was before, you can’t go there, even twenty years later, without feeling the absences and the changes caused by that tragedy]

Almost ten years after 1994, Jean finds the city of Kigali beginning to be rebuilt after genocide and gives quite a detailed description of the architectural transformation of the capital. While Jean is there, he spends his mornings jogging around the city, describing, through the exoticist eyes of a tourist, the morning routine in Kigali with its noises, colours and smells: ‘ce folklore m’enchantait’ [I found that folklore enchanting] (115). In Kibuye, he enjoys sitting at the edge of Lake Kivu eating a breakfast of bread with guava jam and locally roasted coffee served by ‘les serveuses aux cheveux parfaitement tressés et au derrière rondement dessiné, fidèle à la génétique ancestrale au Pays des Mille Collines’ [waitresses with perfectly plaited hair and round bottoms, faithful to the genetic ancestry in the Land of a Thousand Hills (150). Yet, at other times, Jean struggles with local food and beverages, which

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he finds difficult to swallow or digest, despite understanding the cultural importance of not refusing hospitality in Rwanda. Having spent so long in exile, Jean has become estranged from the realities of everyday life in Rwanda. This estrangement is then exacerbated by the transformation of his country through the genocide. Unable to connect to the Internet when he wants to send an email to his wife in Brussels, his frustration conveys his double estrangement: ‘Suis-je encore réellement dans mon pays?, me révoltai-je. Autant être un touriste!’ [‘Am I really still in my country?’ I asked myself indignantly. I might as well be a tourist!] (114). Like the Fest’Africa writers, Jean finds Rwanda both familiar and foreign. The practicalities of travelling in Rwanda are also discussed, with large sections of the novel stressing the difficulties of driving, including negotiating potholes, unfinished and poorly constructed roads, heavy rain and flooding, a burst tyre on a car that was not suitable for the road and the problems of hiring a four-wheel drive in Kigali. When Jean finally finds a car suitable to make the journey to see his twin brother in prison, the trip is presented as a dangerous one with the possibility of broken bridges, landslides and no telephone network. On the way to the prison he passes a genocide memorial, but does not immediately recognize its significance. On the other hand, when Jean stops to pick up a hitchhiker, the young man knows his name because Jean was a local football champion in the 1980s before he emigrated to Belgium. Although he feels like a stranger in the Rwandan city of Kibuye, where he lived and worked for two years, he is still able to give himself a ‘visite guidée’ [guided tour] (83). Able to identify himself as both tourist and guide, Jean epitomizes the ambiguous position of the native tourist in Rwanda, an ambiguity that is crystallized in the scene towards the end of the novel when he changes his mind three times about delaying his return flight to Belgium. At times, the narrator’s native tourist gaze makes the novel read like a travel guide, describing as it does the extraordinary beauty of the Rwandan countryside with its rivers, lakes and hills, banana trees, papyrus and tea plantations.17 Jean’s local knowledge also provides 17 Having explored the return of his narrator-protagonist to post-genocide Rwanda in La Promesse faite à ma sœur, Ndwaniye’s second novel, Le Muzungu mangeur d’hommes (2012), offers a new perspective on the theme of travelling in Rwanda with the story of an idealistic European couple’s journey to the Land of a Thousand Hills. This novel, which makes no reference to the genocide, is discussed briefly in the conclusion of this book.

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the reader with tourist information. For example, when he reaches a junction indicating Kigali and Butare, he identifies the latter city as the pride of the south because, he explains, it is the home of the National University of Rwanda (168). However, Ndwaniye never positions his narrator as a dark tourist, the figure that is the source of so much ambiguity in the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ fiction. Rather than mapping the country in terms of its genocide memorial sites, Ndwaniye presents a more extensive and detailed topography of Rwanda after genocide. Traces of what happened in 1994 are, of course, still present everywhere, but the focus is on individuals’ associations with places rather than the places themselves. This reflects Burnet’s observation that ‘even after the physical signs [of genocide] were covered over, the landscape remained charged with memories for survivors’ (88). For the waitress who serves Jean’s breakfast at the Sinaï Centre, the exceptional beauty of Lake Kivu is a personal memorial to her dead family whose canoe, she explains, was not as fast as the génocidaires who killed them (150–151).18 Despite the emphasis in Jean’s narrative on how much his country has changed, Ndwaniye’s La Promesse faite à ma sœur reminds us that Rwanda remains mythologized in the non-Rwandan imagination as a land of genocide and gorillas. Back in Belgium, Jean has a brief conversation with a work colleague about his trip to Rwanda. The only question she asks him is whether he saw the gorillas. Reflecting on this conversation, the narrator observes that: Elle remarqua le peu d’intérêt que je portais à ses questions et décida de ne plus m’en poser. J’aurais voulu qu’elle me demande de lui parler de ma famille, de la situation politique de mon pays ou de la vie des gens là-bas et non celle des primates auxquels je n’avais pas eu le temps de penser pendant mon séjour. Elle ne devait probablement plus se souvenir de ce qui s’y était passé moins de dix ans plus tôt. (190) 18 Lake Kivu as a genocide memorial site also features in Robusto Kana’s Le Défi de survivre. When Léonard Ndutiye and his fellow Tutsi from the mountains, running from the killers, arrive at the Lake, they can think only of the thousands of dead bodies decomposing at the bottom of the water (187). Yet, when the genocide is over and Michel’s battalion moves to Gisenyi in preparation for future combat with the exiled génocidaires, the text emphasizes the extraordinary beauty and calm of Lake Kivu, which seems out of place, ‘comme si la nature se souciait peu du déchirement entre les hommes ou les invitait plutôt à la tolérance mutuelle’ [as if nature cared little about divisions between men, or invited them rather to try mutual tolerance] (241).

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[She noticed my lack of interest in her questions and decided not to ask me anything else. I would have liked her to ask me to talk about my family, about the political situation in my country or about the way of life over there, and not about the primates that I hadn’t had time to think about during my stay. She most probably couldn’t remember what had happened there less than ten years earlier]

Jean’s observation that he did not even have time to think about gorillas during his trip highlights the inappropriate nature of his colleague’s question and, by extension, the global tendency to reduce Rwanda to a (dark) tourist destination. His colleague’s question also demonstrates what Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka condemned in 1994 as the international community’s greater concern for the gorillas than the people of Rwanda (see Waberi, 72). What each of these fictional texts asks us to do is reflect on how we see Rwanda. As all of them have been published in France or, in the case of Ndwaniye’s novel, in Belgium, the majority of their readers will not have visited Rwanda and almost none will have experienced the genocide first-hand. If they have witnessed the events of 1994 at all, they will have done so from a considerable geographical and cultural distance, through the often ill-informed lens of the international media. As we travel through fictional versions of post-genocide Rwanda with the authors, narrators and characters of these texts, we are constantly encouraged to reflect on how to position ourselves as self-conscious and responsible tourists. By consistently drawing attention to the mystification of Rwanda as, on the one hand, a gorilla safari destination and, on the other, what Mahmood Mamdani calls ‘a metaphor for postcolonial political violence’ (xi), these fictional works invite us to (re)view Rwanda with an ethical tourist gaze while at the same time reminding us of the ambivalence of our own position as visitors in these texts. In the following chapters we turn to the ethical implications of recreating testimony in fiction through an analysis of the ways in which authors create figures of literary witnesses and survivors.

chapter three

Witnesses Witnesses

One of the defining characteristics of fictional responses to the Rwanda genocide is a concern with documenting and remembering the truth about what happened in 1994. The importance of accurately describing the horrors of the genocide is summarized in the quotation from German playwright Peter Weiss that Rurangwa chooses as the epigraph for his novel, Au sortir de l’enfer: Pendant longtemps on a dit tout cela indicible. Nous arrivons au point où il faut décrire de façon la plus précise ce qui reste incompréhensible [For a long time all of that was said to be unspeakable. We are now getting to the point where what is still incomprehensible needs to be described as precisely as possible]1

In order to convincingly tell a story that has been repeatedly described as unspeakable, untellable, incomprehensible, unknowable, authors rely on witness accounts from Rwandans who were present in 1994; real-life stories that have been passed on to them or those they have experienced first-hand. Bearing witness about the genocide requires remarkable courage, strength and determination. It is therefore not always easy to find primary witnesses who are willing to give testimony. Many witnesses are already dead, in exile or in prison. This explains the search for witnesses that runs through many of the genocide novels and is particularly strongly felt in Ndwaniye’s La Promesse faite à ma sœur. Having returned to his Belgian home after searching for the truth about what happened in Rwanda, the narrator writes:

1 Peter Weiss’s 1965 post-Holocaust docudrama The Investigation has been performed around the world by Rwandan theatre company Urwintore, directed by genocide survivor Dorcy Rugamba.

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Je pensais souvent à ces témoins que j’avais eu beau chercher dans les rues de Kigali sans pouvoir les trouver. […] Ils n’étaient plus là! Ils n’étaient plus! J’aurais voulu qu’ils m’expliquent pourquoi pendant mon absence notre pays s’est basculé dans l’horreur. (199) [I often thought about those witnesses I had looked for in vain in the streets of Kigali without ever finding them. […] They were no longer there! They were no more! I would have liked them to explain to me why, during my absence, our country let itself fall into horror]

Most of the people who witnessed the horror are now dead. Of those who are still alive and living in Rwanda, many survivors are reluctant to talk about their experiences, be it for fear of repercussions, because they are disillusioned with post-genocide justice or because they do not want to relive the trauma they struggle to forget. Jennie Burnet observes that, over the years since 1994, survivors have become increasingly less willing or less able to tell their stories (79). Giving testimony is also complicated by the fact that many witnesses who are also survivors spent the genocide running or in hiding, fearing for their lives. As Kayimahe explains through the words of survivor Annamaria, it is impossible for survivors to recount everything they lived though in 1994 (2014: 351). Aside from the emotional and psychological pain involved in remembering genocide, there are also practical obstacles to recording events when your life is under threat. Writing about the Rwandan civil war that preceded and became entangled with the genocide, Twagilimana acknowledges the difficulties of writing about mass killings for those who actually experienced them: Many people said they were sorry they couldn’t write, because what they heard, saw and suffered, could fill thousands of volumes of books. At the same time, they regretted that they were so busy saving their own lives that none had time to keep records of the great and small events. They complained that history would be lost here. In the future, when people wrote the history of these days they’d only have fragments to go on when they could have had the whole story. Thus, they would write interpretations and provide links among the fragments when they could have a true history. No one had written things down as they took place. Who could? People didn’t even have time to put their clothes on when a machine gun installed in their garden started shooting. (171–172)

In 1994, the size and scale of the genocide made it even more difficult for witnesses to keep records. For these reasons, the most comprehensive accounts would most likely be those of perpetrators or their relatives

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who were not the targets of the killing. Needless to say, although many alleged génocidaires have acted as witnesses in both defence and prosecution cases, naming accomplices and then facing threats and harassment themselves, their testimonies can be self-interested and so are not always reliable (African Rights and Redress, 23). In La Chanson de l’aube, Kayimahe responds to the difficulty of witnessing by creating the figure of Sakabaka, an ancient warrior transformed after death into an eagle that spends its time recounting the horrors that it has seen to RPF lieutenant Lionceau. 2 As a soldier, Lionceau has witnessed much of what Sakabaka describes, but his is a unilateral account determined by his personal experience. The bird, on the other hand, is able to give a much fuller account of the genocide: le récit de l’aigle était d’une intensité dramatique extrême, marqué par une vision panoramique de l’horreur. Rien ne l’échappait en effet avec sa vue d’altitude, sa perspicacité mille fois plus aiguë que celle des hommes. (205) [the eagle’s tale had extreme dramatic intensity marked by its panoramic vision of the horror. With its view from on high and its vision a thousand times sharper than humans, nothing went unnoticed]

Through the figure of the eagle, Kayimahe invents a neutral and objective witness who offers a complete and critical commentary on the genocide. Of course, as Kayimahe’s choice of a supernatural being confirms, no such witness exists. However, the talking eagle also reminds us of the importance of telling and listening to testimony. Lionceau can only hear the bird’s story if he listens with his heart (193). Despite the limits of testimony, witnesses play a central role both in establishing the truth and in ensuring that the rest of the world is made aware of what happened in Rwanda. Although people were able to witness the genocide for themselves through the international media, particularly television, global reactions were characterized by a failure to respond, even when presented with visible evidence of the suffering and brutality that was taking place. In Diop’s novel Murambi, what Torchin describes as a ‘crisis of witnessing’ (103) is ironically critiqued through the words of Kigali video store proprietor Michel Serumondo: La Coupe du monde de football allait bientôt commencer aux Etats-Unis. Rien d’autre n’intéressait la planète. Et de toute façon, quoi qu’il arrive 2 Although ‘sakabaka’ is the Kinyarwanda word for kite, the bird is referred to as ‘l’aigle’ [the eagle] throughout the novel.

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au Rwanda, ce serait toujours pour les gens la même vieille histoire de nègres en train de se taper dessus. Les Africains eux-mêmes diraient, à la mi-temps de chaque match: ‘Ils nous font honte, ils devraient arrêter de s’entre-tuer comme ça’. (2001: 16–17) [The World Cup was about to begin in the United States. The planet was interested in nothing else. And, in any case, whatever happened in Rwanda, it would always be the same old story of blacks beating up on each other. Even Africans would say, during half-time of every match, ‘They’re embarrassing us, they should stop killing each other like that’] (2006: 9–10)

This powerful image of the world watching football while around 10,000 innocent people were being slaughtered every day highlights just how little attention was paid to the genocide in Rwanda, and also points to the failure of the visual evidence of the horror to have an impact on the world. Conscious of their own inaction when they had found themselves witnessing the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan people, the Fest’Africa writers’ duty to remember can also be understood as a duty to bear witness on behalf of those who were present in Rwanda in 1994. Of course, this duty becomes complicated when it is translated into a work of the imagination since the story is then by definition no longer a true account. This explains some Rwandan survivors’ requests to the Fest’Africa group not to write fiction. Diop recalls them telling him: De grâce, n’écrivez pas de romans avec ce que nous avons vécu, rapportez fidèlement ce que nous vous avons raconté, il faut que le monde entier sache exactement ce qui s’est passé chez nous. (2003: 76) [For pity’s sake, don’t write novels with what we’ve lived through, report faithfully what we’ve told you. The whole world needs to know exactly what happened among us]

Of course, fictional acts of witnessing are always acts of indirect testimony, but they are almost always based on the stories of primary witnesses, be they other people who experienced the genocide or, in a small number of cases, the authors themselves. As discussed in Chapter One, a number of autobiographical texts have appeared since 1994 by Rwandans, mostly women, who want to record and remember the events of the genocide for themselves. Other testimonies have been collected by foreign writers such as Hatzfeld and Gourevitch. Generally, those Rwandans who witnessed the genocide

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first-hand and survived have tended to write about their experiences as testimony rather than fiction. Both Rwandan members of the Fest’Africa project chose to publish testimonial texts in the first instance, although only Kayimahe is actually a survivor. Exiled author Rurangwa chose an interview with Italian history student Gianluca Perfetti, entitled Le Génocide des Tutsi expliqué à un étranger [The Genocide of the Tutsi Explained to a Stranger] (2000), as his contribution to the project. He then produced a second testimony, Un Rwandais sur les routes de l’exil [A Rwandan on the Roads of Exile] (2005) before publishing his first novel, Au sortir de l’enfer, in 2006. 3 In both his testimonial texts, Rurangwa is careful to correct the misunderstandings about Rwanda perpetrated by the international media in 1994: Les journalistes en mal de sensationnel fantasmaient au lieu de s’informer. ‘La guerre entre Hutu et Tutsi au Rwanda’! ‘Rwanda: les paysans bantous massacrent les pasteurs hamites!’ ‘Guerre entre les Courts et les Longs au Rwanda!’ Tels étaient les titres des émissions de Télévision ou des articles de journaux. C’était révoltant pour qui connaissait la réalité. (2005: 144) [Journalists craving the sensational would make things up rather than get the facts. ‘War between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda!’ ‘Rwanda: Bantu peasants kill Hamite herdsmen!’ ‘War between the Small and the Tall in Rwanda!’ These were typical titles of TV programmes and newspaper articles. It was appalling for those who knew the truth]

The importance of knowing – and writing – the truth about what happened is also underlined in Rurangwa’s postscript to his novel Au sortir de l’enfer. He describes the novel as ‘un texte de fiction sur fond de vérité historique’ [a fictional text based on historical truth], which he wants to be considered as both testimony and fiction (197). Similarly, Kayimahe’s novel is presented by his publisher, Izuba, as ‘un roman témoignage, contre l’oubli’ [a testimonial novel, so we do not forget]. In other words, both novels are packaged as being based on witnesses’ true stories, an aim that is reflected in Rurangwa’s text through the use of explanatory footnotes and also in the repetition of the term ‘témoin oculaire’ [eyewitness] in his novel. This emphasis on using fiction to record the truth of what happened in Rwanda in 1994 is articulated by 3 Rurangwa was a child refugee who fled Rwanda to Burundi with his parents in 1959. He returned to his birth country in 2000 where he taught at NUR and the Université Libre de Kigali [Free University of Kigali] as well as directing the theatre troupe ‘Izuba’. He now lives in Canada. See Rurangwa (2005).

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many authors of genocide fiction and supports Norridge’s conclusion that literary responses to the genocide demonstrate ‘the urgent desire to witness’ that she identifies as a defining characteristic of the genre (2011b: 257). There is, however, a tension between the urgent desire to witness and the fact that the majority of writers of fictional responses to the genocide were not primary witnesses, but rather watched the genocide from positions of considerable geographical distance. This tension is, of course, exacerbated by the choice of fiction as a means of recording the truth. Of the eleven Rwandan authors I have discovered who have written works of genocide fiction, only five (Gatore, Kana, Karangwa, Karege and Kayimahe) were actually in Rwanda in 1994 and only one (Kayimahe) explicitly identifies himself as a survivor (see Chapter Four). Focusing mainly on those writers who do not self-identify as survivors and comparing these with the African tourist authors discussed in Chapter Two, this chapter will consider the ways in which writers of fiction negotiate their role as witness. It will suggest that the position of the literary witness is always an ambivalent one. Even for those writers of fiction who were present in Rwanda in 1994, the relationship between author and text is seldom straightforward. Rwandan novelists Gatore and Kana both witnessed the atrocities of the genocide first-hand, but neither has chosen to write a novel that can be easily linked to his own experience. In Gatore’s case, as I have argued elsewhere, Le Passé devant soi ‘openly rejects the testimonial in favour of a work of the imagination’ (Hitchcott, 2013: 80). As a writer, Gatore is careful not to present himself as a genocide survivor but, as Coquio suggests, he has been positioned by his publisher and in the media as both a victim and a witness (2010: 262). While it is true that Gatore’s publisher, Phébus, makes a parallel between the author and the iconic child witness of the Holocaust, Anne Frank, Le Passé devant soi contains no autobiographical links to Gatore’s own experience, nor is his birth country, Rwanda, ever mentioned by name. Despite having watched the genocide unfold as a child before his family fled to Zaire in 1994, Gatore explicitly refuses to be identified as a witness: Il y a des nationalités qui pèsent plus que d’autres […] Israélien, Palestinien, ou Rwandais. On m’attend toujours là-dessus. Or je ne veux en aucun cas être le énième petit Rwandais à témoigner du génocide. (Perrier, 2008) [There are some nationalities that weigh more heavily than others […]

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Rwanda Genocide Stories Israeli, Palestinian or Rwandan. People always expect me to talk about it. But in no way do I want to be the nth little Rwandan testifying about the genocide]

It is possible that Gatore’s dissatisfaction at being constantly expected to speak about the genocide has fuelled what I describe as the ethnopolitical controversy around this author and his novel (Hitchcott, 2014a). The fact remains that, for Gatore, the position of witness is not a desirable one; he wants to be recognized as a writer of fiction, not a giver of testimony. Indeed, so keen is Gatore to distance his fiction from his life story that he claims he is only ever able to write in the third person, even when writing about himself (2008b: 202). Also narrated in the third person, Kana’s Le Défi de survivre (2009) is the only example I have found of a text by a Rwandan author explicitly presented as a historical novel.4 Published under the pseudonym Robusto Kana, the story is closely based on the personal experience of author Cyrien Kanamugire, who worked for the RPF during the genocide, first as a journalist then as a medical assistant. However, the autobiographical link to the author is kept hidden in the novel. Although the publisher’s blurb informs us that Kana ‘vécut le génocide des Tutsi du Rwanda en 1994’ [lived through the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsi in 1994], this is all the information we are given. Intriguingly, Kanamugire’s choice to publish pseudonymously is clearly an attempt to conceal the relationship between author and text, yet a photograph of the author is provided on the back cover of the book. It seems, then, that Kanamugire both is and is not there as a witness in his text. The biographical information I have uncovered about the author suggests that the character of RPF journalist Andrew Ramba in the novel may be based on Kanamugire’s own story. Like the author, Ramba is a civilian working for the RPF’s rebel radio station, Radio Muhabura, who, finding his spirit crushed by the events of 1994, chooses to stop reporting and joins the RPF’s medical team. When questioned about this resemblance, Kanamugire told me, ‘You were right, but the profile of the author is not only in one personage, it inspires the entire book. Tous les personnages ont un rapport, de près ou de loin avec l’auteur’ [All the characters are related to the author, either closely or at a distance]. 5 4 American Julian R. Pierce’s Speak Rwanda is also described by its author as a ‘novel [that] is a work of historical fiction’ (author’s note). 5 Correspondence with Cyrien Kanamugire, 30 January 2014. As quoted here, the author responded in a mixture of French and English.

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Although the autobiographical link between Kanamugire and his novel is deliberately blurred, an emphasis on the importance of witnessing remains. When Andrew Ramba tells the RPF political advisor that he wants to work for the medical corps, his colleague warns him not to abandon his duty as a reporter: ‘Tu dois voir et savoir, car tu peux avoir un jour à témoigner aussi’ [You must watch and know because one day you may have to bear witness too] (88). There is so much detail in this novel that much of it reads very much as a documentary or witness account. Furthermore, the writing style is rather prosaic and conveys a degree of clinical detachment that suggests a professional rather than an emotional relationship with the victims of the massacres. Information about medical treatments dispensed to patients combines with precise details of the tactics and weapons used by the rebel soldiers in a text that is often closer to a historical document than a work of fiction. However, the text is also strongly inflected by the author’s political commitment. Kanamugire’s personal loyalty to the RPF is palpable in the novel, as it is in his long essay Génocide au Rwanda: quinze ans plus tard [Genocide in Rwanda: Fifteen Years Later], also published in 2009 and, like his novel, at the author’s own expense, this time under the name of Kana Mugire.6 The other Rwandans writing about 1994 all present their novels as based on individuals’ true stories, but each does so in a different way. Karege’s first-person novel is written in the voice of outspoken French teacher Gustave Giraneza (Gégé), who finds himself imprisoned, humiliated and tortured for publicly criticizing the President in 1992, a time of much civil unrest and strong opposition to Habyarimana’s rule. On the back cover of Sous le déluge rwandais, a paratextual link is made between the author and the narrator of the book, encouraging the reader to approach the text as a personal story, a testimony, given by a man who experienced first-hand what is euphemistically described as ‘le passé douloureux: celui qui lui a fait connaître la prison et la torture, celui qui a emporté plus d’un million de ces compatriotes’ [the painful past: the past which made him experience prison and torture, the past which carried away over 1 million of his compatriots]. Only the last forty or so pages of the novel are devoted to what is referred to as ‘the Holocaust’ 6 At the heart of this essay is a critical engagement with former RPF Lieutenant Abdul Ruzibiza’s 2005 testimony Rwanda: l’histoire secrète [Rwanda: The Secret History], in which Ruzibiza accuses then RPF General Paul Kagame of war crimes and, in particular, of shooting down Habyarimana’s plane on 6 April 1994. Ruzibiza retracted his claims in 2008 (Vidal, 2009).

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rather than ‘the genocide’ (2005: 196); the rest of the text is concerned with exposing abuses of human rights in Rwanda that took place before 1994. Karege’s decision to focus on political injustice, combined with the vagueness with which he identifies the genocide, could lead him open to accusations of revisionism. Karege is not, however, a genocide denier.7 Rather, he tells the story from the particular point of view of a ‘moderate Hutu’ witness.8 Gégé resists the genocide, openly challenging the killers and, through his work for the International Red Cross, helps save the lives of many victims. We assume from the autobiographical link that Karege’s own story resembles that of his narrator who finds himself targeted by the génocidaires for opposing their ideology. What we do know is that the author, like his protagonist, did not leave Rwanda immediately after the genocide: Karege worked as a journalist for Radio Rwanda from 1995 to 2001 (2005: back cover) and now lives in France. In other words, the presentation of Karege’s novel as autofiction encourages us to read Sous le déluge rwandais as a fictionalized version of a primary witness narrative or insider’s story. The exiled Rwandan writers’ relationship with the genocide is complicated by their status as insider-outsiders. Tutsi who were living away from Rwanda in 1994, having fled earlier assassination attempts, are sometimes known as ‘survivors by destination’ (African Rights and Redress, 74). The guilt exiled writers feel at having been absent is a dominant theme in their fiction and one that is often expressed through unanswered questions or through an inability to find out information. What is interesting is that novels by both primary witnesses and exiles share an emphasis on the ambivalent position of the witness. As I have already discussed, this is partly reflected in the difficulty the reader experiences in locating authors in relation to their texts. Like Kana and Karege, Ndwaniye positions himself ambiguously in relation to his autofictional text La Promesse faite à ma sœur. The ‘For Intérieur’ series in which Ndwaniye’s novel is included is presented by Belgian publishing house Les Impressions Nouvelles as a series of autobiographical writings that aims to push back the boundaries of the genre. In Ndwaniye’s text, the strongly autobiographical presentation and content of the novel contrasts with the author’s refusal of an explicit autobiographical pact. The biographical thumbnail of Joseph Ndwaniye on the back 7 Karege does use the term ‘genocide’ in his second novel, Entre brouillards et ténèbres (2010). 8 See Chapter Four for further discussion of this category.

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cover matches some of the details of his narrator Jean Seneza’s story; for example, both trained as medical laboratory assistants in Kigali before moving to Brussels. The implied autobiographical connection is reinforced by what appears to be an old family photograph of two small children on the front cover. However, Ndwaniye is careful to resist an autobiographical reading of his text by changing important details, notably the narrator’s name and date of birth. When asked about the novel, he stated: Le personnage principal me ressemble beaucoup, c’est vrai. Il a quitté son pays natal, le Rwanda, depuis plusieurs années et il a donc vécu le génocide de l’étranger. La première partie du livre raconte une enfance dans les collines. […] Voilà pour la partie la plus autobiographique, ces collines que je connais très bien. Mais pour la suite du roman, qui commence par le retour au pays dix ans après la tragédie, j’ai laissé de côté ma propre histoire familiale pour mieux partager les sentiments du narrateur avec le plus de Rwandais possible. Cela rassemble des histoires de gens que je connais ou pas, mais je voulais que chacun puisse s’y retrouver. Au fond, je ne connais pas un romancier qui n’écrive pas sur lui-même. Ça nous permet de nourrir nos illusions, on ne sait pas toujours où commence la fiction et où finit la réalité. (Beullens and Corbeel, 2013) [The main character does resemble me, it’s true. He left his birth country, Rwanda, several years ago and so lived through the genocide abroad. The first part of the book tells the story of a childhood in the hills. […] So that’s the most autobiographical part of the novel, those hills that I know so well. But in what follows I put my own family story to one side so as to be able to share the narrator’s feelings with as many Rwandans as possible. It draws together the stories of many people I do or don’t know, but I wanted everyone to be able to find themselves in it. Basically, I don’t know any novelist who doesn’t write about himself. That’s what allows us to nurture our illusions. We don’t always know where fiction begins and reality ends]

As Ndwaniye acknowledges, the relationship between fiction and reality is always complicated, but when writing stories about the experiences of real people and real events, the issue becomes more complex still. In his attempt to create a more universal narrative, Ndwaniye claims he has not written a completely autobiographical novel. Yet, the strong resemblances between author and first-person narrator make it difficult to accept the publisher’s claim that the book ‘ne ressemble en rien aux témoignages qui se sont multipliés sur le génocide’ [is nothing like the testimonies that have multiplied since the genocide].

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La Promesse faite à ma sœur stands out from published testimonies and most of the other Rwandan novels about the genocide in its refusal to include a description of the events of 1994.9 The time of the genocide is deliberately omitted from the novel, which leaps from the narrator’s rural childhood in the 1970s to 2003 when, having left to study in Belgium in 1986, Jean Seneza, now living in Brussels, finally returns to Rwanda. Like Ndwaniye himself and the other Rwandan exiles, Jean experienced the genocide second-hand: Nous avions vu à la télévision, installés dans nos confortables fauteuils, des engins de combat traverser la ville de Kigali vers l’aéroport en file indienne en évitant les cadavres qui jonchaient la route. (2006: 45) [Settled in our comfortable armchairs, watching television, we had seen the engines of combat cross the city of Kigali towards the airport in single file, avoiding the corpses that littered the road]

As a secondary witness, he has to rely on those who were actually present in 1994 to help him understand what happened and so, when he returns to Rwanda, he spends most of his time looking for the people he hopes will tell him the truth about who was responsible for the death of his sister as well as the whereabouts of his missing twin brother. On arriving in Kigali, Jean finds himself again watching the television news. But this time his viewing is interrupted by the voice of his dead father speaking to him from beyond the grave. His father then appears to him in a vision along with all his dead relatives, and begins to tell him the story of his sister and her family’s suffering and death. Here Ndwaniye’s novel seems at first to echo Giorgio Agamben’s study Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive (1999), which is itself closely informed by the work of Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi. In his influential book of essays The Drowned and the Saved, Levi argues that the only true witnesses of genocide are the dead. For this reason, giving testimony is always an expression of the impossibility of testifying (63–64). In other words, living witnesses or ‘pseudowitnesses’ can only testify on behalf of the true witnesses, who cannot speak because they are dead or have been silenced (Agamben, 120). In his reading of Levi, Agamben identifies one exemplary or ‘complete’ witness, the ‘Muselmann’, the prisoner in the Nazi concentration camps 9 The only other writer I have discovered who avoids relating what happened between April and July 1994 is Mukasonga, whose short stories are discussed below.

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who is himself so close to death that he, like the dead, is unable to give testimony (41–96). In La Promesse faite à ma sœur, the impossibility of witnessing is similarly implied through Ndwaniye’s decision to focus on the periods before and after 1994, but not the genocide itself. Through this gap he conveys the difficulty for those Rwandans who, like him, were not there in 1994, but who still want to tell the story. The difficulty faced by Rwandan witnesses who were absent is also portrayed in Mukasonga’s first work of fiction, the short story collection entitled L’Iguifou: nouvelles rwandaises (2010). Mukasonga is an interesting example of a witness presented as a survivor. While Mukasonga is indeed the only surviving member of her family, her relationship with the genocide is, like Ndwaniye’s, that of a secondary witness, as she was living in France in 1994. This no doubt explains why Mukasonga’s writings express the same clash between the desire to find out the truth and the impossibility of discovering that truth. Of the five short stories in L’Iguifou, only two make direct mention of the 1994 genocide and in each case the emphasis is on what those who remain alive cannot know or do not want to know. Like Ndwaniye, Mukasonga sets her fiction in periods before and after, but never during the genocide. At the end of the second story ‘La Gloire de la vache’ [The Glory of the Cow], the narrator, Karekezi, returns from exile to Kigali after the genocide has ended, but we learn that many of his questions remain unanswered. While he knows that his entire family was killed in the Nyamata massacre, he never learns what his father named the cow he bought him, nor does he want to know about the role his Hutu friend and neighbour played in the genocide (46). In the final tale, ‘Le Deuil’ [‘Mourning’], the third-person female narrator is unable to find out if her relatives are still alive. When she finally receives an official letter with a list of her dead relatives, she at first refuses to open it; moreover, she initially confirms that she does not want to see or hear anything about the horrors of the genocide (105). In Mukasonga’s other stories, all of them set in the period immediately after Rwandan independence, the shadow of 1994 hangs retrospectively over the narratives. In leaving out the genocide, both Ndwaniye and Mukasonga appear to share an acknowledgement of their own inability to testify to that which they did not experience. The gap that is the genocide itself is strongly felt in each of the texts and does seem to signify the impossibility of witnessing for those who did not die. As we have seen, Ndwaniye’s description of Jean being visited by members of his family who were victims of the genocide when he arrives in

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Rwanda could also be interpreted as substantiating the view that only the dead can know the whole truth about what happened. However, although Jean says he is not ready to hear the story from his father’s ghost, we learn that he has in fact already read the story in a letter from his mother, who is still alive and living in Kigali. For the rest of the book, Jean travels around Rwanda searching for witnesses, finally promising the ghost of his sister that he will one day find those who were responsible for her death. In other words, La Promesse faite à ma sœur also appears to highlight the importance of living witnesses who can speak or write about their experiences rather than following writers like Levi and Agamben in privileging the testimonies of the dead.10 In the Rwandan context, the devaluation of living witness accounts has serious implications since the uniquely intimate nature of the genocide makes it particularly difficult for witnesses to testify at all. Since 1994, many have found themselves living side by side with perpetrators, sometimes the very people responsible for killing their loved ones. Like all those who give testimony, Rwandan witnesses are faced with having to relive the horror of what happened to them and to those they have lost. In addition, many witnesses report feeling intimidated, harassed, threatened or bribed during and after trials, some dying in highly suspicious circumstances (Rettig, 204–205).11 Although the Rwandan National Police is responsible for witness protection, and the intimidation of witnesses is punishable by law, critics view the measures in place to protect witnesses as less than adequate and not well advertised to the general public (African Rights and Redress, 19). During trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania, witnesses reported feeling intimidated by the presence of people they knew to be genocide suspects found to be working for the court (African Rights and Redress, 59–63). In circumstances such as these, the decision to testify is especially difficult and potentially dangerous. The central importance of witnesses in creating narratives of genocide is reflected in the Fest’Africa writers’ emphasis on the role that real witnesses played in the construction of their stories. For example, in a 2001 interview with Noémie Bénard, Diop identifies by name the 10 A number of critics – see, for example, Mesnard and Kahan (11) – have criticized Agamben’s promotion of the voiceless for diminishing the importance of those who do testify. 11 See also Kayigamba ( 41) and African Rights and Redress (6–19, 61–62).

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Rwandan people he met during his trip to Rwanda and who he says inspired the fictional characters in Murambi (Bénard, 87). In particular, he states that Siméon, the key witness character in the novel, is based on a Rwandan man called Apollinaire. Similarly, Tadjo emphasizes the fact that L’Ombre d’Imana is based on her personal encounters with real Rwandan people, but she does this within and around the text itself. At the end of the text, Tadjo thanks all those she met during her trip and ‘qui ont bien voulu [lui] faire entendre leurs voix’ [who agreed to let her hear their voices], but no individuals are actually named. Instead, the use of quotation marks around many of the first person narratives included in Tadjo’s text gives them the status of legitimate, oral testimonies, suggesting that the author may have recorded individuals speaking as she travelled around Rwanda. Although, as discussed in the previous chapter, Tadjo very much positions herself as an outsider in relation to the genocide, she is nevertheless keen to authenticate her text with what are presented as the personal stories of witnesses. Even Monénembo – who prefaces L’Aîné des orphelins with the disclaimer that ‘Si le génocide rwandais est irréfutable, les situations et les personnages de ce roman sont, eux, fictifs pour la plupart’ [While the reality of the Rwandan genocide cannot be denied, the situations and the characters in this novel are, for the most part, fictitious] – presents his fictional survivor’s story as if it were a testimony. First-person narrator Faustin introduces himself with a brief autobiographical summary that, combined with the transcribed mispronunciation of French words such as ‘événements’ [‘events’] as ‘avènements’ [‘advents’], attempts to give the reader the impression of a real survivor speaking.12 However, the creation of fictional voices based on real-life witnesses is a risky process, as evidenced by the hostility which greeted Hatzfeld’s first volume of testimonies, Dans le nu de la vie (Coquio, 2004: 171–172). Although she accuses Hatzfeld of concealing the processes of transcribing, translating and poeticizing oral testimonies, Coquio concludes that Hatzfeld’s writings demonstrate the fragility of the boundary between witness testimony and literature (2004: 172). In a later reflection on his experience of recording testimonies from survivors and perpetrators in his best-selling Rwandan trilogy, Hatzfeld himself confirms that: 12 For Small (203), Monénembo’s style of presentation recalls Hatzfeld’s (2000) summary descriptions of survivors in Dans le nu de la vie (though both texts were published in the same year).

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Of course, for writers of fiction, the process of transformation is more explicit than for Hatzfeld, whose works are nevertheless presented as ‘authentic’ testimonies. Yet the ethical implications are similar, if not to say the same, for the creative writers, as they too share a concern with authenticity and truth. Imagined primary witnesses are present in all the Fest’Africa narratives, but their words are mediated in most cases by the narrator and, in all cases, by the author. Speaking on behalf of those who witnessed and/or survived the genocide can be problematic, particularly for those who have had little or no personal involvement with the events of 1994. This explains what Michael Syrotinski describes as the intense anxiety of the Fest’Africa authors faced with writing about the genocide: ‘Almost all the writers were, unsurprisingly, left with a sense of impotence, which often took the form of a compulsion to emotional identification or mimicry, and then a denial of such identification’ (431). The exception for Syrotinski is Monénembo, whom he describes as ‘careful to avoid the pitfalls of affective identification’ (437). It is true that L’Aîné des orphelins works hard to maintain a distance not only between reader and text, through the antipathetic narrator, Faustin, but also between author and text since nowhere is Monénembo’s authorial presence felt. In each of the other (semi)-fictional texts by Diop, Ilboudo, Tadjo and Waberi, the author’s emotional identification is strongly felt, which, as Syrotinski rightly notes, is completely at odds with some of these authors’ explicit attempts to efface their own investment in the genocide through published interviews and prefatory disclaimers in

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their texts (431). For example, in his preface to Moisson de crânes, Waberi describes his own position as ‘faire le mort’ [playing dead] (14), a metaphor that encapsulates his own ambiguous relationship with Rwanda and that of some of his fellow travellers. On the one hand, the Fest’Africa authors express their desire to bury themselves beneath their stories; on the other, their authorial presences are forever breaking through their narratives as they struggle to separate their own experiences from those of the people of Rwanda. However, while Syrotinski attributes this ambivalence to ‘almost all’ of the writers in the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ project except Monénembo, I would argue that his conclusion cannot so easily be applied to the women authors in the group, particularly Tadjo. Indeed, both Ilboudo and Tadjo are conspicuous by their absence in Syrotinski’s article. While Diop, Waberi and Lamko might appear to struggle with affective identification, Tadjo does not attempt to efface her personal engagement at all, but rather writes her own emotional and physical responses into her text. Unlike her male counterparts, Ilboudo also offers no paratextual attempts to minimize her own investment in the process of writing about the genocide. Murekatete does, however, demonstrate the intrusion of the author that Syrotinski describes as ‘emotional identification or mimicry’, but this is nowhere contradicted in interviews or disclaimers by the author. What all the Fest’Africa writers do, including Monénembo, is record other people’s testimonies, real or invented, in a fictionalized form. This can result in a certain degree of confusion between what authors did and did not see, an issue that is particularly striking in the presentation of the author in Moisson de crânes, where Waberi is described as having ‘vu les massacres à la machette, à la grenade, les émasculations, les viols, la mutilation de corps encore vivants, le désarroi, la peur, le dénuement …’ [seen the massacres with machetes, with grenades, the castrations, the rapes, the mutilation of living bodies, the helplessness, the fear, the destitution …] (7). Given that Waberi only travelled to Rwanda for the first time in 1998 and then again in 1999, he clearly did not see any of these acts of violence with his own eyes, but rather experienced them indirectly through the accounts of other witnesses who were present in 1994. Thus, although Syrotinski seems to single out L’Aîné des orphelins as ‘a narrative which may blur the distinction between factual witness statement and fictional manipulation of the truth, and which we may find unacceptable, even unforgiveable, or at the very least incredible’ (437), I would suggest that the same can be

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said of all the Fest’Africa novels. While Syrotinski implies that the other texts ‘[pretend] to stand in for direct testimony’ (437), I would argue that what is interesting about all the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ texts is precisely this blurring between testimony and fiction that he attributes only to Monénembo. What stands out in Monénembo’s text is the extent to which it consistently draws attention to the unreliability of the witness narrative. The circumspection with which witness accounts are sometimes received by their audience translates into an emphasis among many fictional witness characters on the importance of being believed. When in Murambi Gérard gives Cornelius his horrifying account of watching a militiaman rape a woman before and after she is violently killed, he insists, ‘J’ai vu cela de mes propres yeux. Est-ce que tu me crois, Cornelius? Il est important que tu me croies’ (Diop, 2001: 211) [‘I saw that with my own eyes. Do you believe me, Cornelius? It’s important that you believe me’ (2006: 175–176)]. Here, Diop points to the importance of witness accounts not only being heard, but also being believed. Similarly, Cornelius’s uncle Siméon, also a survivor, ends his story of the genocide by asking Cornelius if he has heard what he had to say: ‘M’entends-tu?’ [‘Do you hear me?’], to which Cornelius replies, ‘Je t’entends, Siméon Habineza’ [‘I hear you, Siméon Habineza’] (2001: 205; 2006: 171). Here, the French verb ‘entendre’, meaning both ‘to hear’ and ‘to understand’, symbolizes the testimonial pact that needs to be established between witness and audience and which extends to the relationship between the text and its reader. The importance for witnesses to find a non-judgemental, non-appropriative interlocutor who listens with generosity is central to Parkin’s Baking Cakes in Kigali, in which Angel spends much of her time listening to witnesses’ stories. After a conversation with Françoise, who saw her husband and elder son hacked to death along with the Tutsi people they had been hiding in their house, Angel thanks her friend for sharing her story. ‘No, Angel’, Françoise replies, ‘I am the one who must thank you for being someone who has ears that want to hear my story and a heart that wants to understand it’ (256). Sometimes what is described is so horrific that it stretches the bounds of credibility. For this reason, the Fest’Africa writers attempt to moderate their descriptions, as Diop explains: Pour ne pas donner au lecteur l’occasion de refermer les yeux, j’ai soigneusement sélectionné les scènes à décrire. […] Chaque fois que les

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événements m’ont paru trop cruels et incroyables, je me suis gardé d’en parler. […] Le lecteur aime croire que ce qui est dit dans tel roman sur un génocide est totalement inventé, ça l’aide à se sentir bien et à ne pas avoir l’impression que notre univers est si épouvantable. (in Di Genio, 2006) [So as not to give the reader the opportunity to close his or her eyes again, I carefully chose the scenes I wanted to describe. […] Each time events seemed too cruel or unbelievable I avoided talking about them. […] The reader likes to believe that what is said in a particular novel about a genocide is totally invented. That helps him feel okay and to have the impression that our world is not so terrible]

But this concern with attenuating the horror to make it believable is not shared by the Rwandan writers. Kayimahe, Karege and Rurangwa make no attempt to spare the reader in their contemporaneous fictional accounts of the atrocities of genocide. Presented as a descent into hell, Kayimahe confronts the reader with horrific descriptions of the violence at Nyamata as seen through the eyes of ‘L’Eradicateur’ [the Eradicator] (2014: 123–126), scenes that offer a powerful contrast with the still shocking but controlled representations of the dead recorded by the Fest’Africa tourists after the genocide. Violence is also presented in extremely graphic terms in both Sous le déluge rwandais and Au sortir de l’enfer, both titles defining the genocide as a traumatic event of biblical proportions. Unlike the Fest’Africa writers, these Rwandan writers refuse to underplay the scale or degree of the horror. This difference is demonstrated in Diop’s preface to Au sortir de l’enfer, in which he singles out for special mention what he describes as the unbearable obscenity of some of the contents of Rurangwa’s novel: Le langage est cru et le charcutage des corps absolument insoutenable. Il s’agit ici, comme il y a douze ans, de sexe et de rage de destruction, de chairs que l’on transperce et de hurlements de terreur auxquels répondent les infâmes ricanements des bourreaux. (7–8) [The language is crude and the butchery of bodies absolutely unbearable. Just like twelve years ago, it’s about sex and the fury of extermination, about the perpetrators’ despicable laughter at the piercing of flesh and screams of terror]

Whereas in Murambi, Diop calls for the chronicler of genocide to ‘apprendre – chose essentielle à son art – à appeler les monstres par

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leur nom’ (215) [‘learn – something essential to his art – to call a monster by its name’ (2006: 179)], Rurangwa has clearly mastered this art and forces readers to see the monsters for themselves. In the chapter entitled ‘Au milieu de l’enfer’ [In the middle of hell], Rurangwa provides an extremely graphic description of Hutu extremist Casimir Kayiru murdering his own brother, Anastase Benimana, father of the protagonist, Jean-Léonard. Having beaten Anastase to death with a nail-studded club, Casimir cuts off his head and genitals in front of his brother’s wife and three children. At this point, Rurangwa’s description focuses on the victim’s bloody brains spraying over the floor and soiling the living room furniture, emphasizing the macabre juxtaposition of extreme violence with the banality of everyday life that characterized the genocide. Next, Casimir disembowels his nephew Alain-Pierre with a bayonet and forces his sister-in-law Irène to watch the gang rape of her two daughters before she herself is sexually humiliated, raped and killed by Casimir. This horrific scene is immediately followed by the appearance of fellow journalist Célestin Sembagare at Jean-Léonard’s house, accompanied by a gang of five militiamen. Drunk and stoned, Célestin is wearing a blood-red headscarf and tells his colleague he is there to drink the blood of Jean-Léonard’s family. Throughout this chapter, the repetition of the word sang [blood] effectively conveys the image of a city running in blood.13 Blood and brains pour down a wall after Célestin has spun Jean-Léonard’s baby son around by his ankles and then hurled him against the wall to die. Having watched his baby being brutally murdered, Jean-Léonard is then forced to witness the gang rape of his wife, who is left for dead while he is dragged away to see the brutalized remains of his father and other members of his family. On the way, he is subjected to sights and sounds normally represented only in horror films or, less graphically the narrator suggests, in Dante’s Inferno or the novels of the Marquis de Sade (86). Forced to walk over mutilated, disembowelled, decapitated bodies, Jean-Léonard hears all around him the screams of young women being raped and sees militiamen covered in blood arguing over the spoils of their crimes. Amidst all this horror, there is one sight so monstrous that it sends a shiver down 13 Writing about her decision to testify before the ICTR as a witness for the prosecution, British journalist Lindsey Hilsum states, ‘I said in my testimony that I had thought the phrase “rivers of blood” was a metaphor, but in Kigali I saw gutters literally streaming red’ (2003: 79).

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Jean-Léonard’s and the reader’s spine: a young baby bathed in blood suckles at the breast of his decapitated mother while the mother’s head is being mauled by two black dogs (85).14 Such is Célestin’s contempt for the bodies of Tutsi victims that he cuts off the baby’s head and reprimands it before throwing it to the dogs. When they arrive at Jean-Léonard’s father’s house, the bodies of the protagonist’s family are piled up in the form of a cross, naked and covered in bullets, the amputated genitalia of the male family members placed in the mouths of his dead mother and sisters (86). Just as Jean-Léonard is initially spared by Célestin so that he can witness the torture and death of those he loves, so the reader is also forced to visualize the horror that Rurangwa portrays in unbearable detail. Rurangwa has a clear agenda, as Diop explains in his preface to Au sortir de l’enfer: Obliger le lecteur à regarder ces démons-là est aussi une façon de lui jeter à la figure: ‘Voici ce que, dans ton hypocrisie, tu as refusé de voir en 1994’. (2006: 7–8) [Forcing the reader to look at those demons is also of way of throwing in his or her face: ‘Here is what you, in all your hypocrisy, refused to see in 1994’]

Jean-Léonard is then saved and taken into hiding by the family’s Muslim servant, Juma. Despite the horror he has seen, he wants to live, ‘pour témoigner un jour de ces horreurs’ [to bear witness one day to these horrors] (Rurangwa, 2006: 90). For Rurangwa, the act of bearing witness is crucial. Those who refused to acknowledge what was happening in Rwanda in 1994 must be confronted with the truth, however shocking that truth may be. Rurangwa’s novel is marked by an imperative to tell, both at the level of his own writing and in the words he attributes to his characters. Quoting Michael Guede, Rurangwa confirms that, in his view, ‘l’écriture fait passer le cap de l’indicible’ [writing overcomes the block of the unspeakable] (195). In Au sortir de l’enfer, bystander Théodore’s lengthy monologue emphasizes the importance of speaking about the genocide. Haunted by the ghost of his dead brother’s victim, Philibert, he believes that recounting the horror will release him from his trauma. He tells the ghost: 14 The image of a live baby suckling at his or her dead mother’s breast is a recurrent image in Rwanda genocide fiction. See, for example, Karege (2005: 192); Kayimahe (2014: 138); Monénembo (2000: 157).

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Dire tout ce qui s’est passé le plus crûment possible. C’est ça ce que tu veux. Mais, c’est horrible, Philibert! C’est atroce! C’est indicible! Mais puisque tu veux que je dise l’indicible, je veux le faire. (138) [Tell everything that happened as bluntly as possible. That’s what you want. But it’s horrible, Philibert! It’s atrocious! It’s unspeakable! But since you want me to speak the unspeakable, I’ll do it]

What follows is an extended summary of the genocide culminating in a long list of atrocities, including decapitation, rape, burning and burying individuals alive, drowning people in latrines and septic tanks, slicing open pregnant women’s bellies, roasting women on spits and deliberately infecting women and girls with HIV (146). Rurangwa is not alone in his determination to describe the horrors of the genocide explicitly. Sometimes the reader is shocked by the banality with which barbaric acts are described by Rwandan authors. For example, in Kayimahe’s La Chanson de l’aube, génocidaires are depicted tearing off children’s limbs ‘ainsi qu’on fait d’un poulet rôti qu’on se partage lors d’un camping en brousse’ [as you do with a roast chicken you share when you’re camping outdoors] (141). In comparing the dismembering of children with the profoundly human experience of eating roast chicken on a camping trip, Kayimahe emphasizes the extraordinary inhumanity of genocide. Elsewhere, the inventive and relentless nature of the horror is powerfully conveyed through long lists of atrocities. In the middle of another list of horrific acts of barbarity, Kayimahe’s narrator concludes that, ‘Partout règne l’agonie, la cruauté est devenue ingénieuse, la soif de sang inextinguible’ [Agony reigns everywhere, the cruelty has become ingenious, the thirst for blood inextinguishable] (203). Like Kayimahe, Karege bases his novel on his personal experiences of witnessing the genocide. Both authors’ novels are extremely graphic and include examples of sadistic violence that are rarely found elsewhere. For example, La Chanson de l’aube describes a woman slicing pieces from a live baby into a cooking pot while she sings him a nursery rhyme (204). In Karege’s Sous le déluge rwandais, Gégé’s move with the Red Cross to a new camp in Butare is accompanied by a catalogue of extraordinary acts of humiliation and violence. These include a description of a militiaman slicing off a man’s penis when he needs to urinate before he is killed; a young girl’s plaits being ripped out of her head, one by one, until her scalp is covered with blood; and a man being forced to have sex with his elderly mother in public before both of them are slaughtered

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(199–200). Other stories include that of Gakende being burnt out of his hiding place and then chopped into pieces and Philomène who, after being raped, has a stake pushed into her vagina. Yet, despite the extreme cruelty of what is described, the narrator reminds us that such scenes do not come close to representing the full extent of the genocide: Nous savions que ce que nous voyions n’était qu’une minime partie des horreurs qui se commettaient sur l’ensemble de cette campagne et sur ces barrières à un autre moment où nous n’étions pas là. (200) [We knew that what we were seeing was only a tiny part of the horrors being committed across the countryside and at these roadblocks at other times when we were not there]

As such, Karege suggests that what he is describing in his novel is restricted to what he himself witnessed at a particular time in a particular place. Many more unimaginable atrocities were being committed, perhaps even more shocking and horrific than those presented here. Sexual violence was rife during the genocide and descriptions of rape and sexual torture are common in the fictional texts. In Le Chapelet et la machette, Karangwa describes Célestin raping and killing his mother’s friend Rosalie, an old woman who had been hiding in their house. The decision by male authors to give accounts of acts of sexual violence contrasts with Rwandan women rape survivors’ reticence about their experiences.15 Delphine who, aged twelve, found herself orphaned and alone after her parents and seven siblings were murdered by the génocidaires, and who was raped by a number of different men, told African Rights, ‘It’s really tough to talk about rape, especially because the facts overwhelm us. I, personally, cannot because it disturbs me so much’ (African Rights and Redress, 92). Other women explain their silence by the shame they feel about what happened to them (92–95). As Newbury and Baldwin explain, ‘the stigma of rape is enormous’ in Rwanda (5). In Karangwa’s novel, Célestin’s mother chooses to hang herself when she discovers that her son has raped and killed her friend. By describing acts of rape and sexual torture in their stories, male Rwandan authors acknowledge the gender-based violence committed against hundreds of thousands of women during the genocide, and stand as witnesses of acts that for individual women often remain 15 The mandates of both the ICTR and gacaca included sexual violence. Since 1998, rape can be prosecuted as a category 1 crime of genocide, but convictions have been rare (See African Rights and Redress, 86–99).

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unspeakable.16 While such acknowledgement is important, these acts of witnessing are not unproblematic since they are both fictional and written by men, creating a doubling of the distance between victim and witness. Lamko raises this issue in La Phalène des collines when the eponymous narrator criticizes the way the story of her rape and vaginal impalement is recounted by the male guide. In her view, ‘l’on est seul vrai témoin de son histoire et seul véritable miroir de son visage’ [we are the only true witnesses of our own stories and the only true reflections of our own faces] (31). Of course, the legitimacy of the witness account challenged by the moth-narrator is further challenged by Lamko’s own role as a tourist-author, which provides another layer to the experiential distance between witness and victim. In other words, while all writers of genocide fiction are witnesses in a general sense, their proximity to – or distance from – the events affects the way they write about the genocide as well as how their texts are received. For Catherine Coquio, ‘le texte est de nature essentiellement différente selon qu’il témoigne au sens où le fait un survivant, ou au sens où le fait un tiers’ [the text is essentially different in nature depending on whether it testifies as a survivor would or in the way a third party would] (2003: 8). The role of third parties as secondary witnesses is a complicated one which, as discussed in the previous chapter, is a central preoccupation in the fictional texts produced by the tourist-writers on the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ mission. While Coquio recognizes the importance of third parties in the transmission of memory narratives, she also draws attention to the dangers of claiming to share or internationalize other people’s grief, particularly when, as is the case for Rwanda, the memory is complicated by the damaging effects of European involvement. The intervention of a third party, she writes, runs a number of risks depending on whether the secondary witness is African or European: if European, there is a danger of the secondary witness colonizing the memorial process; African third parties, she suggests, might project their own suffering onto the memory, thereby appropriating it for themselves (2003: 7). 16 Despite the taboo surrounding rape and the stigmatization of rape victims in Rwanda, a significant number of Rwandan women have spoken out about the sexual violence they experienced during the genocide. Some have recorded their testimonies for Genocide Archive Rwanda: http://www.genocidearchiverwanda. org.rw/index.php/Welcome_to_Genocide_Archive_Rwanda, accessed 21 October 2014.

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To a certain extent, the process of writing fiction makes all writers secondary witnesses, since fiction necessarily increases the distance between the narrative and the event. During the Kwibuka 20 commemorations of the genocide in Rwanda in 2014, a group of African writers was invited to participate in a Café Littéraire event in the capital, Kigali.17 One of the writers present was Scholastique Mukasonga. Having spent 1994 in exile in France, Mukasonga explained that losing her entire family in the genocide is what prompted her to write: ‘In fiction’, she explained, ‘you become a witness from the outside’. What links all the novels about the genocide is an emphasis on the difficulty of witnessing. Questions arise around who can give testimony. Whose story is legitimate? What are the limits of fiction in representing the truth? On the one hand, as we have seen, writers share a stated commitment to the importance of recording the truth about what happened. On the other, the choice of fiction signals the limitations of testimony and allows writers to draw attention to the difficulty of ever arriving at a completely true or comprehensive account. Whether primary or secondary witnesses, writers of fiction position themselves as what Mukasonga calls ‘witnesses from the outside’ and so creates an important critical distance between themselves and the events of 1994. Diop confirms the distancing role fiction plays in commemorating genocide when he openly criticizes his own attempt to create a highly literary imagining of Rwanda in his novel Le Cavalier et son ombre, published in 1997 before Diop had visited the country (2003: 77–78). When, in 1998, he visited the memorials and talked to survivors along with the other members of the Fest’Africa party, Diop describes himself becoming more humble and more aware of the limits of genocide fiction. He writes that ‘l’effarement absolu était au détour de chaque témoignage’ [we listened to each testimony in absolute stupefaction] (78). Out of respect for those who shared their stories, Diop and the other ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ authors were concerned not to take too many liberties with the testimonies they heard (76). For fellow traveller Waberi, this translates into a ‘devoir moral contracté auprès de divers amis rwandais et africains’ [a moral duty contracted with various Rwandan and African friends] (13). It is worth noting here that Waberi makes a distinction between ‘Rwandans’ and ‘Africans’. Just as Coquio suggests that only Rwandans can be primary witnesses, so Waberi considers himself a different kind of African witness from 17 See Chapter One for more about the Café Littéraire.

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Rwandan authors such as Karangwa, Karege and Kayimahe who saw the horror with their own eyes. These reflective comments demonstrate the precarious position of the secondary witness in relation to the story he or she is (re)telling. Writing about narratives of trauma, LaCapra suggests that the desired response of a secondary witness should be that of what he calls empathic unsettlement: the secondary witness ‘should reactivate and transmit not trauma but an unsettlement […] that manifests empathy (but not full identification) with the victim’ (1997: 267). Empathic unsettlement is highly evident in Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana, in which the author’s struggle with her own position in relation to victims and survivors runs through the narrative, as discussed in Chapter Two. Tadjo tries hard to avoid the vicarious traumatization that Kopf considers a result of the difficulty faced by the secondary witness in reconciling past events with their effects on the present (76). A term originally coined by Lisa McCann and Laurie Anne Pearlman (1990), ‘vicarious traumatization’ initially referred to the effects on trauma counsellors and psychotherapists dealing with the traumatic experiences of others. Kaplan extends the application of this concept to the analysis of texts in her oft-quoted study Trauma Culture: The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature. Here, Kaplan raises questions that relate to the impact of genocide fiction on readers (92). She even takes as a case study for her category of visually mediated trauma a documentary film about the Rwanda genocide, which she describes as a ‘tragic interethnic war’.18 For readers and viewers, as for therapists, the traumatic experiences of victims are mediated through narratives, be they textual, visual, therapeutic or sometimes a combination of these. Kaplan compares the situation of the trauma therapist to that of the film viewer, noting that, in both situations, the secondary witness (therapist or viewer) needs to maintain control of his or her cognitive functions in order to follow and decode the story. In other words, awareness of narrative is crucial. In most cases, Kaplan suggests, the secondary witness retains a certain amount of distance from the narrative, except in situations where ‘the story deals with traumatic situations that the viewer may 18 Given her misinterpretation of the genocide as interethnic war, it is ironic that Kaplan, describing her own response to the film as determined by empathic over-arousal, proceeds to define what she calls ‘empty empathy’ as ‘empathy elicited by images of suffering provided without any context or background knowledge’ (93).

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have experienced either directly or indirectly’ (90). What Kaplan does not do, however, is consider the effect of the multiple layers of mediation involved in the production of a fictional text, including film, about a traumatic experience. In a genocide novel, the experience of the primary witness has been mediated not only through its retelling by a secondary witness (the author), but also by the artistic requirements of the genre and sometimes by a translator. Only once it has gone through these various levels of mediation does Kaplan’s secondary witness (the viewer or reader) receive the narrative. Kaplan goes on to claim that in some cases therapists and viewers do not experience vicarious traumatization at all, but rather ‘feel the pain evoked by empathy – arousing mechanisms interacting with their own traumatic experiences’ (90). This remark recalls LaCapra’s insistence on the importance of making a clear separation between identification and empathy (2001: 21). The concept of vicarious traumatization suggests a point at which the boundary between identification and empathy has somehow been overrun. For Kopf, Lamko creates a fictional example of vicarious traumatization in La Phalène des collines when Pelouse develops a moth phobia after seeing the spirit of her dead aunt fly out of the pile of corpses in the church in the form of a moth (76–77). Although Pelouse does not realize that the moth is the reincarnation of her aunt, Lamko portrays her as haunted by moths throughout the rest of the novel. Here, the experience of Lamko himself is transferred onto the character of Pelouse. As he explains in an interview with Sylvie Chalaye, he remains haunted by the sight of Mukandori’s mutilated corpse, on which the moth-narrator is based: une image ne me quittait plus, celle du cadavre d’une femme violée avec un pieu dans le sexe dans une église. C’est une image qui m’est restée collée à la mémoire. J’étais tourmenté par cette image en quittant le Rwanda en 1998, et elle a été le point de départ de mon écriture. L’écriture n’a d’ailleurs pas été facile, car j’écris généralement la nuit, et c’est le moment où surgissent les fantômes surtout lorsqu’on a à se souvenir de tous ces sites du génocide avec tous ces corps sans sépulture. (Chalaye, 2001) [one image would not leave me: that of the cadaver of a woman who had been raped with a stake in her vagina in a church. It is an image that has remained fixed in my memory. I was tormented by this image when I left Rwanda in 1998 and it was the starting point for my writing. The writing has not been easy, as I generally write at night and that’s the time when ghosts appear, especially when you have to remember all those genocide sites with all those unburied bodies]

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Rather than vicarious traumatization, I read Pelouse’s trauma as a projection of the distress of the author-witness into his text. Kopf also singles out Cornelius’s feelings of anger when he visits Murambi as another moment of vicarious traumatization. Cornelius is horrified by the sight of the skeletons displayed at Murambi. For him, the corpses look as though they are still alive. Diop describes Cornelius wanting to flee, pacing up and down in the corridor like a caged animal and salivating excessively. As discussed in the previous chapter, he is overcome by the stench of death. However, as Deborah Horvitz suggests in her study of literary trauma, experiences such as these are a long way from the horror experienced by the victims of traumatic events such as the genocide in Rwanda. Writing about trauma fiction by American women, Horvitz is unambiguous in her rejection of vicarious traumatization. Discussing Shoshana Felman’s conclusion that students watching videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors themselves became victims of trauma, Horvitz concludes that ‘second-hand or vicarious perception of trauma is not tantamount to experiencing it’ (21). By creating fictional depictions of what Kopf reads as vicarious traumatization in characters like Cornelius in Murambi and Pelouse in La Phalène des collines, Diop and Lamko are projecting onto their characters their own physical and emotional reactions to the sights of post-genocide Rwanda, but there is no suggestion in either text that the trauma of the secondary witness compares with that of survivors of the genocide. The characters’ distress may indeed mirror that of the writers themselves, which is then projected onto the reader of their fiction. But, as Horvitz suggests in her response to Felman’s classroom experiment, any response on the part of the reader is far removed from the initial trauma of the genocide. Ilboudo creates the character of a traumatized witness in her novel Murekatete but, unlike visitors Pelouse and Cornelius, Venant is an RPF soldier who experienced the genocide first-hand. After rescuing Murekatete, Venant falls in love with the eponymous narrator and they get married. In an attempt to better understand the genocide, they decide to visit the memorials, including Murambi, the site that serves as a catalyst for Venant’s post-traumatic stress disorder, as the narrator observes: Depuis notre visite en ce lieu maudit, rien ne va plus. Au début, ce furent de légères turbulences auxquelles je ne prêtai pas toute l’attention due. Puis, ce fut une lame de fond qui déferla, nous submergea et noya ce que nous avions tenté de préserver dans cet univers de chaos. (61)

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[Since our visit to that accursed place, nothing is right anymore. At first, there was some light turbulence that I didn’t pay enough attention to. Then, there was a groundswell that opened up, swallowed us and drowned everything we had tried to hold on to in this chaotic universe]

After visiting Murambi, Venant starts to stay out all night drinking, taking drugs and sleeping with other women, all common features of post-traumatic stress disorder (Calhoun and Tedeschi, 5–9). When he returns, often in the early hours of the morning, he subjects Murekatete to ‘histoires macabres’ [gruesome stories], including, on the night of the marital rape, describing to her the noise an infant makes when its skull is crushed (Ilboudo, 67). To a certain extent, Venant’s compulsion to recount what he has witnessed to his wife can be read as a reflection of Ilboudo’s decision to record in Murekatete what she herself witnessed during her visit to Rwanda in 1998. This is not to suggest that the two experiences of witnessing are in any way comparable, but rather to explain what appears to be a degree of empathic identification with the characters in Murekatete (see Chapter Four). Rather than displaying instances of vicarious traumatization, the Fest’Africa fictional texts demonstrate the empathic unsettlement that LaCapra proposes as an appropriate response to the act of secondary witnessing. The texts do not suggest that their authors have been traumatized by hearing stories about the genocide, but rather use fiction to show what LaCapra calls the ‘desirable affective dimension of inquiry’ (2001: 78). Empathic unsettlement is also experienced by the reader, who becomes another indirect witness of the genocide. This, like the position of the author-witness, is not an easy one. Although the events of 1994 are now over, the atrocities are re-enacted through the experience of reading. Yet, as reader-witnesses we are now powerlessness to change the course of history. What this impotence reinforces is our failure as an international community to act in 1994. As readers we find ourselves once again in the role of passive spectators of genocide, witnessing but not stopping countless acts of unimaginable horror. While the non-Rwandan texts encourage us to reconsider our own (in)action after the genocide by focusing on the horror that is now memorialized in the genocide sites across Rwanda, the majority of the Rwandan texts force readers to witness again the atrocities that most of us ignored in 1994. As Judith Herman notes, the secondary witness, like the bystander, has a duty to respond: ‘When the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. The bystander is

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forced to take sides’ (7). Survivor-witness Kayimahe reinforces this view in La Chanson de l’aube when RPF Colonel Bigabiro tells Lieutenant Lionceau that: Quand on se veut homme de devoir et d’honneur, on a la dignité de garder les yeux ouverts devant les pires atrocités, le cran d’affronter la dernière abomination. C’est ainsi que l’on triomphe des perfidies et de toutes les pourritures humaines …’. (276) [When you want to be a man of duty and honour, you have the dignity to keep your eyes open when faced with the worst atrocities, the guts to confront the worst kind of abominations. That’s how we triumph over acts of treachery and all kinds of rotten human behaviour …]

By reminding us of our failure to act in 1994, Rwanda genocide fiction highlights the ethical responsibility of witnesses and bystanders. We have not only a duty to remember, but also a duty to witness, to empathize and to be unsettled. The next chapter further considers the question of empathic unsettlement through a discussion of the implications of fictionalizing the testimonies of those who survived the genocide.

chapter four

Survivors Survivors

In Moisson de crânes, Waberi records a meeting with Marie-Immaculée, an old woman who lost all ten members of her family in the genocide and nearly died herself. Marie-Immaculée keeps as a pet an overweight dog that fed on corpses during the genocide, possibly even those of her family. The dog, ironically named Minuar after the UN forces that failed to save the people of Rwanda, functions as a powerful symbol of survivor identity after the genocide. Those who survived are often treated with resentment and mistrust because, as Marie-Immaculée explains, ‘A nous les rescapés, on nous reproche d’avoir survécu’ [We survivors are blamed for having survived] (55). Similarly, in Au sortir de l’enfer, when returnee RPF lieutenant Sam Namagunga discovers that journalist Jean-Léonard was in Rwanda during the genocide, he immediately labels him ‘un rescapé!’ [a survivor!], but follows this by asking him what he must have done in order to survive (Rurangwa, 2006: 121). This same question follows Jean-Léonard around as he travels to Belgium and Mauritius; other people wonder how and why he alone was able to survive when all his family was killed. As these fictional examples remind us, the killings in Rwanda were so widespread and so successful that non-survivors sometimes find it difficult to comprehend how anyone survived at all.1 Some assume that, like Marie-Immaculée’s overweight dog, those who were not killed must have done something terrible to escape the massacres. Survivors are often suspected of having themselves participated in killing or of having negotiated their freedom, perhaps in exchange for sexual acts. Also, like the dog, survivors serve as a constant reminder of the horrors that many would like to forget. As Dauge-Roth notes, ‘survivors embody a disturbing memory, which 1 It is estimated that in 1994 as many as three-quarters of the Tutsi population were killed (Des Forges, 1).

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revives a chapter of Rwanda’s history that most people would like to see closed, while its aftermath still constitutes an open wound for those who have survived’ (2010: 8). Although many Rwandans would like to move on from the genocide, the survivors can never forget what happened in 1994 (Burnet, 86–92). Like Kayimahe’s survivor, Annamaria, and traumatized rescuer, Bigabiro, many Rwandan people are haunted by ‘visions infernales’ [hellish visions] (Kayimahe, 2014: 381) every day of their lives. Rurangwa’s survivor-protagonist, Jean-Léonard describes the genocide as like the poisoned tunic of Nessus: ‘[Le génocide] me poursuit où je vais. Il est collé à ma peau et me fait mal’ [The genocide follows me wherever I go. It is stuck to my skin and hurts me] (Rurangwa, 2006: 171). Through the parallel stories of Jean-Léonard and his wife JeanneLaurette, Rurangwa shows the impossibility for survivors to leave the memory of the genocide behind. Each believing the other dead, they both independently leave Rwanda to start new lives in Belgium, Jeanne-Laurette even taking a new name, reinventing her life story and wearing a wig ‘qui la rendait complètement différente de ce qu’elle était avant’ [that made her completely different from how she was before] (185). When Jean-Léonard and Jeanne-Laurette meet again by chance in Belgium, the novel highlights the inescapability of the past for those who have experienced genocide. Yet, Au sortir de l’enfer also seems to emphasize the need to move forward, as the couple is denied the possibility of being together again. They cannot be reunited because each is now in a new relationship; Jeanne-Laurette and her new partner also have a son. The intertextual reference to the story of Orpheus in the novel’s title is mobilized in the final scene when Jeanne-Laurette’s new partner, Orlando, tells them both: vous avez vécu un véritable enfer. Mais Dieu merci, vous en êtes sortis vivants. Vous devez maintenant penser à votre avenir. Ce qui s’est passé s’est passé. (191–192) [you have lived through a veritable hell. But, thank God, you came out alive. Now you have to think about your future. What’s done is done]

Like Orpheus, Jean-Léonard is advised not to look back, but in accepting this he tacitly agrees to lose Jeanne-Laurette for a second time. The incommunicable nature of the pain of survival is expressed through the final words Jeanne-Laurette speaks to her former husband. The unfinished sentence, ‘J’aurais aimé re …’ [I would have liked to re …] (193), invites the reader to imagine what she might have wanted to say.

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What was it she wanted to do again? To be reunited with her husband? Whatever it is, Rurangwa’s use of the conditional perfect tense clearly signals that it is already too late. The tension between being unable to forget and needing to move forward is a daily challenge for genocide survivors in Rwanda. It also represents a significant challenge for the Rwandan government, which has to balance the demands of reconciliation and growth with the need to acknowledge the experiences of survivors and to commemorate the genocide. Survivors face an enormous range of emotional, physical, psychological and practical problems on a daily basis. As well as pain, bereavement and grief, these include trauma, depression, HIV/AIDS, poverty and homelessness (Buckley-Zistel, 138–139). Many survivors now find themselves without any living family and so forced to deal with the aftereffects of genocide alone. In addition, some survivors experience threats, animosity and even violence from perpetrators and their families. Many of those who have given evidence in the various legal processes following the genocide have had to deal with intimidation, assault and even sometimes death. Having lived through the most atrocious events imaginable, and often left suffering long-term physical and psychological pain, survivors occupy an ambivalent place in Rwandan society. So many people were killed in 1994 that survivors are greatly outnumbered by the rest of the population, which includes a significant number of génocidaires and their families. 2 Uniquely, Rwandan survivors often find themselves living next door to perpetrators and their relatives, sometimes becoming dependent on these same people for support, particularly in rural areas (Buckley-Zistel, 143–144). Support from the government is limited and there has been controversy around its relationship with survivor associations. 3 While there are many different organizations working with genocide survivors in Rwanda, critics have drawn attention to the inhumane treatment of the former leaders of IBUKA, the umbrella organization for genocide survivors, who openly 2 In some sectors, fewer than ten Tutsi survived (African Rights and Redress, 34). There are between 300,000 and 400,000 genocide survivors in a population of 11.5 million people in Rwanda. See the statistics published by the Rwandan Survivors Fund SURF: http://survivors-fund.org.uk/resources/ rwandan-history/statistics/, accessed 19 June 2014. 3 Even for recognized survivors, the civil compensation scheme is unworkable and the extrajudicial humanitarian fund the FARG (Fonds d’Assistance aux Rescapés du Génocide) is not without its problems. See African Rights and Redress (100–105).

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criticized the government for what they claim is a lack of support (Longman, 2011: 30–31). All these factors, combined with limited access to public discourse and representation, leave many survivors feeling marginalized and stigmatized. While survivors frequently emphasize the importance of making their stories heard, authors who base works of the imagination on the real-life experiences of others leave themselves open to accusations of appropriation or exploitation. This chapter will consider how genocide survivors are represented in fiction, focusing on the ethical implications of speaking on their behalf. For critics of the Rwandan government like Susanne BuckleyZistel, survivors are not given enough opportunity to participate in Rwandan society which, she argues, chooses amnesia as a strategy to facilitate peaceful cohabitation (133–134). For Burnet, mourning in Rwanda has become ‘political and managed by the state’ (93). It is true that the Rwandan government’s decision to attempt to restrict acts of remembering to particular places and particular times leads some survivors to feel pushed to the margins of society. According to Cassius Niyonsaba, a survivor from Nyamata, La sévère politique de réconciliation interdit au rescapé de parler des tueries n’importe comment. Seulement quand il est invité à témoigner, dans les cérémonies, pendant les périodes de deuil ou dans les gacaca. (Hatzfeld, 2007: 102) [The harsh politics of reconciliation forbid survivors to speak about the killings in any way whatsoever, except when invited to give evidence, during ceremonies, during mourning periods or the gaçaça trials (2010: 82)]

On the other hand, as Niyonsaba does acknowledge, survivors are central to the national genocide commemoration ceremonies that take place in Rwanda every year, beginning in April, when the whole country spends three months remembering what happened in 1994. Survivors also play an important role in the national narrative of remembrance, acting as guides at the genocide memorials. The role of survivors’ testimony in public commemoration demonstrates an acknowledgement of the need for survivors’ stories to be heard, albeit only in certain places and at certain times. Having lived through the genocide, Kayimahe criticizes what he implies is the exploitation of survivors when, in La Chanson de l’aube, a survivor named Sarah is invited to respond to the public confession of the man who killed her family. Described as a walking skeleton

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bearing the scars and wounds of the torture she experienced during the genocide, Sarah s’était toujours estimée menue, effacée, inexistante et son statut de survivante méprisée, cernée par l’enfer et au bord de la tombe était une barrière sûre contre les intrusions dans l’intimité de son déchirement. (407) [had always considered herself unimportant, unassuming, non-existent and thought that her status as a survivor, scorned, surrounded by hell and with one foot in the grave, would be sure protection against intrusions into her personal heartbreak]

The implied marginal status of survivors is then contrasted with what the author presents as the Rwandan nation’s need for survivors’ pain, words and patriotism to be publicly articulated. As Kayimahe cynically suggests, survivors are central to commemoration, but this is often the limit of their perceived contribution to society: ‘Subitement, elle [Sarah] devenait un personnage de foire […] on voulait la consacrer héroïne d’un demi-jour’ [Suddenly, Sarah became a fairground character […] they wanted to make her a heroine for half a day] (407). Much like the victims’ bodies on display in the genocide memorials, survivors are encouraged to participate in public commemoration in order to resist genocide denial and so promote national reconciliation. During the first two weeks of the commemoration period, all shops and businesses close at lunchtime every day to allow communities to come together on a local level and remember the events of 1994. Large-scale events are also organized, including the annual commemoration ceremony attended by the President at Amahoro stadium on 7 April. Following this ceremony, a walk to remember is led by the youth of Rwanda from the parliament building to Amahoro stadium, where a candlelit vigil is held. Survivors are present at all these events, either giving testimony or as members of the audience. Their presence is particularly strongly felt at the stadium events as a significant number of individual survivors become extremely distressed, experiencing post-traumatic flashbacks, and are sometimes carried out by therapists, screaming in terror. Kayimahe insists on telling the story of the genocide in as much detail as possible. Both his testimony (2001) and his novel (2014) stand out in terms of their size and scope. Throughout La Chanson de l’aube, Kayimahe criticizes the refusal of the international community to recognize the genocide and the silence with which the horror was – and continues to be –witnessed by the rest of the world. Through our

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silence, he suggests, we became the génocidaires’ accomplices; only by allowing survivors to remember can the guilty silence begin to be broken (383). Although, as Kayimahe writes, the full extent of the individual survivors’ suffering will always be a terrible secret shared only with those who tortured them, this suffering, he suggests, must be explained to those who, in 1994, chose to look away (380). The importance of acknowledging survivors’ experiences is recognized by writers, who attempt to preserve these stories in works of literature. In Au sortir de l’enfer, Rurangwa describes a young survivor drinking beer in an attempt to forget his own experience of genocide. On the wall of a bar he writes in chalk, ‘Essuie tes larmes et tiens-toi debout’ [Wipe your tears and stand tall] (95), words which express the frustration that many survivors feel about being expected to move on with their lives.4 These words are subsequently taken up by the poet Bamara, who turns them into the title of a poem. Here, Rurangwa is making an intertextual reference to a play of the same name, written and directed by Rurangwa himself in tribute to the victims and survivors of the 1994 genocide. 5 By presenting the words on the wall becoming the title of a poem, which is also the title of his own play, Rurangwa highlights the role of writers who take survivors’ testimonies and transform them into literature, underlining the importance of recording survivors’ stories, but also implicitly reminding readers that most writers of fiction are not, in fact, survivors. Unlike testimony, fictional texts presume a degree of separation between the voices of real-life survivors and their representations in works of the imagination. In other words, however carefully an author of fiction may attempt to recreate a survivor’s voice, the aesthetic demands of fiction will require a certain degree of reinterpretation through which narrators and characters speak for the real-life people on whom they are based. Speaking on behalf of those who have only limited access to public discourse poses an ethical dilemma for creative writers: on the one hand, not to acknowledge survivors’ suffering runs the risk of 4 Putting the past behind you and moving forward is a leitmotiv in Kyomuhendo’s novel Secrets No More, in which genocide survivor Marina is repeatedly advised to ‘start a new life’ (76), whatever the personal cost. 5 The play Essuie tes larmes et tiens-toi debout!, which also includes a poet character named Bamara, has been performed around the world, including in Rwanda, by Rurangwa’s theatre troupe Izuba. See http://www.humura.ca/ cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&lang=en, accessed 17 June 2014.

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denying the genocide; on the other, creating imagined versions of their suffering denies survivors the opportunity to speak for themselves. Rwandan survivor Jean-Baptiste Kayigamba expresses his anger and dismay that survivors like him ‘have too often been denied the right to narrate the true and verifiable facts of the genocide and previous periods of violence that we survivors know better than the best historians and so-called political experts, many of whom could not even locate Rwanda on a map during the genocide’ (41–42). In terms of published works, it is true that, as Kayigamba suggests and I outline in the Introduction, the facts of the genocide have, for the most part, been recorded by people who were not there. Although, as discussed previously, an increasing number of survivors, mainly women, have published their own testimonial accounts of the 1994 genocide, works of fiction have been far more commercially successful than these published testimonies, and to date only five novels and one testimony have been translated into English. Of the translated novels, only two were written by Rwandans (Gatore, 2012 and Mukasonga, 2014) and neither is, strictly speaking, a survivor of genocide – an issue I expand upon below. The writer of genocide fiction thus has a degree of ethical responsibility towards survivors. As Kayigamba explains, ‘Observers of the violence and those who experienced it first-hand, like me, will often have different accounts of what took place’ (33). Survivor Innocent Rwililiza takes Kayigamba’s point further, claiming that witnesses, unlike survivors, can never fully understand the genocide. This includes survivors by destination: il se creuse un ravin entre ceux qui ont vécu le génocide et les autres. Quelqu’un d’extérieur, même s’il est rwandais, même s’il est tutsi et s’il a perdu sa famille dans les tueries, il ne peut pas comprendre tout à fait le génocide. Même s’il a vu tous ces cadavres qui pourrissaient dans la brousse, après la libération; même s’il a vu les entassements dans les églises, il ne peut pas partager la même vision que nous. (Hatzfeld, 2000: 110) [a divide is growing between those who lived through the genocide and other people. An outsider, even though he be Rwandan, even though he be a Tutsi and lost his family during the killings, cannot quite understand the genocide. Even if he saw all those corpses rotting in the bush after the liberation; even if he saw the heaps of corpses in the churches, he cannot share the same vision as us (2008: 81–82)]

These words have important implications for writers of genocide fiction since the number of survivors, according to Rwililiza’s definition, is very

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small indeed. Both Rwililiza and Kayigamba stress what they believe to be the differences between insiders’ and outsiders’ relationships with the genocide. How these differences are negotiated by different authors writing about survivors is the focus of this chapter. The question of survivor status is anything but straightforward in Rwanda. While, in Western discourse, the concept of the ‘survivor’ has acquired an all-purpose definition that, as Luckhurst explains, ‘strongly link[s] trauma to identity politics’ (62), encompassing survivors not only of the Holocaust, Vietnam and Hiroshima, but also of slavery, segregation, incest and rape, the term is a politically loaded one in post-genocide Rwanda. Here, the category of survivor also connects traumatic experiences with identity politics, but in a very particular way.6 For some researchers, like Max Rettig, survivors are all those who were targeted for extermination during the genocide, that is all Rwandan Tutsi and some Hutu (208). This, however, is not a definition that is accepted by all. According to Hintjens, the Rwandan government now refuses to include Hutu among those they identify as ‘survivors’ (87). Burnet takes this further, claiming that the RPF government ‘tends to classify all Tutsis as “victims” or (genocide) “survivors”’ (112). Now that the genocide is officially known as ‘The Genocide against the Tutsi’, only Tutsi can officially be acknowledged as survivors, to the anger and frustration of many Hutu in post-genocide Rwanda. Of course, strictly speaking, it is true that genocide can by definition apply to only one group of people.7 What the official narrative of the genocide refuses to do, however, is to allow any Rwandan Hutu to be identified – or to identify themselves – as survivors (Burnet, 7). At the same time, it also risks labelling all Hutu as collectively guilty (Hintjens, 87). For Vidal, the assumption of Hutu collective guilt is reinforced in the national genocide commemoration ceremonies, which, she argues, perpetuate ‘la menace que tout Hutu risquait d’être accusé de participation criminelle au génocide’ [the threat that all Hutu risk being accused of criminal participation in the genocide] (2004). Furthermore, while the Hutu were not directly targeted by the supporters of the genocidal government, those who opposed the killings, had Tutsi relatives or protected Tutsi 6 The rather loose definition of ‘survivor’ in the context of the Holocaust can be problematic, as Tal notes in her discussion of Elie Wiesel and Henry Kissinger (1–3). 7 Hintjens, however, argues that ‘It is useful to avoid using a purely racial definition of genocide’ (84).

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were also victims of the violence, and many died or lost their loved ones. The issue of who can be a survivor is further complicated by the fact that a number of those who escaped death are of mixed parentage, people labelled by the génocidaires as ‘Hutsi’. To demonstrate the complexity of what she argues is a racialized definition of genocide, Hintjens presents the profiles of three individuals who each survived different atrocities in 1994. None of the individuals she describes is recognized as a survivor because each is of mixed parentage. ‘The problem’, she concludes, ‘is that Rwandans are increasingly identified politically regarding their presumed role, rather than their actual role in the genocide, as it is now officially remembered’ (93). If only Tutsi who lived through the genocide can be categorized as survivors, then, of the eleven Rwandans I have identified as authors of genocide fiction, only three – Karangwa, Kana and Kayimahe – appear to come close to being recognized as such.8 Of these, only Kayimahe explicitly self-identifies as a survivor.9 While biographical research substantiates that Cyrien Kanamugire (alias Robusto Kana) lived through the genocide as a member of the RPF, working first as a journalist for the rebel radio station then as a medical support worker, much less is known about Karangwa.10 Although, as discussed briefly in the Introduction, Karangwa’s novel is framed by a dedication and a series of photographs that suggest he has had personal experience of the genocide, nowhere in either the text of the novel or its paratexts is he explicitly named as a survivor. This contrasts with the way in which he is presented in Firoze Manji and Patrick Burnett’s published collection of editorials from the electronic weekly newsletter Pambazuka News.11 This volume, which includes an editorial piece by Karangwa on the role 8 Karangwa’s CV, published online, states that he was a teacher at Byimana College in Rwanda from 1993 to 1999. He now lives in South Africa, where he works as a professional translator: cdn.proz.com/profile_resources/940046_ r4906eef555a2c.doc, accessed 29 January 2014. 9 The subtitle of Kayimahe’s 2001 testimony is Témoignage d’un rescapé [A Survivor’s Testimony]. 10 Kanamugire’s biography is published on the website of the Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies network. He also states that he was working as a journalist in Kigali on 6 April 1994 in the conclusion to his essay, Génocide au Rwanda: quinze ans plus tard (391). 11 Pambazuka News is produced by the pan-African organization Fahamu, which promotes social justice in Africa. See their website: www.fahamu.org, accessed 30 September 2014.

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of the church in the genocide, describes the author as having survived the genocide in Rwanda (xvii).12 Perhaps Karangwa’s decision not to promote himself as a survivor in his self-published novel reflects his personal rejection of the stigmatized identity of survivors that he describes in Le Chapelet et la machette. Survivors, he writes, ‘étaient marqués à jamais, condamnés par les hommes et poursuivis par le destin’ [were marked for ever, condemned by humanity and pursued by destiny] (108). Karangwa’s novel also includes a character who is filled with shame for having survived. Higiro is a former Marist priest who was the director of a school for visually and hearing-impaired children, many of whom were massacred in the genocide. Having witnessed the horror with his own eyes, he spends his time decrying the complicity of his people. A deeply religious man, Higiro cannot bear the hypocrisy he observed among church representatives during the genocide. His shame and anger about what happened isolate him from the Catholic Church, which ultimately engineers his admission to a psychiatric unit in an attempt to stop him giving testimony against a fellow priest. When Monsignor Gabriel visits Higiro in hospital, in an attempt to persuade him not to give evidence, the former priest explains to the bishop what it is like to be a survivor: – Dites-moi, Monseigneur, pensez-vous un seul instant à la souffrance silencieuse des survivants, à leur déchirure interne, à leur consomption lente et douloureuse? Vous arrive-t-il de croiser leurs regards vides? Je vous assure, Monseigneur, ce sont les gens qui ont tout perdu. Ce sont les gens qui ne croient plus en rien, plus en personne. (116) [Tell me, Monsignor, do you ever think for a single moment about the silent suffering of survivors, about their internal agony, their slow and painful deterioration? Do you ever look into their empty eyes? I assure you, Monsignor, these are the people who lost everything. They are the people who no longer believe in anything or anyone]

Although Higiro himself was attacked with a club and left permanently disabled, he does not want to self-identify as a survivor because he feels ashamed. In fact, he is the only one to have survived the massacre at the school; even the Hutu children were killed for refusing to murder their classmates. He finds himself shunned by fellow priests who also survived because ‘[ils avaient] peur de lui mais surtout de ses paroles’ [they were afraid of him, but above all of his words] (113). 12 Karangwa’s contribution is entitled ‘Safe Sanctuary? The Role of the Church in Genocide’ (Manji and Burnett, 49–52).

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The stigmatization of Rwandan survivors is a dominant theme in fiction about the genocide. Novels allude to the fact that survivors are not always treated with respect, particularly by returnees. Having lived for many years in exile in neighbouring countries such as Uganda, Zaire/DRC and Burundi, large numbers of formerly persecuted Tutsi returned to Rwanda after 1994. In Au Sortir de l’enfer, Rurangwa stages a conversation between the protagonist Jean-Léonard and RPF lieutenant Sam Namagunga in which the soldier criticizes Jean-Léonard for using writing rather than combat to challenge the genocide (121–122). What this scene reveals is a social hierarchy in post-genocide Rwanda in which survivors are ranked lower than returnees. Other texts point to the fact that survivors are often viewed with suspicion and assumed to have compromised themselves in some way in order to survive (Ndwaniye, 2006: 68). This distrust is then internalized and compounded by the guilt of the survivors themselves, as Siméon tells Cornelius in Murambi: ‘Certains se sentent coupables de ne pas avoir été tués. Ils se demandent quelle faute ils ont commise pour être encore en vie’ (Diop, 2001: 172) [‘Some feel guilty for not having been killed. They wonder what fault they committed to still be alive’ (2006: 143)]. As Yolande Mukagasana, the most famous published survivor, explains, survivors are doubly victims: firstly victims of genocide and then secondly victims of having survived (in Parisel, 7). This double victimhood is reflected in descriptions of survivors as haunted, as ghosts, zombies or shadow people, as Rwanda’s living dead: ‘je suis morte. Depuis bien longtemps’ [I am dead. I have been for a very long time] laments Murekatete (Ilboudo, 10).13 Believed to have been stillborn as a baby and then resuscitated by her mother, Ilboudo’s survivor-narrator is a woman haunted by death: ‘J’ai la mort aux trousses. Elle rôde autour de moi et détruit tout ce que j’aime’ [I’ve got death at my heels. It prowls around me and destroys everything I love] (22). Those survivors’ stories that are retold tend to emphasize just how close most survivors came to death. Writing about the aftermath of the Nyamata massacre, Kayimahe’s narrator describes the survivors found by the RPF as ‘des squelettes hébétés [gesticulant] comme des ombres’ [dazed skeletons waving like shadows] (2014: 269). In Diop’s Murambi, Gérard describes how he lay hiding under a pile of dead bodies to keep himself alive: 13 In Kinyarwanda, survivors are called ‘bapfuye buhagazi’ or ‘the walking dead’ (Prunier, 2009).

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Oui, j’étais obligé d’avaler et de recracher leur sang, il m’entrait dans le corps. Pendant ces minutes, j’ai pensé que chercher à survivre n’était peut-être pas la bonne décision. J’ai mille fois été tenté de me laisser mourir. (209) [Yes, I was obliged to swallow and then spit out their blood, it went into my whole body. During those minutes I thought that maybe trying to survive wasn’t the right decision. I was tempted a thousand times to let myself die (2006: 174)]

Through Gérard’s repeated references to the fact that he swallowed victims’ blood, Diop creates an uncomfortable parallel between survivors and the bloodthirsty génocidaires. In doing so, he highlights the social exclusion and suspicion that many survivors experience. ‘Survivor’, then, is not a label that many Rwandans want to embrace. Yet, at the same time, it is one that seems to be defined in terms of ethnopolitical exclusivity. One author who exemplifies the complexity of survivor status in Rwanda is Anicet Karege. The author of three novels and two essays, Karege is one of the most prolific Rwandan creative writers since 1994. His first published work of fiction, Sous le déluge rwandais, is presented as a quasi-autobiographical novel in which, according to the publisher’s blurb, the first-person narrative of Gustave Giraneza (Gégé) ‘ressemble point par point, sur les plans factuel et spatiotemporel au vécu de l’auteur lui-même’ [resembles exactly that of the author’s own lived experience in factual and spatiotemporal terms] (back cover). Although his identity card labels him a Hutu, Gégé is constantly taken for a Tutsi and is arrested and brutally tortured for challenging then President Juvénal Habyarimana in public. Through the events in the narrative, the narrator reveals the arbitrary and ultimately unreliable nature of the ethnic categories that became so important in Rwanda before and during the genocide. Unlike his friend Chartine, described as a ‘Hutu non contestée’ [an uncontested Hutu] (30), Gégé’s ethnic identity is constantly questioned by others. As a man from the south with a pointed nose, he is assumed to be in league with the largely Tutsi RPF rebels, despite his explicit, unwavering refusal to identify with any political, ethnic or regional group. When the genocide begins, Gégé is working for the Red Cross, but he becomes a wanted man because, as he explains: Les temps avaient changé et il n’était plus seulement question de région ou d’ethnie […]. Si vous osiez dire ouvertement que vous n’étiez pas d’accord avec la mort des tutsi [sic] et des opposants, vous étiez vous-mêmes considérés comme devant mourir et beaucoup sont ainsi passés. (201)

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[Times had changed and it was no longer just a question of region or ethnicity […]. If you dared to say openly that you didn’t agree with the death of Tutsi or opponents, you were yourself seen as deserving to die, and many passed that way]

In other words, when he is not being labelled a Tutsi, Karege’s narrator is associated with the parenthetical group generally identified as ‘moderate Hutu’ or ‘Hutu who opposed the genocidal regime’, a group that many Tutsi survivors recognize as having also been targets of the killers (Kayigamba, 39). Françoise in Baking Cakes in Kigali is implicitly identified as a Hutu when, talking about the people she hid in her house, she tells Angel, ‘Every day the radio told us that it was our duty to kill these people; they said that they were inyenzi, cockroaches, not human beings’ (Parkin, 252). Despite being a member of the Hutu majority, Françoise is unambiguously presented as a survivor by Parkin. As punishment for having tried to protect people from slaughter, Françoise’s husband and their son are hacked to death while she watches from behind a wall with her baby on her back. She explains: I tell you, Angel, if I’d been alone that night, if I hadn’t had Gérard on my back, I would have come out from behind that wall and said to the soldiers, I am that man’s wife, I too am guilty of protecting inyenzi, I too must die. I did not do that. But there are many, many times when I wish I had. If I had known then what survival was going to be like, I would not have chosen it. (255)

Although Hutu rescuers are portrayed as survivors in genocide fiction, Hutu authors can only be positioned as witnesses. Karege, for example, is presented as a witness on his section of the website of the writers’ association in the Rhône-Alpes region of France where he now lives.14 Yet, if we accept the publisher’s suggestion that his own biography is identical to that of his narrator, then Karege too can be identified as a survivor of the genocidal ideology that threatened his freedom and indeed his life. In fact, only one Rwandan author is explicitly presented by her publishers as a survivor: Gallimard’s prizewinning writer, Scholastique Mukasonga. On the back cover of her acclaimed first novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, Mukasonga is ambiguously described as ‘rescapée du massacre des Tutsi’ [a survivor of the Tutsi massacre]. Although this statement is true, it risks misleading the uninformed reader since the massacre referred to here is not the 1994 genocide but 14 http://www.uera.fr/ecrivains/karege_anicet.htm, accessed 12 December 2013.

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rather the attempted extermination of the Tutsi in 1973, which forms the basis of Mukasonga’s novel. It is possible that Gallimard’s ambiguous presentation of Mukasonga as a survivor is a deliberate marketing ploy to promote the author as what some readers identify as an ‘authentic’ Rwandan: a Tutsi survivor. In 1973, Mukasonga fled Rwanda with her family to settle in Burundi. She later moved to France, where she had been living for two years by 1994. In other words, Mukasonga is a survivor by destination. Given the contentious nature of debates around who has the authority to speak as a survivor, it is unsurprising that many genocide novelists demonstrate a degree of authorial reluctance to speak on behalf of those who survived. Only a few of the fictional responses to the genocide portray survivors as central protagonists. Two of the novels that do place imagined survivors’ stories at the centre of their text both focus on the devastating effects of surviving genocide on marital relations. In Rurangwa’s Au sortir de l’enfer, Jean-Léonard is the only member of his family who survives. Saved by the family’s Muslim house servant, Juma, he remains hidden in the house of Juma’s friend Hassan until the genocide is over and then struggles to rebuild his life after witnessing the horrific killing of his baby and what he believes to be the rape and murder of his wife. In Murekatete, by Fest’Africa writer Monique Ilboudo, the eponymous narrator-protagonist survives what we infer to be gang rape and near-death in the opening pages of the novel.15 Her subsequent marriage to RPF soldier Venant, who rescued her from the genocide, is gradually destroyed by the psychological after-effects of her husband’s trauma. Having lost both her children at the hands of the Interahamwe, Murekatete is unable to consummate her marriage to Venant and suffers from insomnia, nightmares and ultimately thoughts of suicide. Venant too has been traumatized by his experience and starts drinking, having sex with other women and smoking cannabis. As discussed in the previous chapter, Venant’s decline culminates in his marital rape of Murekatete, whom he infects with HIV. Whereas Rurangwa’s novel presents the death of a marriage at the hands of 15 Although, like many women genocide survivors in Rwanda, Murekatete never speaks explicitly of sexual violence, her ensuing loss of libido implies that she was most likely a victim of rape by the militia. Furthermore, the Interahamwe attack on Murekatete which opens the novel is depicted as an out-of-body experience (Ilboudo, 9), a sensation that Murekatete experiences again towards the end of the novel when she is raped by her husband Venant.

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perpetrators of genocide, Ilboudo’s Murekatete traces the destruction of a relationship by a traumatized rescuer-survivor. What both Rurangwa’s and Ilboudo’s novels stress is the way in which survivors become isolated and lose control over their own lives: ‘Dans ce déluge de souffrances, rien ne pouvait échapper’ [Nothing could escape from that flood of suffering] writes Ilboudo (66). For Rurangwa, survivors are like a boat alone at sea, driven by the wind (2006: 156). The isolation of protagonist Jean-Léonard is emphasized throughout his novel. On national liberation day three years after the genocide, Rurangwa describes Jean-Léonard feeling ‘étranger dans son proper pays’ [like a foreigner in his own country] (120). Just as, before and during the genocide, the Tutsi were identified as foreign invaders to be distrusted and ultimately eliminated, so Rurangwa suggests that Tutsi survivors again feel like outsiders in post-genocide Rwandan society. Having lost his entire family, his friends and his colleagues, Jean-Léonard finds himself living in a veritable ‘melting-pot’ of returnees, exemplified in the description of the clientele of the Intsinzi Bar in Remera, Kigali (96). Many of the returnees speak English rather than French as a first language, leaving the Francophone survivors marginalized linguistically as well as emotionally.16 The difficulty some survivors have in identifying themselves is encapsulated in Jean-Léonard’s repeated refrain that, for him, ‘le Rwanda n’existe plus’ [Rwanda no longer exists] (120; 123); he no longer has a home. Writing about the Fest’Africa project, Dauge-Roth questions the ethics of using fictional characters to bear witness to survivors’ suffering, particularly as many Rwandan survivors are illiterate and fiction risks misrepresenting their stories. Focusing only on the texts of Fest’Africa writers Diop, Lamko and Tadjo, Dauge-Roth identifies a number of techniques used to resist betraying survivors. These include grounding works of fiction within their historical and political context and situating narratives at a chronological distance from the genocide (2010: 96–97). In each of the three texts Dauge-Roth chooses to discuss, the action of the novel takes place after the genocide: Diop’s Cornelius returns to Rwanda in 1998 to discover what has happened to his family, Lamko’s narrative is set in 1999 and Tadjo’s two journeys took place in 1998 and 1999. Of course, the same is true of the three other fictional texts produced by the project: Ilboudo, Monénembo and Waberi also 16 The marginalization of the Francophone community has been exacerbated by the official shift from French to English in 2008.

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set their texts in Rwanda after the genocide. While this gap in time does, as Dauge-Roth suggests, ‘function as an invitation to maintain a critical distance between our position of indirect witnessing through reading and the position of survivors and their points of view’ (2010: 96), it does so only if we assume the position of survivors to be fixed within the period of April–July 1994. Since the identity of a survivor is necessarily determined only after the genocide, I would suggest that the chronological gap does not necessarily resolve the problem of speaking for survivors, but rather serves to emphasize the gap between genuine Rwandan survivors and the authors who tell survivors’ stories but did not experience the genocide themselves. In arguing that these three writers successfully negotiate the ethical dilemma of speaking for survivors, Dauge-Roth identifies what he describes as the ‘insurmountable gap’ between author and survivor that novels such as Tadjo’s demonstrate (2010: 106). To do this, he takes the example of Tadjo’s description of her visit to Ntarama church, where she imagines the thoughts of the memorial guide: ‘Quel motif inavoué nous pousse à regarder les yeux grands ouverts la mort dénaturée par la haine?’ (2000: 26) [‘What hidden motive drives us to gaze wide-eyed at death distorted by hatred?’ (2002: 15)]. While I agree that this effectively illustrates the limits of Tadjo’s understanding, I do not read this scene as a ‘double dialogue’ (Dauge Roth, 2010: 107). For me, what is striking in this scene is precisely the absence of dialogue since the guide is not given any direct speech; instead his words and thoughts are reported in the third person or imagined by Tadjo, sometimes representing a projection of her own anxiety about her subject position, as discussed in Chapter Two. The absence of dialogue in Tadjo’s first encounter with a Rwandan who lived through the genocide therefore functions as a powerful example of the difficulties faced by authors of fiction in telling Rwandans’ stories. Unable to empathize, Tadjo can only imagine. Where she does recount the guide’s words in the details of the story of his survival, the indirect nature of her reporting suggests a fear of misrepresenting what he said. Furthermore, what Dauge-Roth fails to mention is that the guide Tadjo meets in Ntarama is a Hutu and a former soldier in the Rwandan national army (Tadjo, 2000: 26). Retired for several years before being recruited to work as a guide, he hid inside his house while the Ntarama massacre was being carried out, stepping outside only when the noises of the killings had stopped to find his home surrounded by dead bodies (25). In other words, although he managed to avoid experiencing the massacre in Ntarama church, as a Hutu and an

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ex-soldier it is unlikely that he would have been a target. According to the official narrative, this guide is not a survivor of the Genocide against the Tutsi. Moreover, having spent his time in hiding, his credibility as a witness is undermined since, when he finally left his house, the massacres were over. As neither witness nor survivor and not identified as a perpetrator, the Ntarama guide is in a post-genocide no man’s land, which might go some way towards answering Tadjo’s question about why he is working in the memorial. However they are defined, survivors’ identities in all the genocide novels are characterized by a lack of belonging and a lack of control. This perhaps explains Ilboudo’s decision to present the experience of a fictional survivor in the form of a first-person narrative. By giving voice to a woman who has survived physical, sexual and domestic violence, Ilboudo is attempting to restore agency to a particularly marginalized and silenced group: women survivors. Although women make up the majority of the Tutsi survivors of the genocide in Rwanda, ten times as many widows as widowers having survived, women rarely participate in acts of public commemoration.17 If, however, we accept the view of survivors like Rwililiza and Kayigamba, who insist on the differences between insiders’ and outsiders’ points of view, then Ilboudo’s firstperson narrative becomes problematic, since Ilboudo herself is from Burkina Faso and not a genocide survivor. Unlike Tadjo, Diop and Lamko, Ilboudo effectively tries to close the gap between author and survivor. As far as I am aware, she is the only writer to do this in a fictional response to the genocide. Although Monénembo also writes his novel in the first person, there is nevertheless a strong emphasis on the constructed nature of his text, as I discuss below. What is also striking about Ilboudo’s novel is that, like Tadjo, she presents a Hutu as a survivor of genocide. Although Murekatete’s mother was a Tutsi, her Hutu father gives her Hutu identity. However, as a Hutu woman married to a Tutsi man, Murekatete is identified by génocidaires like Alfred Ndimbati in the novel as a ‘Hutsi, cet alliage contre nature [qui] étaient la pire des espèces’ [Hutsi, this hotchpotch that goes against nature, the worst of all species] (Ilboudo, 36). A similar family model is drawn in L’Aîné des orphelins, although Monénembo keeps the reader guessing about Faustin’s ethnicity. Indeed, one of the common features of all the fictional texts produced by the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ mission 17 http://survivors-fund.org.uk/resources/rwandan-history/statistics/, accessed 19 June 2014.

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is an attempt to challenge the ethnopolitics of post-genocide Rwanda in which Tutsi is synonymous with survivor, Hutu with perpetrator (Burnet, 130–133). Through her use of a first-person narrative, Ilboudo places much emphasis on the subjectivity of her eponymous victim and also facilitates reader empathy with a woman survivor of genocide. What her choice of narrative form also does, however, is complicate the relationship between author and text, particularly as the voice of Ilboudo herself sometimes seems to break through the first-person narrative. For example, after visiting the genocide site at Murambi, the narrator, Murekatete, exclaims, ‘Murambi a profondément ébranlé ma foi en l’humain. Est-il aussi capable de ça?’ [Murambi deeply disturbed my faith in humanity. Are human beings really capable of that?] (Ilboudo, 60). As Chantal Kalisa rightly notes in her brief commentary on these lines of novel: Having experienced and witnessed the killings of people including her own children, Murekatete would hardly make such a declaration. Instead, here we see Ilboudo the writer-witness who traveled to postgenocide Rwanda and in the process of writing her experience identifies completely with the fictive victim/witness she has created. (2009: 183)

Ilboudo was clearly so profoundly affected by her trip to Rwanda that she uses fiction to translate her own emotional responses to what she witnessed there; as Kalisa succinctly puts it, she is ‘writing her experience’. Another example can be found in her decision to follow three of the other authors on the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ mission and single out the story of real-life genocide victim Theresa Mukandori for inclusion in her text.18 Previously on display at the Nyamata church memorial as a symbol of the brutality of sexual violence in the genocide, Mukandori’s skeleton had her hands tied to her feet and a pickaxe forced into her vagina. In Murekatete, the narrator recalls the sight of the skeleton as a ‘Spectacle indécent. Spectacle indigne de mon humanité offensée. J’ai rencontré Mukandori, ma sœur bien aimée. Ligotée, violée, meurtrie’ [An indecent spectacle. A spectacle unworthy of my offended humanity. I met Mukandori, my beloved sister. Hands and feet bound, raped, beaten black and blue] (Ilboudo, 65). Here, Ilboudo clearly transfers her own reaction, which she describes as her ‘offended humanity’, to her narrator, Mureketate, in another example 18 See Chapter Five for further discussion of Theresa Mukandori.

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of the authorial identification Kalisa describes. Thus, although Ilboudo adopts a first-person narrative in the novel, her own authorial presence is sometimes palpable, suggesting the possibility of authorial empathy and solidarity with the fictionalized experiences she portrays. But this kind of authorial empathy can be self-serving and illusory, and risks skewing the representation of survivors’ stories through what the previous chapter discussed as vicarious traumatization. While the blurring of narrator’s and author’s voices is a common feature of African storytelling that has been used effectively by such renowned authors of published fiction as Ahmadou Kourouma, it is important to consider the ethical implications of the slippage between author and narrator in Ilboudo’s text. In almost seamlessly blending her authorial voice with that of the fictional survivor of genocide she has created, Ilboudo is stretching the limits of empathy and speaking for the survivor. While Ilboudo projects onto her protagonist her personal experience of visiting the genocide sites, her own relationship with the memorial and the events it commemorates are fundamentally different from those of the survivors in the novel. As discussed in Chapter Two, Ilboudo visited the memorial sites in Rwanda as an outsider, a tourist, whereas Murekatete and her husband go there in search of healing for their personal trauma as survivors of the genocide. In other words, Ilboudo draws on her personal experience as a dark tourist of the genocide to imagine the effects of the afterlife of violence in Rwanda on those who experienced it first-hand. Monénembo, on the other hand, is careful not to contaminate his fictional survivor’s story with his personal responses to the genocide. In fact, the first-person narrative he creates in L’Aîné des orphelins is intended to resist empathy or solidarity with its narrator, Faustin. In creating an antipathetic adolescent narrator who is sexually precocious, uncouth and morally ambiguous, Monénembo makes it difficult for the reader to identify with Faustin and so reinforces the gaps between author, reader and narrator that Ilboudo’s novel elides. Through Faustin’s narrative, the text stages the difficulties of translating a Rwandan survivor’s experience to a non-Rwandan, more particularly a white audience, represented in the novel by the character of Una Flannery O’Flaherty, the Irish Human Rights Watch worker whom Faustin refers to ‘Miss Human Rights’ or ‘la Hirlandaise [sic]’ [‘the Hirish woman’] (63; 2004: 37). Describing the recurrent nightmares he has been having in prison, Faustin explains:

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Au début, je pensais que cela venait, comme le disait souvent la Hirlandaise, des taumatrismes que j’avais subis. Mais la Hirlandaise, elle ne pouvait pas comprendre. Avec les Blancs, c’est difficile de parler, nos mondes ont été faits comme si les pieds de l’un étaient la tête de l’autre. (2000: 92) [At first, I thought that was caused, to use the Hirish woman’s word, by the taumatrisms I had undergone. But the Hirish woman couldn’t understand. It’s hard to talk with whites; our worlds were made as if the feet of one were the head of the other (2004: 55)]

As well as preventing empathic identification with the narrator, Monénembo deliberately makes the story difficult for readers to follow and understand. Faustin’s narrative jumps backwards and forwards in time, reflecting both the disordered nature of traumatic memories and the chaos of post-genocide Rwanda. He claims he can remember nothing beyond the moment when Colonel Nyumurowo grabbed the kite from his hand and locked the door of Nyamata church: Mes souvenirs du génocide s’arrêtent là. Le reste, on me l’a raconté par la suite ou alors cela a rejailli tout seul dans ma mémoire, en lambeaux, par à-coups, comme des jets d’eau boueuse jaillissent d’une pompe obstruée. (2000: 156) [My memory of the genocide stops here. The rest, I was told later, or it resurfaced on its own in my tattered memory, in spurts, like muddy water pouring out of a clogged pump (2004: 96)]

Like Faustin’s memory, the narrative is also marked by significant gaps and silences. For example, when Faustin is captured by an RPF soldier, he is quickly released from captivity when he tells the soldier his story, but Faustin’s genocide story is not disclosed to the reader until the closing pages of the novel. While he withholds the whole truth about the narrator’s experience of the genocide, Monénembo does provide a lot of detail about how Faustin and the other orphans survive afterwards on the streets of Kigali: the girls working as prostitutes, the boys shining shoes or acting as porters, that is, when they are not smoking cannabis, stealing or sniffing glue. As such, the novel foregrounds the consequences of genocide rather than the genocide itself. Through what Small identifies as Monénembo’s use of the device of repressed memory, the novel also stresses the psychological damage that Faustin’s experience has caused (208–209). An equally negative picture of the lives of orphaned children who

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survive is drawn through the character of Innocent Karangwa in Pierce’s Speak Rwanda. Having witnessed his mother and siblings being slaughtered in a church, Innocent becomes enlisted as a ‘soldier’s boy’ to a Hutu militiaman who repeatedly rapes him in exchange for his protection. When he eventually runs away, Innocent becomes a glue-sniffer living on the streets of Kigali and watching other orphans ‘die of sadness’ (175). These street kids are described in the novel as ‘shadow children’ who, having survived the most terrible atrocities in the genocide, are now forced to survive again, begging from tourists, stealing food and picking through rubbish tips to find objects to sell. In many ways, Innocent resembles Monénembo’s Faustin; both manage to exploit emotional reactions from others to their own ends. As we saw in the previous chapter, Faustin manipulates the foreign TV crews by pretending to be a different version of the survivor he really is; Pierce’s orphan plays on the fact he reminds RPF soldier Emmanuel of his own son to obtain privileges and gifts. What both orphans display is the level of resilience required to survive the atrocities of genocide. When he eventually makes it to Goma, Innocent demonstrates impressive entrepreneurial skills, buying and selling items, including dead people’s shoes, to keep himself alive. However, whereas Monénembo’s Faustin powerfully performs the ambiguity of survival in post-genocide Rwanda, Pierce’s attempts to present a balanced portrayal of the genocide through the use of ten first-person narrators, five Hutu, five Tutsi, lessen the impact of the fictional survivor’s voice, particularly as the narrative voices are barely distinguishable from one another. Like the other narratives in Speak Rwanda, Innocent’s voice is that of an archetype, as Lauren Lydic observes. Comparing Speak Rwanda to Courtemanche’s Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali, Lydic concludes that ‘whereas Courtemanche’s Rwandan characters are archetypal because they don’t speak for themselves, Pierce’s are archetypal because they do; they give voice to characters from the colonial library and international news media’ (62). Both Pierce and Courtemanche choose to speak on behalf of genocide survivors, the latter dedicating his novel to his dead Rwandan friends, as discussed in the Introduction to this book. Other outsiders, however, are more sensitive to the dangers of trying to speak for someone else. In Diop’s view, writers of genocide fiction have a responsibility not to take too many liberties with survivors’ stories. Writing about the Fest’Africa project, he explains that ‘la vraie commande du texte, non formulée, nous est venue des survivants et des morts’ [the real control

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of the text, which is not expressed, came to us from the survivors and the dead] (2003: 76). In his novel Murambi, Diop presents us with a key fictional survivor in the secondary character of Cornelius’s uncle, Siméon Habineza, one of the few to have escaped the massacre at Murambi. When he returns to Rwanda, Cornelius is keen to see his uncle again, expecting him to provide all the answers about what happened to the rest of his family. Cornelius is also described meeting other survivors, in particular his childhood friends Jessica and Stanley, who both worked for the RPF, and the traumatized ‘Sailor’ Gérard Nayinzira. According to Dauge-Roth, the encounters Cornelius has with individuals who survived the genocide underline what Diop promotes as the central importance of survivor testimony to the duty of memory in Rwanda: without listening to survivors’ stories, ‘those who are foreign to the genocide – like Diop and the majority of his readers – cannot understand the meaning and the experience of the genocide from their experience alone’ (2010: 159). Although survivors are present in Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana, very few of them speak in the first person, reflecting this author’s acute awareness of her ambivalent position in Rwanda. Unlike Ilboudo, Tadjo makes a clear distinction between her own responses and those of her fictional characters. Even when survivors are given direct speech, they often tell us little about their own experiences, demonstrating the repression often necessary for post-traumatic survival. For example, Nelly, who appears to be dying of an unidentified disease, tells us only that she cannot accept her daughter’s baby: ‘Celui-là, je n’en veux pas. Il est né de la guerre. Que voulez-vous qu’on en fasse?’ (2000: 47) [‘I don’t want this one. He was born of the war. What are we going to do with him?’ (2002: 35)]. When it seems that Nelly is about to hit the baby, her daughter says something to her mother that Tadjo chooses not to record, and Nelly lifts up the baby and kisses him. The reader infers that both women have been raped and that Nelly has contracted HIV/AIDS, but this is never articulated in the text, reinforcing the emphasis on survivors’ repression. There is, however, one important exception to Tadjo’s presentation of repressed genocide survivors in the story of a young Zairian woman who was targeted because she looked like a Tutsi. This woman’s story is presented as a first-person narrative in quotation marks as if it were a testimony. It is interesting that this is the one survivor testimony Tadjo chooses to include in this way. There is a hint of a possible identification between the young woman and Tadjo herself, as earlier in the text she records being told that she also looks like a Tutsi (2000: 33). Like Tadjo,

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the Zairian woman is a geographical outsider in Rwanda, yet she was raped in 1994, her husband and baby murdered. Unlike Ilboudo, however, Tadjo’s identification with a woman who lived through the genocide is indirect. While the text implies that, had she been in Rwanda in 1994, Tadjo might also have been a target for the killers, at the same time the author is careful not to transmit her own emotional experience through the voice of a survivor. Here, the quotation marks around the Zairian woman’s narrative, combined with Tadjo’s decision not to provide her name, reinforces the critical distance between author and survivor. For Dauge-Roth, there is a marked difference between Tadjo’s treatment of survivors in the author-centred travel journals that open and close the text, and the overtly fictional short stories that she places in between. In the short stories, he suggests, Tadjo ‘dares to cross the positional gap separating her from those who saw their lives radically redefined by the genocide. She takes the liberty to imagine how they envision themselves, view their daily negotiation of the genocide’s legacy and imagine their future’ (2010: 121). Here, Dauge-Roth’s use of ‘dares’ and ‘taking the liberty to imagine’ adds an interesting dimension to the ethics of creating fictional survival testimonies, suggesting that Tadjo is knowingly breaking some kind of authorial taboo. It is certainly true that the stories present very personal, at times horrific stories of individual people’s lives during and after the genocide. What is not true, however, is that Tadjo writes these fictional pieces in the first person, which is the foundation of Dauge-Roth’s analysis (2010: 120). Each of the stories is narrated in the third person, which, in my view, allows Tadjo to maintain the positional gap between author and survivors that characterizes her text and to resist the kind of affective identification that I distinguish as problematic in Ilboudo’s novel. Like Tadjo and Ilboudo, many authors choose to include characters who are survivors of rape. According to the Rwandan survivors’ fund SURF, between 250,000 and 500,000 women were raped during the genocide; of these more than two-thirds were infected with HIV. As a result of these rapes, as many as 20,000 babies were born in or after 1994.19 Boys were also raped, as Pierce’s Speak Rwanda illustrates. As discussed in Chapter Three, often the rape itself is not spoken about, reflecting the shame associated with rape and the stigmatization of survivors of sexual violence in Rwandan culture (Amnesty International, 5). In La 19 http://survivors-fund.org.uk/resources/rwandan-history/statistics/, accessed 19 June 2014.

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Promesse faite à ma sœur, Jean Seneza meets his childhood friend, the symbolically named Violaine, who was captured by militiaman Alain. 20 Violaine now has a ten-year-old son and describes how after Alain left she started being sick and her belly began to grow. Her story ends in suspension points and she breaks down in tears. Jean, not knowing how to react to what he has heard, chooses to leave, reinforcing the taboo of speaking about rape in Rwanda (Ndwaniye, 2006: 161). This verbally limited exchange emphasizes the difficulties survivors face in both speaking and being heard. Violaine does not know what to say and Jean does not know how to listen. Ndwaniye addresses this difficulty by including an incomplete, elliptical story in his novel. By refusing to give the details of Violaine’s story, he resists appropriating survivors’ stories or exploiting them while at the same time inviting readers to imagine them for themselves. By encouraging the work of the imagination, Ndwaniye is able to generate a more powerful empathic bond between reader and survivor than one created through graphic descriptions of sexual violence in fiction. While many fictional works paint a pessimistic picture of life for Rwandan survivors after the genocide, a number of them nevertheless end on an optimistic note. In La Chanson de l’aube, Lionceau is reunited with his baby son, the symbolically named Cyizere – ‘hope’ in Kinyarwanda – and begins a new life with Esther, the Hutu woman who rescued his son. The creation of an ethnically mixed couple as a positive image of the future also features in Ilboudo’s Murekatete, which ends with Aloys, a Hutu man whose leg was sliced off when he refused to join the Interahamwe, and Soline, a Tutsi victim of gang rape whose vagina was burned with acid. The novel ends with the couple gazing out at the sky, uncertain about the future, but filled with love and dreams. A more abstract vision of peace and reconciliation is found in Karangwa’s Le Chapelet et la machette, in which survivor Higiro dreams of two mountains separated by a valley with a river of blood which move together and fuse into a single mountain that is young and beautiful. It is particularly significant that two of the optimistic endings appear in novels written by Rwandan survivors. While both Karangwa and Kayimahe demonstrate the marginalization and stigmatization of survivors after the genocide, they nevertheless promote alternative, positive images of the future centred on the possibility of ‘ethnic’ mixing and reconciliation. 2 0 Violaine’s name marks her as a victim of rape, viol in French.

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While the non-Rwandan authors demonstrate anxiety about speaking for survivors and sometimes, as in the case of Ilboudo’s novel, appear to cross an unspoken empathic line, they share with the insiders’ texts an emphasis on the importance of telling survivors’ stories, despite the ethical risks involved. As Dauge-Roth points out, not doing so ‘runs the risk of feeding discourses that profit from survivors’ silence and translate their social silence into denial’ (2010: 118). Indeed, Buckley-Zistel’s fieldwork confirms that, ‘For most Tutsi survivors it [is] paramount to have their pain and suffering and their dignity reconstituted’ (146). There is, of course, a line between acknowledgment and exploitation that, as we have seen, is not always clearly drawn, but there is a shared attempt in all these fictional works on the genocide to reconstitute the dignity of survivors by creating individual characters with important stories to tell.

chapter five

Victims Victims

Mukasonga’s powerful short story ‘Le Deuil’ [‘Mourning’] describes an unnamed female protagonist’s return to Rwanda to find out what happened to all the members of her family who were killed in the genocide.1 She takes this decision after receiving an official letter from Rwanda notifying her of her multiple bereavements. Reading the list of names in the letter, she thinks of it as a kind of tomb for her dead relatives. Like so many of the hundreds of thousands of people murdered in the 1994 genocide, the details of their deaths are unknown, as are the whereabouts of their remains. Although she has received official notification of their deaths, she has not been able to bury and formally grieve for her lost loved ones. 2 The importance of honouring the dead in Rwandan culture is highlighted in Mukasonga’s story through a flashback to the protagonist as a young girl exiled in a convent in Bujumbura, Burundi, where she and her friends spent much of their time tending a small abandoned cemetery in the grounds. As fellow Rwandan exile Espérance reminds her, ‘If faut toujours faire quelque chose pour les morts’ [You always have to do something for the dead] (Mukasonga, 2010: 108). However, as the narrative of ‘Le Deuil’ reminds us, hundreds of thousands of those massacred in the genocide have not been given a proper burial, a situation that continues to cause considerable emotional distress for survivors in Rwanda. This distress is fictionalized in Rurangwa’s Au sortir de l’enfer, narrator-protagonist Jean-Léonard tormented by the fact that he does not know where the 1 An English translation of this story from Mukasonga’s collection L’Iguifou appeared in the winter 2013 edition of the New Welsh Review (Ceulan, 2013). 2 It is customary in Rwanda for the remains of the dead to be buried. The funeral is traditionally followed by a period of mourning during which a fire remains lit for seven days (Adekunle, 119).

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bodies of his wife and baby are, both of whom he presumes to be dead. He tells his new girlfriend Julie, ‘je ne peux pas me remarier avant d’avoir inhumé dans la dignité ma femme et mon enfant’ [I can’t get married again until I’ve buried my wife and child with dignity] (174). Similarly, Mukasonga’s protagonist is portrayed in a kind of limbo, spending her time walking around the unnamed French city in which she lives, wandering into churches and weeping at the funerals of strangers. Each time she attends a stranger’s funeral, she projects the image of one of her own dead relatives into the coffin on display, but the only coffin she has for her dead loved ones is the list of names in the official letter of condolence. Having at first refused to open the letter, she later takes it with her everywhere she goes. A list of names on a piece of paper folded into an envelope may not seem a fitting way to commemorate such enormous and painful loss, but it symbolizes the importance of recording, remembering and keeping alive the memory of the victims of 1994. This emphasis on not forgetting is central to commemoration in Rwanda, where every year in April an official three-month period of remembrance begins. The need to create physical traces of the genocide is also reflected not only in the memorial sites and commemorative monuments created all over the country, but also in the huge number and range of creative outputs produced by writers, artists and performers from Rwanda. As Carole Karemera, director of the Kigali-based Ishyo arts centre, explains, chaque note, mot et image posés comme une pierre pour construire cet édifice en mémoire des Tutsis du Rwanda de 1994 est une pierre posée contre l’oubli, érigée en témoin du passé. (8) [every note, word or image placed like a stone to build this edifice in memory of the Tutsi of Rwanda in 1994 is a stone placed against forgetting, erected as a testimony to the past]3

Karemera’s comparison between commemorative works of art and the construction of a genocide memorial is one that reoccurs frequently in discussions of how to remember 1994 Rwanda. Moreover, her vision of the collection of all the individual creative works forming part of a much larger memorial recalls a statement made by the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ authors on the aims of their project: 3 In his reflections on the role of writers in relation to the genocide, Waberi similarly suggests that they might build a Pantheon out of ink and paper in memory of the victims (16).

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l’ensemble [de textes] constitutera une manière de monument élevé à la mémoire des victimes du génocide … comme un pendant au monument, bien matériel celui-ci, sur lequel un sculpteur sud-africain, Bruce Clark [sic], a commencé à travailler au Rwanda. (in Harrow, 2005: 44) [the collection will represent a kind of monument raised in memory of the victims of genocide … a kind of matching piece to the very material monument that Bruce Clark[e], a South African sculptor, has started working on in Rwanda]

What is interesting here is the suggestion that commemorative artworks, including fiction, can, like Bruce Clarke’s ongoing sculptural project, the Garden of Memory, be interpreted as memorial pieces. Yet as Karemera, Bruce Clarke and the Fest’Africa writers suggest, these are particular kinds of memorial piece: rather than recording and fixing memories in the past, they encourage commemoration as a continuing process, one that requires the active participation of visitors and readers. This chapter evaluates the ways in which fictional texts about the genocide function as memorials to the dead. While in 1994, the horrific deaths of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan people were largely ignored by both the general public and the international community, authors of genocide stories write to ensure that the victims of the genocide are not forgotten. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s concept of ‘multi-directional memory’, which emphasizes cross-cultural resonances as a productive means of remembering, this chapter considers Rwanda genocide stories as acts of multidirectional commemoration. It analyses how authors create overlapping layers of memories through intertextual references to other crimes against humanity, particularly the Holocaust, and, in doing so, extend the global reach and significance of this body of fiction. As multidirectional memory narratives, genocide fiction, like other forms of commemoration in Rwanda, demonstrates a strong desire to implicate the reader in processes of remembering. In her critical discussion of commemoration in Rwanda, Vidal (2004) highlights the efforts made by many survivors to discover the bodies of their dead relatives after the genocide. Since 1994, many exiles have returned to look for the remains of family members, often without success.4 This search for bodies, Vidal explains, reflects the commonly held desire among survivors to restore dignity to the dead through proper 4 Discovering the truth about what happened to victims and where they were buried has to some extent been facilitated by the gacaca process (see African Rights, 30–32).

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burial (2004). In both ‘Le Deuil’ and La Promesse faite à ma sœur, Mukasonga and Ndwaniye describe their central characters returning to Rwanda in what is presented as a kind of genocide pilgrimage. When Mukasonga’s protagonist realizes that she will never find her dead relatives by attending other people’s funerals in France, she resolves to go back home. In La Promesse faite à ma sœur, Jean returns to visit the hills he once knew and to ask what happened to the people who used to live there. Both texts describe the shock of finding the family home destroyed, particularly as in each case nature seems to have begun to erase the traces of the genocide. Ndwaniye’s novel depicts Jean as unable to find the place where his father and younger brother were buried in the garden of his parents’ home since they are now hidden under thick vegetation. All traces of humanity have been erased by the inhumanity of the genocide. In ‘Le Deuil’, too, the fence that used to surround the protagonist’s home has transformed into a hedge dont le feuillage vigoureux ou la floraison écarlate lui parurent indécents, comme si, pensa-t-elle, ces simples piquets s’étaient vivifiés de la mort de ceux qui les avaient plantés. (Mukasonga, 2010: 115) [whose sturdy foliage and scarlet blooms seemed indecent to her, as if, she thought, those simple fence posts had come alive with the death of those who had erected them]

What both texts implicitly critique is the lack of appropriate respect for the dead which was a horrifying feature of the genocide and continues to be an issue in Rwanda today. During the hundred days of killings, the génocidaires’ treatment of their victims was contemptuous in the extreme, with corpses often subjected to dismemberment, mutilation and sexual violence before being thrown into mass graves or pit latrines. After the genocide, the scale of the killings has made it extremely difficult, often impossible, for survivors to locate the bodies of those they lost. In a sense, as Violaine tells him, Jean is lucky: at least he knows where his father and brother were buried, and neither was a victim of the genocide. Inside Rwanda, much has been done to pay tribute to those who died, but the scale of the killings and the killers’ deliberate concealment of bodies make this an extremely difficult task. 5 The building of 5 When bodies are exhumed, they often remain unidentified, either because they are too decomposed or because there are no survivors left to claim them (Cook, 288).

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c­ ommemorative monuments, Hélène Dumas and Rémi Korman remind us, is a very recent phenomenon in Rwanda and can be traced back to 1995, when the Government of National Unity set up the Commission pour le Mémorial du Génocide et des Massacres au Rwanda [Commission for the Commemoration of Genocide and Massacres in Rwanda] (8).6 Since then, a large number of memorials have been constructed around the country, most of them on the sites of mass graves. In NyanzaKicukiro, Bruce Clarke’s Garden of Memory is hoped to eventually contain 1 million individual stones laid in memory of those who died, each one marked with the name of a victim (Hitchcott, 2014b: 59–60). The recognition of individual victims by recording their names is a common feature of the genocide memorials that have been constructed in Rwanda. Visitors to Ntarama church find a wall of memory on which the names of the dead have been inscribed, but only a very small number of the spaces have actually been filled, as most of the victims’ bodies remain unidentified.7 Efforts are also being made to create proper official records of the victims. Waberi notes in Moisson de crânes that the umbrella organization for Rwandan survivors’ associations, IBUKA, has been compiling a dictionary of names of all the victims of the 1994 genocide. The dictionary lists each individual’s name, job, gender, and the place and date of their death along with details of how and with what weapons they were killed (82). Where names are not recorded, the dead are often commemorated through the display of personal photographs. For example, inside the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Gisozi, photographs of victims fill an entire room, demonstrating both the scale of the killings, but also the uniqueness of each of the victims. One of the most powerful exhibits at the memorial is the children’s room in which large, blown-up photographs of babies and children are displayed. Beneath each of them is a plaque which records, in the three languages of Rwanda, the name of the child and the age at which they died. Very personal information is also provided, including the child’s favourite toy, favourite food, a brief description of their behaviour, and details of how they were killed. Such attempts to identify victims and acknowledge the intimate details of their lives help to restore the dignity that was denied them by the génocidaires through their dehumanizing 6 In this article, Dumas and Korman provide fascinating insights into the politics of memorialization in Rwanda. 7 The lack of shared family names in Rwanda makes it difficult to trace victims of a particular family even when individuals’ names are known.

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propaganda and acts of brutal violence. Sadly, only a very small number of the hundreds of thousands of victims are currently remembered through such personalized memorials. In L’Ombre d’Imana, Tadjo interrogates the relationship between memorials and fiction by punctuating her text with short summaries of people and places set apart from the narrative. The information provided about victims is limited, however, reflecting what she and her fellow travellers present as the impersonal nature of commemoration in Rwanda. Although a wall of memory has now been constructed at Ntarama church, Tadjo was shocked, when she visited in 1998, by the lack of personalization in the memorial: ‘Tout est sens dessus dessous. Aucun nom. Pas d’inscription’ (2000: 26) [‘Everything is topsy-turvy. No names. No inscriptions’ (2002: 16)]. As discussed in Chapter Two, memorialization is a complicated process in Rwanda and one that has been criticized as at best inadequate and at worst disrespectful to the memories of the dead. In Dumas and Korman’s view, such moral objections become less convincing when considered against the subversion of all social and cultural norms brought about by the genocide (27). The role of commemorative fiction adds another layer to the controversy around how to remember victims, particularly as some Rwandans felt it inappropriate that the Fest’Africa authors should be ‘writing on the bones of the dead’ (Hitchcott, 2009c: 51). For Paul Williams, these debates are not unique to Rwanda, since ‘controversy over memorialization is a near-default expectation’ (1). What is unique to Rwanda, however, is the decision to exhibit bones and corpses in so many different kinds of memorial as well as the vast number of victims’ bones and corpses on display.8 Accounts of 1994 always quote the extraordinary number of victims slaughtered in such a short time, generally estimated at between 800,000 and more than 1 million people in just 100 days.9 Although the numbers cited vary quite considerably and the exact total will probably never 8 Although Williams claims that ‘Rwandan memorial museums have recently chosen to display human remains less plainly’ (42), skulls, bones and, in the case of Murambi, entire skeletons remain a dominant feature of memorial museums in Rwanda. The only change that has been made at Murambi is the removal of skeletons from the main exhibition. Skeletons are now displayed only in the rooms at the back of the main memorial building. 9 The official Rwandan government statistic quoted at the Kigali Genocide Memorial is that over 1 million people were killed.

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be known, even the lowest estimate is so overwhelming that there is a risk that each of the individuals who died will be reduced to a simple statistic. Lamko parodies the preoccupation with the total number of victims in the opening paragraph of La Phalène des collines, which presents a convoluted list of sums that, difficult to follow, eventually adds up to 1 million dead. Genocide deniers often challenge these statistics. This is also parodied by Lamko when, visiting the Nyamata memorial, the musungu challenges the numbers quoted by the guide. Unable to accept that so many people can have been massacred in such a tiny church, he instructs Pelouse to write down that there were 5,000, not 20,000 people killed ‘pour être plus proche de la vérité’ [to be closer to the truth] (27).10 This emphasis on statistics is picked up by Tadjo who, in L’Ombre d’Imana, reproduces the details from signs outside memorials to create fictional memorial plaques. For example, she opens her entry about her visit to Ntarama church with the words, ‘Site de génocide. + ou – 5000 morts’ (2000: 24) [‘Site of genocide. Plus or minus 5,000 dead’ (2002: 14)]. The words of the original French text are copied from the actual sign at the site that greets visitors on arrival.11 Planted in the grounds outside the church, the sign provides this same information in French, English and Kinyarwanda. By repeating this information in her text, Tadjo draws attention to the depersonalization of death in such a memorial. Each victim is simply one of ‘more or less 5,000 dead’. This entry contrasts strongly with Tadjo’s dedication in the novel, which reads like a different kind of commemorative plaque: ‘A tous ceux qui sont partis mais qui restent encore en nous’ [To all of those who are gone but who remain forever in our hearts]. The difference here is that Tadjo acknowledges the humanity of the dead by mentioning their continuing presence in our memories in contrast to the emotionless statistic of the Ntarama church sign. An emphasis on the humanity of victims is a common trope in genocide fiction and, like the children’s room at the Kigali Genocide Memorial, is generally expressed though the inclusion of details of characters’ everyday lives and their relationships with others. For 10 Although the guide in the novels tells visitors there were 20,000 dead (Lamko, 22), the official estimate is that 10,000 people were killed at Nyamata. Tadjo records ‘+ ou – 35,000 morts’ (2000: 21) [‘Plus or minus 35,000 dead’ (2002: 11)]. 11 The link with the memorial sign is lost in the English translation, where the words of the plaque are no longer set apart from the rest of the text and ‘+ ou –’ is rendered ‘plus or minus’.

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example, in ‘Le  Deuil’, Mukasonga describes the protagonist ‘bouffée de fierté’ [bursting with pride] (2010: 115) as she looks upon the pile of broken roof tiles where once was her family home, the formerly tiled roof a symbol of her dead father’s economic success. As well as recalling the way in which the génocidaires damaged and pillaged Tutsi homes, such details remind us of the individuality of each and every victim, challenging the homogenization of the dead so powerfully symbolized later in the same story by the sacks full of anonymous bones and skulls stored in a room in a church, waiting to be displayed in what will become another genocide memorial. Here Mukasonga’s text echoes the criticisms of genocide memorials made in the Fest’Africa novels and more widely in and outside Rwanda, particularly when the guide explains that the bones will be exhibited in ‘des espèces de vitrines […] comme celles qui sont dans la boutique du Pakistanais au marché’ [some kind of glass display case […] like those in the Pakistani’s shop in the market] (2010: 117). By comparing the exhibition of the remains of the dead with goods on display in the marketplace, Mukasonga’s text implicitly critiques the commodification of death that, as discussed in Chapter Two, has become an important component of the tourist industry in present-day Rwanda. Hoping to find the remains of her family members inside the church, the protagonist learns that some of their bones are indeed inside the sacks, but that it is impossible to identify them. A similar point is made in Moisson de crânes, whose title emphasizes the reduction of victims to disjointed, broken body parts, when the narrator comments that the lack of tombstones makes it difficult to distinguish between the skeletons (Waberi, 59). This reduction of victims to a homogenous mass in the memorials is further challenged in Diop’s description of Cornelius’s visit to the Murambi memorial when the guide stops him and asks if he wants to continue, informing him that he will only see more of the same on the rest of the tour. Cornelius angrily challenges the guide, who then apologizes, acknowledging that Cornelius is right. ‘Bien sûr qu’il avait raison’ [Of course he was right], comments the narrator, ‘Chacun de ces corps avait eu une vie différente de celle des autres, chacun avait rêvé et navigué entre le doute et l’espoir, entre l’amour et la haine’ (2001: 177) [‘Each one of these corpses had had a life that was different from that of all the others, each one had dreamed and navigated between doubt and hope, between love and hate’ (2006: 147)]. Thus, for many genocide novelists, writing fiction is a means of remembering the individuality of victims and reminding the world of the humanity of those who died. Writing about Tadjo, Norridge identifies

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this as an attempt to ‘seek out the personal, the human story behind the figures’ (2012: 159). This emphasis on seeking out the personal is confirmed by Rurangwa in the postscript to his novel Au sortir de l’enfer. Here Rurangwa defines the Fest’Africa mission as both a duty to remember and a duty to mourn (195).12 The duty to mourn, he explains, is not only a duty to remember and to grieve for the victims of the genocide, but also a duty to explain the circumstances of their death. As memorials, fictional texts can function as more than just literary tombstones or epitaphs since they not only name and commemorate the dead, but also recreate, through the imagination, the stories of their lives. Fellow traveller Diop shares this view of fiction’s role in challenging the dehumanizing ideology of genocide by restoring the humanity of the victims: .

La fiction est un excellent moyen de contrer le projet génocidaire. Elle redonne une âme aux victimes et, si elle ne les ressuscite pas, elle leur restitue au moins leur humanité en un rituel de deuil qui fait du roman une stèle funéraire. (2003: 79) [Fiction is an excellent way of countering the genocidal project. It gives victims back their soul and, although it cannot bring them back from the dead, it at least restores their humanity through a ritual of mourning that turns the novel into a tombstone]

Faced with the impossibility of identifying the majority of the dead, some authors use the names of real-life victims whose have become part of the official narrative of the genocide. Two victims, one Rwandan, one European, stand out in this respect: Theresa Mukandori, a woman impaled in the vagina whose body was on display in Nyamata church when the Fest’Africa party visited in 1998, and Antonia Locatelli, the Italian missionary who in 1992 had tried to draw the world’s attention to the preparations for the genocide. Locatelli was shot dead in March 1992 outside the church in Nyamata. According to Amnesty International, she was killed while trying to help Tutsi flee violent attacks.13 She is known for having spoken out about 12 It is interesting that Rurangwa chooses to make this point when reflecting on his novel Au sortir de l’enfer, which was not the text he produced as part of the Fest’Africa mission, but is his first work of fiction. 13 See the Amnesty International document UA 84/92: http://www.amnesty.org/ en/library/asset/AFR47/009/1992/es/d3b5260b-edc4–11dd-a95b-fd9a617f028f/ afr470091992en.html, accessed 10 July 2014.

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the slaughter of Tutsi in the Bugesera region. In 1992, she contacted the Belgian Ambassador, Radio France Internationale and the BBC to challenge the MRND government’s claim that the mass killing of Tutsi in Nyamata was an act of self-defence promoted by the discovery of a pamphlet warning that Hutu were going to be attacked by Tutsi, and to denounce the killings of the Tutsi (Prunier, 1999: 172; Morel, 178–179).14 She was killed the following day. Recognized as a heroine of the genocide, Locatelli is buried in the grounds outside Nyamata church, where she now has a substantial tiled grave incorporating a commemorative plaque telling visitors her story.15 The grave is one of only two individual tombs in the grounds of the church.16 The thousands of victims of the massacre at Nyamata have either been buried in mass graves or are displayed in the rows of anonymous bones and skulls that line the shelves of the crypt inside the church. It is probable that the memorial plaque had not been laid when the Fest’Africa group visited the church in 1998, as the country was only just beginning to recover from the devastation of the genocide. Tadjo therefore provides Locatelli with a textual tombstone: TONIA LOCATELLI Morte le 09.03.1992. RIP. (Repose en paix.). (2000: 27) [Died 09.03.1992. RIP (Rest in Peace.) (2002: 16)]

Locatelli’s status in the Rwandan memorialization process as a heroine of the genocide is mirrored in the references to her story in a number of works of fiction, including the pre-genocide novel by Twagilimana, Manifold Annihilation, where she is ironically described as ‘altogether an undesirable witness [who] had to pay for knowing too much about what was going on’ (229). In Kayimahe’s very recent work, La Chanson de l’aube, Locatelli’s dead body is a symbol of resistance to Hutu extremism, described by the Eradicator as cette pétasse qui, deux ans auparavant, avait espéré par ses meuglements sur RFI et d’autres radios internationales, arrêter le cours glorieux de triomphe des Hutu. (126)

14 Two years later, in 1994, 50,000 more Tutsi were killed in Nyamata and the surrounding area (Dauge-Roth, 2010: 130–31). 15 Locatelli also has a commemorative stone in the Garden of the Righteous in Warsaw, Poland. 16 The other individual grave is that of a policeman, not a genocide victim.

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[that slag who, two years earlier, had hoped to stop the glorious path to victory of the Hutu by bleating on RFI and other international radio stations]

In a display of contempt for Locatelli, the Eradicator urinates on her grave. While Locatelli does not, as Bénard suggests, appear in all the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ writings (88), she does feature in four of the texts, usually as a historical figure (Diop, 2001; Ilboudo, 2000; Tadjo, 2000) but, in the case of Monénembo’s L’Aîné des orphelins, as a historically based fictional character. In Monénembo’s version, Locatelli is hacked to death outside Nyamata church after warning what Faustin calls the ‘Ouatican’ [‘Watican’] and the ‘Notions-Unies’ [‘United Notions’] (2000: 122; 2004: 74) that the genocide was being prepared. Monénembo also imagines her as a friend of Faustin’s family, bringing gifts to his parents, who help out on her farm, and teaching his sisters to read and sew. In particular, Locatelli provides the paper that Faustin uses to make the kite that becomes the marker of the trauma of the genocide in the novel. Like Locatelli, Theresa Mukandori also appears as a figure in a number of the fictional texts published by the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ writers, so shocked were they by the visual evidence of this Tutsi woman’s horrifying death. Earlier, I discussed the way in which Ilboudo transfers to her narrator-protagonist her own reaction on seeing Mukandori’s skeleton displayed in Nyamata church (Chapter Four) and Lamko’s description of being haunted by her image (Chapter Three). In fact, references to Mukandori are included in all the fictional narratives produced by the project except Moisson de crânes. Among the piles of anonymous skulls and bones now displayed in the church, Mukandori’s skeleton was discovered still intact. At her family’s request, her corpse is no longer exhibited in what is now the Nyamata genocide memorial, and has been placed inside a coffin in the basement crypt of the church. But, in 1998, when the Fest’Africa party visited Nyamata, they were confronted with the horrifying sight of Mukandori’s desiccated corpse. Diop explains the rationale for the exhibition of Mukandori through the words of a memorial guide who tells Cornelius that the victim’s brother had wanted a proper burial for his sister, but the authorities persuaded him to let them keep her on display (2001: 90). Like Locatelli, Mukandori is singled out by the Fest’Africa writers because she was one of the few victims to be identified by name (Dauge-Roth, 2010: 134);

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the others were too difficult to distinguish from the many hundreds of skeletons on view.17 Whereas Locatelli’s story is one that is now written into the published history of the genocide (Melvern, 2006: 27), the facts of Mukandori’s death remain mostly unknown. She has therefore become a story that is variously reimagined by the Fest’Africa visitors. All that the writers know about her is what could be seen from her brutalized remains. In L’Ombre d’Imana, Tadjo notes that Mukandori had a machete wound in the back of her neck, describing the groove left by the weapon. She also records the fact that the material of a blanket she had over her shoulders is now incrusted into what remains of her skin, and mentions the tufts of hair still visible on the victim’s head. Like Locatelli, Mukandori is given a kind of literary commemorative plaque by Tadjo: La femme ligotée. Mukandori. Vinqt-cinq ans. Exhumée en 1997. Lieu d’habitation: Nyamata centre. Mariée. Enfant? (2000: 21) [A woman bound hand and foot. Mukandori. Aged twenty-five. Exhumed in 1997. Home: the town of Nyamata. Married. Any children? (2002: 11)]18

The difference here, signalled by Tadjo’s question mark, is the limited amount of knowledge about the woman whose body is described here. She was married, but did she have a child? In asking such questions, Tadjo attempts to restore Mukandori’s humanity, but the body remains largely objectified, just as the authors found it. Reflecting on her own response as a reader of Tadjo’s narrative, critic Sonia Lee writes: Mukandori, je la vois moi aussi à travers les mots du texte dans lequel elle est exposée. […] Je la vois offerte aux regards, laissée sans sépulture pour qu’on n’oublie pas. Ainsi même dans la mort, elle doit subir une volonté 17 Dauge-Roth (2010) discusses the treatment of Mukandori by Diop, Lamko and Tadjo, but does not include the novels of Monénembo or Ilboudo. 18 Here again, Véronique Wakerley’s translation distorts the original French, as a lack of spacing in the English text incorporates Mukandori’s literary plaque into the sign for Nyamata Church.

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autre que la sienne. […] Il me semble qu’on ne devrait pas soumettre les victimes à la curiosité publique, on ne devrait pas montrer leurs souffrances et leur agonie même par devoir de mémoire. (97) [Mukandori, I see her myself through the words of the text in which she is exposed. […] I see her offered up for us to see, left without a tomb so that we do not forget. So even in death, she has to be subjected to someone else’s will. […] I don’t think we should subject victims to public curiosity. We shouldn’t display their suffering and their agony, not even as a duty to remember.]

While Lee’s own discomfort on reading about Mukandori clearly mirrors the experiences of the Fest’Africa writers on seeing the exposed corpse, her words also seem to imply that, in metaphorically laying out Mukandori’s body again in their fictional texts, the authors are contributing to a similar kind of exploitation of a victim of the genocide; they are exposing her to the reader. Certainly, the tension between commemoration and exploitation is strongly felt in Lee’s response, as it is in Tadjo’s own description of the victim’s body. The objectification of Mukandori’s corpse is also scathingly critiqued by Monénembo in L’Aîné des orphelins when Faustin ironically suggests that he is always blamed for everything: Tant qu’à faire, c’est moi qui avais […] foutu un pieu dans le vagin de cette dame Mukandori (dont l’image de la momie empalée a fait le tour du monde). (72) [I might as well be the one who […] thrust a stake up Mrs Mukandori’s vagina (whose impaled mummy image went around the world) (2004: 43)]

In different ways, Lee and Monénembo draw attention to the ethical implications of exposing Mukandori’s suffering. As Richard Sharpley notes, ‘the rights of those whose death is commoditized or commercialized through dark tourism represent an important ethical dimension deserving consideration’ (8). Though the remains are now hidden from view in a coffin in Nyamata church, the Fest’Africa texts continue to circulate the image of Mukandori’s violated body. While both Tadjo and Monénembo are sensitive to the ethical problems of exhibiting victim’s bodies for commemorative purposes, there is nevertheless a danger that repeated references to this woman’s impaled vagina will further objectify her as a rape victim rather than an individual, particularly as Monénembo treats the issue with a familiar note of

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sarcasm. Paradoxically, in an attempt to restore this victim’s humanity or, in the case of Monénembo and Ilboudo, to criticize the touristic exploitation of her body, these writers risk objectifying her further, reifying Mukandori as the rape victim with a stake in her vagina.19 Lamko’s novel signals this as a potential danger when it describes the moth-narrator causing Védaste, the guide, to have an epileptic fit to prevent him telling yet again the story of her rape. Also conscious of the danger of objectifying Mukandori, Diop develops her into a fictional character: in Murambi, Theresa appears as a friend of Jessica, herself an undercover RPF agent masquerading as a Hutu, who takes Theresa to Nyamata church in 1994 in the full knowledge that she will probably die there. Mukandori is not, however, fully developed as a character in Murambi and so retains the iconic status she acquires in the other texts. In 1998, when Cornelius returns to Rwanda, Jessica is reunited with her friend, but now Theresa is dead, her corpse laid out in the church where she was so brutally killed. Before he sees the stake in her vagina, Cornelius remarks on the scream of pain forever frozen on Mukandori’s still grimacing face (Diop, 2001: 89). The iconic status of Mukandori’s skeleton is simultaneously challenged and reinforced by Kayimahe in La Chanson de l’aube when RPF Lieutenant Lionceau reflects on how both he and Colonel Bigabiro were more affected by the sight of Mukandori’s body than by the thousands of other corpses they witnessed during their fight against the génocidaires: Oh! Elle n’était pas la seule à avoir subi ce terrible sort. Il y avait notamment la môme sur la tombe de l’Italienne, mais c’est sur la désormais tristement célèbre Mukandori que nos regards se sont télescopés et je suis sûr que c’est elle qui nous a chamboulés le plus … (394) [Oh! She wasn’t the only one to have suffered that terrible fate. In particular, there was that chick on the Italian woman’s tomb, but it was the now tragically famous Mukandori who caught our eye, and I’m sure that she’s the one who messed us up the most]20

Although Lionceau wonders why Mukandori has been singled out as 19 Norridge offers an interesting reading of the role of the stake in Mukandori’s body (2012: 155–156). 2 0 This comment recalls the moment when Kayimahe’s Eradicator finds a young woman with a stake in her vagina lying on top of Locatelli’s grave (2014: 126–127) and offers a rare conflation of Mukandori’s and Locatelli’s stories.

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a unique victim when so many others were brutalized and killed, his reflection on her death, along with Kayimahe’s decision to name her in his novel, continues the perpetuation of the myth. These literary reincarnations of Mukandori make an interesting contrast with the victim’s story as it is retold by John Rusimbi, who became headmaster of Nyamata High School when he returned to Rwanda from exile in 1994. In his second novel, The Hyena’s Wedding, Rusimbi’s first-person survivor-narrator Musonera Kiroko hears the story of an unnamed woman in Nyamata church: Also on display was a human skeleton with arms and legs still tied together with a strong rope. [Chief] Mugabo explained that it was once a woman who was raped. Interahamwe militias had seen a beautiful lady with her husband in their house. The Interahamwe macheted the husband immediately, tied the woman and stripped her naked. They raped her in turn and finally pushed through her body a thick, long sharpened stick to complete the job. (2007: 60)

This story, which we assume to be drawn from Rusimbi’s local knowledge as a member of the Nyamata community, describes the skeleton as a married woman but, unlike most of the Fest’Africa texts, refuses to give her a name. This suggests a rather different approach to commemorating victims. For this Rwandan writer, the skeleton is not unique because so many other women faced a similar fate. Rusimbi’s portrait, however, emphasizes the human story of this, and by extension, all the victims. Mukandori, we learn, was beautiful and her husband also died. As an unnamed victim, she is presented here less as an icon of genocide and more as a rehumanized representative of the hundreds of thousands of Tutsi women who lost their lives. The only fictional text that departs from the standard representation of Mukandori as impaled skeleton is Lamko’s La Phalène des collines. As mentioned above and further discussed in Chapter Three, Lamko recalls the image of Mukandori as the most horrifying sight of his trip to Rwanda. However, unlike his fellow Fest’Africa travellers, who explicitly name the victim in acts of commemoration that are in many ways not dissimilar to the exhibition of corpses at memorial sites, Lamko reinvents Mukandori as an unnamed queen whose soul is reincarnated as the eponymous moth of his book’s title. While the other writers focus almost exclusively on the horrific spectacle of Mukandori’s skeleton, Lamko creates an imagined story about what happened to this brutalized corpse. Mukandori is depicted as a Tutsi queen who is knocked unconscious and

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then repeatedly raped and brutally killed by the priest of the ‘Famille Sainte’ church. 21 In a lengthy description of rape that continues over ten pages, Lamko describes in horrifying detail the first-person narrator’s experience of sexual violence and humiliation at the hands of the genocidal priest. The scene ends with the priest ejaculating in the narrator’s face and forcing into her vagina first acid, then a broken bottle, then finally not a stake, but an enormous wooden cross. For Dauge-Roth, Lamko’s novel represents an emancipatory gesture in which the author gives the dead victim the right to tell her own story (2010: 14). While it is true that Lamko’s version can be read as less potentially exploitative than those of the other writers in the group, he nevertheless bases a fantastical story of a dead queen reincarnated as a moth on a real-life genocide victim. According to Boniface Mongo-Mboussa, the figure of the moth is based on an African superstition that a moth is a sign of someone returning from the dead to reclaim a debt (200). In Lamko’s text, this debt is the narrator’s funeral, which, at the beginning of the novel, like so many thousands of other victims, she has been denied. A symbol of the failure of national commemoration, which has been unable to give dignified burials to so many of its dead, the moth continues to haunt Rwanda until she has been given an appropriate send-off. 22 The novel ends in Kibengira cemetery, where the narrator’s niece, Pelouse, and the poet Muyango make traditional offerings to the dead and the moth-narrator dies for a second time, only this time she is laughing. 23 Her final wish is that all the names on tombstones around the world should be erased or, if this is not possible, that the names of the millions of black people killed in slavery and genocide should be painted in letters of gold. 21 This is most likely a reference to Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, former Priest of the Sainte Famille church in Kigali, indicted for crimes of genocide including rape and murder. See Hitchcott (2012) and Chapter Six of this book. 22 Another failure represented by Lamko’s moth is that of the genocidal project to exterminate all the Tutsi, especially women and babies, to ensure that no one was left to tell the story. As Dauge-Roth notes, the moth in La Phalène des collines is the quintessential symbol of resurrection emerging here from a corpse that, impaled in the birth canal, symbolizes the genocidaires’ sustained attempt to prevent Tutsi fertility (2010: 136). Dauge-Roth also suggests that the figure of the moth represents a ‘symbolic rebuttal’ to the Hutu extremist metaphor that a cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly. 23 Regular sacrifices, including milk, beer and animal blood, are traditionally made to ancestral spirits in Rwanda (Adekunle, 29).

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The moth’s first-person narrative is frequently interrupted by the third-person tale of another ghost: Fred R., a man who keeps on running. Here, Lamko draws on the true story of Fred Gisa Rwigyema, co-founder of the RPF and Major General in the RPA, who was shot dead during the October 1990 RPA offensive against Habyarimana’s regime. 24 By interspersing the story of the moth-queen with that of a recognized hero of the genocide, Lamko, like his narrator, calls for all the victims of crimes against humanity to be respectfully remembered. Although Rwigyema is now a national hero and his body is buried at the Heroes Cemetery in Kigali, Lamko’s decision to present him forever running suggests that even the stories of national heroes are not properly acknowledged. Nobody recognizes Fred R. as he runs around in exile. He is unable to find work and is at one point sexually assaulted by a woman he encounters in a marketplace. Commemoration in Rwanda tends to focus on victims rather than heroes. The same is true of genocide fiction, in which heroes rarely feature except as victims or ghosts. 25 Post-genocide Rwanda is portrayed in a number of works of fiction as a nation full of ghosts. In Rwandan tradition, ‘when a person dies, he or she changes identity by transforming into abazimu, residing in the spirit world but remaining in the area in which they once lived’ (Adekunle, 29). When he returns to Rwanda after an absence of seventeen years, Ndwaniye’s narrator is visited by the ghosts of all the dead members of his family. Talking to the dead is reassuring for Jean (Ndwaniye, 2006: 57) but for the bystander Théodore in Au sortir de l’enfer, the ghost of his brother’s victim, Philibert, is a terrible symbol of his own guilty conscience (see Chapter Six). Although, as these novels suggest, ghosts and the supernatural are a strong feature of traditional Rwandan culture, they are also common figures in trauma narratives based in other contexts, as Luckhurst observes: Ghosts are the signals of atrocities, marking sites of untold violence, a traumatic past whose traces remain to attest to a lack of testimony. A haunting does not initiate a story; it is the sign of a blockage of a story, a hurt that has not been honoured by a memorializing narrative. (93)

Many Rwanda genocide novels contain ghosts who are angry at both the 2 4 The exact circumstances of Rwigyema’s death are disputed. See Prunier (2009: 120–122). 25 One exception is Kana’s historical novel Le Défi de survivre, which focuses on the heroic story of an RPF soldier.

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circumstances in which they died and the lack of appropriate commemoration of their death. Tadjo bases one of her short stories, ‘La Colère des morts’ [‘The Wrath of the Dead’], around the dead taking revenge on the living by plaguing them with appalling weather. When a soothsayer arrives, he tells the living that they need to stop displaying bones, give the dead a proper burial and remember them with respect. 26 The anger of the dead also connotes, as Luckhurst suggests, their inability to tell their own story. Tadjo writes that: Les morts auraient voulu parler mais personne ne les entendait. Ils auraient voulu dire tout ce qu’ils n’avaient pas eu le temps de dire, toutes les paroles qu’on leur avait enlevées, coupées de la langue, arrachés de la bouche. (2000: 53) [The dead would have liked to speak but no one could hear them. They would have liked to say all that they had not had time to say, all the words whose utterance they had been denied, cut from their tongues, torn from their mouths (2002: 41)]

By creating a fictional text around the anger of victims whose own stories can no longer be heard, Tadjo draws attention to the importance of appropriately commemorating those who can no longer speak because they are dead. Once they have given the dead a respectful send-off, the living are advised by Tadjo’s soothsayer to speak the words that the dead are no longer able to articulate. This emphasis on keeping alive the voices of the dead is a common thread in fictional responses to the genocide in Rwanda and connects with the concept of the ‘devoir de deuil’ [duty to mourn] evoked by Rurangwa above. How to mourn the dead through fiction is a question that preoccupies writers. Mukasonga tackles the issue through her appropriately titled story ‘Le Deuil’ [‘Mourning’], which opened the discussion in this chapter. When the unnamed protagonist finally finds the site where her father’s body lies, she is horrified to discover that he had been thrown into a pit latrine. When she looks into the pit, she thinks she sees the outline of a body and the hideous remains of what once had been a face. Unable to sleep, she is visited in the night by the guide from the church where the bones of her other family members are stored awaiting display. The guide advises her that mourning is not about forgetting, nor is it about 2 6 In Rwanda, it is traditionally believed that ‘diviners (abapfumu) have the power to communicate with the spirits of the dead and to protect the living from malevolent acts from the dead ancestors’ (Adekunle, 31).

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recovering bodily remains; rather, as Tadjo and Rurangwa also suggest, it is about keeping alive the memory of those who died. Diop echoes this point in Murambi when he writes that: Au moment de périr sous les coups, les suppliciés avaient crié. Personne n’avait voulu les entendre. L’écho de ces cris devait se prolonger le plus longtemps possible. (2001: 177) [As they were perishing under the blows, the victims had shouted out. No one had wanted to hear them. The echo of those cries should be allowed to reverberate for as long as possible (2006: 147)]

In their attempt to keep alive the voices of the dead victims, these novels, short stories and travel narratives form part of a chain of memory of the genocide. This is a chain with lots of broken links created by the extraordinary number of victims, the flight of many Rwandans, mainly perpetrators, who witnessed the genocide and the extensive misinformation and misreporting that followed the events of 1994. Through recreating victims’ stories, works of fiction attempt to reforge some of the links in the memory chain while at the same time highlighting what Dauge-Roth describes as the ‘clash between competing memories’ (2010: 144). These include such counternarratives as Hutu Power’s revisionism and the Hamitic Hypothesis, as well as other colonialist versions of Rwanda’s history. 27 Many novels gesture towards such clashes with references to key representatives of genocidal ideology, such as revisionist historian and Director of RTLM Léon Mugesera and hate propagandist and singer Simon Bikindi. What fictional works also do is make new links with complementary memories across different cultures, creating a kind of transnational and transhistorical web of memories rather than a linear chain. A strong example of this is Waberi’s Moisson de crânes, which the author locates within a global framework by punctuating it with quotations from authors from around the world. These include Nigerian Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka, South African poet and academic Antjie Krog, Jewish-Italian Holocaust survivor Primo Levi, Mozambican Mia Couto and, most frequently, Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire. What links 27 As an example of this clash in his discussion of Lamko’s novel, Dauge-Roth recalls the fact that in 1998 the Fest’Africa authors spent their time collecting stories from survivors while the representatives of the Quilès commission argued that ‘a dialogue with survivors was not needed since the bodies of the victims told “the” story’ (2010: 144).

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all the writers cited by Waberi is a concern with exposing the effects of political and racial violence, and emphasizing the humanity of the victims of that violence, both of which are the primary concerns of all the authors writing about the genocide. In doing this, Waberi presents the genocide in Rwanda as both similar to and different from other experiences of violence around the world. As such, Waberi implies that Rwanda can be read as one of what Rothberg describes as ‘the differentiated – neither entirely homogenous, nor entirely particularistic – landscapes of violence that a globalized trauma studies seeks to theorize, work through, and ultimately transform’ (2008: 232). Though, as discussed in the Introduction, this book does not inscribe itself within the tradition of trauma studies, Rothberg’s concept of differentiated landscapes of violence has important resonances in a number of fictional works about Rwanda. What happened in Rwanda in 1994 can be seen as a more extreme version of the conflicts that plagued the African continent throughout the twentieth century and which have continued into the twenty-first century in countries such as Sudan, Somalia and the Central African Republic. But, genocide is not an exclusively African phenomenon, as demonstrated by what has become the touchstone for all genocides: the Holocaust. Intertextual references to the Holocaust appear in many critical reflections on the genocide in Rwanda, most famously in Hatzfeld’s bestselling collection of testimonies, Une saison de machettes [Machete Season]. Quoting Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved, Hatzfeld compares the planning of the Rwanda genocide with the organization of the elimination of Jews and Roma in Nazi Germany (2003: 63–71). In fiction, the Holocaust is a less common point of reference, although critics such as Véronique Bonnet (2004) have read genocide novels, especially the Fest’Africa texts, against Holocaust writing. Apart from Waberi, only Monénembo and Diop allude to the Holocaust in their ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ texts and references tend to be fleeting. In Murambi, Diop presents the father of Faustin Gasana criticizing his son and fellow militiamen for not being as well organized as Hitler in his elimination of white inyenzi (2001: 25). During this conversation, Faustin’s father gets his facts wrong, referring to Hitler as a Frenchman and not knowing his name. Here, Diop is suggesting that the Holocaust may not be an entirely appropriate referent for the people of Rwanda, since many Rwandans have little if any knowledge about what happened in Europe during the Second World War. Anneleen Spiessens makes this point more strongly in her reading of Hatzfeld, challenging the comparison

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he makes between Rwanda and Nazi Germany on the grounds that the historical and philosophical framework of the Holocaust is largely absent in black Africa (32). Indeed, where the Shoah appears as an intertext in fiction, it is often mobilized by a Rwandan character to explain the genocide to a non-Rwandan audience. For example, Stanley in Murambi describes how, in his role as RPF ambassador, he used to make comparisons with the Holocaust to help students in Tampa, Florida understand what was happening in 1994 (Diop, 2002: 58–59). Similarly, in L’Aîné des orphelins, when Faustin is unable to answer all the TV crew’s questions, Rodney challenges them with the question, ‘Vous pensez peut-être que tous les rescapés d’Auschwitz se souviennent de la vie qu’ils ont mené avant de goûter à l’enfer?’ (Monénembo, 2000: 107) [‘Do you think Auschwitz survivors remember the life they led before landing in hell?’ (2004: 65)]. In texts by Rwandan authors, the Holocaust is treated in a similar way, although in many it does not figure at all. Brief allusions appear in Le Défi de survivre (Kana, 169), Sous le déluge rwandais (Karege, 196) and throughout La Chanson de l’aube (Kayimahe, 88; 90; 114), but the one novel that stands out in this respect is Rurangwa’s Au sortir de l’enfer. In this novel, references to films about the Shoah are woven into the narrative. For example, early in the novel Rurangwa describes the protagonist’s sister, Marie, making the rest of her family watch video recordings of as Au Nom de tous les miens [For Those I Loved], a film based on the autobiography of a Polish Holocaust survivor, and the 1960 Pontecorvo film Kapò, set in a Second World War concentration camp. 28 When Jean-Léonard complains about being forced to watch these movies, his Tutsi separatist sister tells him that watching them is good preparation for what is about to happen in Rwanda: ‘En regardant ces films sur la Shoah, moi je me familiarise avec l’horreur. Je l’apprivoise’ [By watching these films about the Shoah, I familiarize myself with horror. I get it under control] (55–56). Later in the novel, Jean-Léonard evokes another film, Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, to demonstrate to his Mauritian girlfriend, Julie, that not all Hutu were involved in genocide: ‘S’il y a eu au Rwanda en 1994 des “Amon Goethe” [sic], il y a eu aussi des “Oskar Schindler”!’ [If, in Rwanda in 1994, there were Amon Goeths there were also Oskar Schindlers!] (154). The implication is that referring to the Holocaust makes the 28 Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo is better known for his 1969 film The Battle of Algiers.

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Rwanda genocide easier to comprehend, particularly for those with no understanding of Rwandan history or culture. Conversely, the use of such references suggests a target readership outside Rwanda since the Holocaust holds less symbolic authority for Rwandan readers than for those in the US and Europe. Thus, for some authors, the Holocaust serves as a way of making Rwanda more accessible to often remote readers, a means of de-othering the genocide. Such a strategy confirms Craps’s view that ‘the Nazi genocide functions as a global narrative template, which is used to conceptualize and to demand recognition for marginalized and ignored acts of injustice and traumatic histories across the globe’ (75). However, as Craps also notes, the universalization of the Holocaust metaphor can result in the marginalization of other non-European genocides (80). 29 For Nicholas Mirzoeff, reading Rwanda through the Holocaust is not only Eurocentric, but also leaves Rwanda completely outside representation (37). In his analysis of artistic and memorial responses to the genocide, Mirzoeff criticizes the decision to use ‘narratives of global genocides, from Armenia to the Balkans and of course the Holocaust’ in the Kigali Genocide Memorial, which he sees as displacing the specificity of what happened in Rwanda: ‘the Rwandan genocide is now being, as it were, dragged over the Holocaust in order to persuade Western audiences of its importance’ (91). While Mirzoeff’s analysis is compelling, he underplays the fact that, as Norridge reminds us, comparisons between Rwanda and the Holocaust also help to ‘[lend] both gravity and relevance to the Rwandan genocide on the international stage’ (2011b: 247). Furthermore, where they do draw certain comparisons with the Shoah, fictional texts also very much emphasize the specificities of the Rwanda genocide, as is also the case in the permanent exhibition at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. Although Mirzoeff and Norridge each react differently to Holocaust references in commemorative responses to the genocide in Rwanda, they both allude to the tension between acknowledging the events of 1994 as a shared human experience rather than an exclusively ‘African’ phenomenon on the one hand, and the homogenization or marginalization of the Rwandan people’s suffering on the other. This tension is also presented by Semujanga in his reading of the Fest’Africa novels by Diop and Waberi (2006: 110). In Murambi, Cornelius reflects with bitterness on the way in which friends outside Rwanda always conflate 29 Craps draws on the work of Dirk Moses (2002) here.

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the Rwanda genocide with all the other atrocities that have happened in the world, concluding that, ‘C’était triste à dire, mais il devait l’admettre: le Rwanda n’était pas de taille à troubler le sommeil de l’univers’ (Diop, 2001: 214) [‘It was sad to say, but he had to admit it: Rwanda was not worth troubling the sleep of the universe about’ (2006: 178)]. Such comments remind us that comparing Rwanda to other genocides can also generate what Rothberg calls the ‘ugly contest of comparative victimization’ (2009: 7) in which, as Cornelius suggests here, Rwanda often fails even to be included. Challenging the construction of collective memory as competitive and culturally exclusive, Rothberg argues in favour of a multidirectional model that ‘posits collective memory as partially disengaged from exclusive versions of cultural identity and acknowledges how remembrance both cuts across and binds together diverse spatial, temporal, and cultural sites’ (2009: 11). Through references to the Holocaust, some of the fictional responses to the genocide gesture towards the multidirectional model of memory that Rothberg proposes. Although it was published before Rothberg’s seminal study, Semujanga’s analysis of Moisson de crânes begins to read Waberi’s text as an example of a multidirectional memory narrative: Le narrateur [dans Moisson de crânes] élargit ainsi l’intertexte de la Shoah à toute référence à la violence dite par la littérature, non pour en faire un simple génocide parmi tant d’autres, mais pour construire une mémoire du génocide qui va aussi loin que l’esclavage dont a été victime l’Afrique. (2006: 108) [So the narrator [in Moisson de crânes] expands the Shoah intertext to include all references to violence in literature, not to reduce the genocide to simply one of many, but to build a memory of genocide that goes back as far as the slavery that Africa suffered]

As discussed above, Waberi’s text does not homogenize the Rwanda genocide, but rather makes transnational and transhistorical connections with many other experiences of mass violence around the world. 30 While Moisson de crânes is a particularly rich example of a multidirectional commemorative narrative, critics have also begun to read other Rwanda genocide stories through a multidirectional lens. For example, Fonkoua (2004) draws together the history of apartheid in South Africa with the 30 There is an interesting comparison to be made between Waberi’s text and Malagasy writer Raharimanana’s collection of short stories Rêves sous le linceul (1998).

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genocide in Rwanda in his comparative study of Diop’s Murambi and Gillian Slovo’s Red Dust. As Norridge suggests, writing about the genocide is mediated not only through the lens of the Holocaust, but also through the experience and afterlife of European colonization in Rwanda (2011b: 249). To borrow Rothberg’s description of Hannah Arendt and Aimé Césaire, African writers of Rwanda genocide fiction are ‘product[s] of multiple historical and intellectual forces’ (2009: 71). Educated within systems established by ex-colonial powers and delivered in the former colonial language, many of them living, or having lived, in exile, the authors whose works are analysed in this book represent a range of geographically dispersed nations, including Rwanda. Elsewhere, I have argued that the members of the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ group identified themselves as ‘global African citizens’ (Hitchcott, 2009a: 153). The same can be said of the Rwandan authors, all of whom write from positions of geographical displacement, be they survivors or witnesses of the genocide. As such, all have been exposed to a range of postcolonial encounters: with the legacies of colonization, with host countries in exile and of course with Rwanda before, during and after the genocide. A multidirectional model for remembering what happened in Rwanda forms a useful antidote to the monolithic master narrative of the genocide championed by the RPF government. Despite the abolition of ethnic categories and the promotion of a united, national identity, Rwandan Hutu who were killed in 1994 are not recognized as victims of genocide and not remembered during the official mourning period (Eltringham, 71; Burnet, 98). 31 There is, of course, a paradox here: on the one hand, the RPF promotes an ethnicity-free Rwanda; on the other, the politics of commemoration remain heavily inflected by the colonial legacy of ethnopolitics discussed in the Introduction to this book. The crime of ethnic divisionism is now included in the Rwandan penal code and a number of individuals have been arrested on these grounds, including the relatively high-profile case of Victoire Ingabire, political opponent to President Kagame, who was given an eight-year prison sentence in October 2012. Ingabire publicly challenged the absence of references to Hutu victims at the Kigali Genocide Memorial and was subsequently 31 Burnet notes that the commemoration of victims ‘took a significant departure’ in 1996. While the first commemoration of the genocide in April 1995 recognized both Hutu and Tutsi as victims, in the following year, only Tutsi were promoted as victims of genocide (96–98).

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prosecuted for genocide denial and divisionism. 32 For many critics, this new crime of ethnic divisionism is potentially incompatible with the politics of peace and reconciliation. While the government argues that, because divisionism was the cause of the genocide, so the new Rwanda must be a nation without Hutu or Tutsi, critics such as Lemarchand emphasize the importance of acknowledging ethnicity for remembering and understanding what happened in 1994. For Lemarchand, The clash of ethnic memories is an essential component of the process by which the legacy of genocide – [what Primo Levi calls] the ‘memory of the offence’ – is being perceived or fabricated by one community or the other. Once filtered through the prism of ethnicity, entirely different constructions are imposed on the same ghastly reality, from which emerge strikingly different interpretations of why genocide occurred. (101)

Lemarchand’s promotion of thinking about genocide in terms of multiple perspectives adds another layer to Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, which ‘supposes that the overlap and interference of memories help constitute the public sphere as well as the various individual and collective subjects that articulate themselves in it’ (2006: 162). What has emerged in post-genocide Rwanda is an attempt to delimit the overlap of memories such that the identity of victim has become an exclusive, ethnicized category within the official memory narrative, a process criticized by Vidal as an act of symbolic violence (2004). By interrogating the question of who can be a victim in post-1994 Rwanda, writers of fiction remind us that memories of genocide are multiple and complex and cannot be encapsulated in a single narrative. Moreover, as this book has shown, only when read together do Rwanda genocide stories really begin to demonstrate the complex and multidirectional nature of remembering the genocide. For readers, fictional responses to the genocide encourage multidirectional readings through the ways in which they implicate non-Rwandan readers in the process of remembering. As such, Rwanda genocide novels and short stories generate another set of postcolonial encounters to be experienced by readers around the world. These encounters are negotiated through acts of commemoration in which the reader brings her own points of reference to remembering victims of the genocide. As multidirectional memorials, fictional works oblige readers to 32 http://www.hrw.org/news/2012/10/30/rwanda-eight-year-sentence-oppositionleader, accessed 11 December 2013.

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commemorate those who died and so go some way to counteract both the génocidaires’ attempts to deny the humanity of their victims during the massacres and the world’s refusal to acknowledge or react to the slaughter. They involve the reader in reflection and contemplation, which Clarke identifies as essential in an effective genocide memorial (Garden of Memory). This finds an echo in Harrow’s view that the only useful account of the genocide is, the account that refuses to leave the reader out of it: the account where the past is not distanced from our lives, and where the consequences are not over for us or for them; the account that refuses the comfortable distance and mere observation. (40)

Works of genocide fiction, as Harrow suggests, do achieve this aim. The stories of victims of the atrocities carried out in Rwanda in 1994 attempt to restore the humanity of the people who died and so challenge Mitterrand’s infamous remark, quoted in Murambi, that ‘dans ces pays-là, un génocide ce n’est pas trop important’ (Diop, 2001: 212) [‘In those countries a genocide doesn’t mean much’ (2006: 177)]. 33 What is more, they implicate readers in the very process of remembering, causing us to question the consumption of pain in genocide memorials where dead bodies are displayed, inviting us to reflect on the status of genocide victims and to extend our commemoration beyond Rwanda. These books also lead us to make links with other acts of violence, some of them closer, some of them not, to our own experience; all of them committed by human beings against other human beings.

33 Mitterrand is ironically identified here as ‘le Vieillard’ [the Old Man].

chapter six

Perpetrators Perpetrators

In ‘Sa voix’ [‘His voice’], one of the short fictional pieces that form part of her travel narrative L’Ombre d’Imana, Tadjo tells the story of Isaro, whose husband Romain hanged himself when he was accused of murdering a woman and her three children. Some years later, Isaro receives a phone call from a man who speaks with the voice of her dead husband. Excited to hear again the voice of the man she loved, Isaro arranges to meet the stranger, hoping that her husband’s spirit has returned from the dead. The stranger turns out to be Nkuranya, the same man whose wife and children were allegedly killed by Romain. In creating a fictional survivor with the voice of a dead perpetrator, Tadjo confounds the distinction between victim and perpetrator, fusing them together in a single character. At the same time, she emphasizes the very intimate nature of the 1994 Rwanda genocide and its afterlife: as friends became enemies during the 100 days of horror, so enemies have become friends in post-genocide Rwanda. One of the distinguishing features of the genocide in Rwanda was the mass participation of ordinary citizens in the killings.1 It is difficult, if not impossible, to know exactly how many people actually took part in acts of genocide in 1994. Estimated numbers range from tens of thousands to as many as 3 million people slaughtering between 800,000 and 1 million victims (Straus, 2004: 85). 2 Indeed, the extraordinarily high number of 1 Scott Straus’s fieldwork in Rwanda shows the majority of the killers to be ‘average adult Hutu men – in terms of age, education, paternity, and occupation’ (Straus, 2006: 108). 2 Based on his own empirical research, Straus estimates that between 175,000 and 210,000 Rwandan people committed acts of genocide between April and July 1994 (2004: 93). Dauge-Roth estimates at least 500,000 perpetrators (2010: 119). See also Hintjens (2008: 82–83).

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civilians involved, directly or indirectly, in acts of torture, mutilation, killing and rape, often accompanied by looting and damage to property was, as a report by African Rights and Redress reminds us, ‘unprecedented in the world’ (6). Describing her visit to the overcrowded Rilima prison in 1998, Tadjo writes that: Toute la société est représentée: anciennes autorités politiques, hommes d’affaires, fonctionnaires, cadres, enseignants, artistes, élèves, étudiants, paysans, médecins, femmes, prêtres, pasteurs, religieuses … (2000: 112) [The whole of society is represented here: former politicians, businessmen, civil servants, managers, teachers, artists, schoolchildren, students, peasant farmers, doctors, women, priests, pastors, nuns … (2002: 98)]3

Authors of fiction portray killers across the full range of those who participated, including Rwandan professionals such as burgomasters, priests, teachers and doctors, as well as those whom Fujii calls ‘Joiners’, that is ‘the lowest-level participants in the genocide [who] were responsible for committing much of the violence directed at Tutsi in their communities’ (129), and a small number of women and children. This chapter focuses on the ways in which those who participated in the genocide are represented in fictional texts, focusing in particular on the question of judgement, both moral and legal, and how authors and readers often find themselves in a position of moral ambivalence in relation to perpetrators of genocide. Some authors use fiction as a means of exposing and judging the actions of those who were in positions of responsibility in Rwandan communities, particularly priests. It is not without significance that the two earliest Francophone novels by Rwandans both explicitly criticize the role of the Catholic Church in the genocide. Both Karangwa and Sehene portray fictionalized versions of perpetrator priests. In the case of Le Feu sous la soutane, Sehene’s narrator, Father Stanislas, is clearly based on infamous real-life priest Wenceslas Munyeshyaka of the Eglise Sainte Famille in Kigali who, charged with multiple counts of genocide, including rape, continues to live and work with impunity in France. In Le Chapelet et la machette, Karangwa’s central protagonist, Célestin Gahinda is a head teacher and activist in the MRND, the political party that planned and orchestrated the genocide. Behind Célestin is the shadowy figure of Father Dominique, a Belgian missionary and former supporter of the Hutu 3 The prison is incorrectly named as Rilissa prison in the text (Tadjo, 2000: 110).

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extremist movement Parmehutu. Like Stanislas, Father Dominique collaborates with the génocidaires to deliver Tutsi to their deaths before fleeing to France for his personal safety. The choice of fiction to expose the immoral actions of the purveyors of Christian morality is an ambiguous one, since the credibility of the story risks being undermined. This no doubt explains both authors’ insistence on the resemblance to real-life perpetrators. Just as Karangwa links his novel to reality with the opposite of the disclaimer often found in works of fiction when he explains that Le Chapelet et la machette is based on real people (see Chapter One), so the back cover blurb of Le Feu sous la soutane states explicitly that Sehene’s novel is inspired by a true story. Christianity had a strong hold in Rwanda at the time of the genocide, with over 90% of the population declaring themselves Christian in 1994 (Adekunle, 35). The influence of Christian teaching is visible in the titles of a number of the Rwandan texts, some authors using biblical images such as ‘le Déluge’ [the Flood] (Karege, 2005) and ‘I’Enfer’ [Hell] (Rurangwa, 2006) to represent the genocide. The role of Rwandan churches during the genocide has received much criticism (Longman, 2010; Whitworth et al., 2004) and a number of individuals, priests and laypeople, left the church after 1994 (African Rights and Redress, 109–117). Some witnesses to the genocide found it difficult to reconcile the predominantly Christian belief system in Rwanda with what happened there. As Jean-Léonard is forced to watch the members of his family being raped and murdered in Au sortir de l’enfer, he comments that ‘si Dieu existait, Il devait en tout cas ce jour-là avoir perdu la vue et l’ouie!’ [if God did exist, he must in any case have lost his sight and his hearing that day!] (Rurangwa, 2006: 86). The apparent incongruity of a Christian belief system and genocide is powerfully expressed through the titles of Karangwa and Sehene’s novels, both of which juxtapose symbols of Christianity with figurative allusions to crimes of genocide: the slicing of body parts in Le Chapelet et la machette [The Rosary and the Machete] and sexual violence Le Feu sous la soutane [Fire Beneath the Cassock]. For many survivors, the participation of priests in the genocide is particularly incomprehensible. Fearing for their lives, many thousands of people fled to churches for safety in 1994, taking with them as many of their personal belongings as they could reasonably carry. These same churches then became the sites of some of the largest and bloodiest massacres, with some priests accused of collaborating with the killers. One priest in particular, Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka, has captured the imagination of a number of writers of genocide fiction. Although

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the most sustained fictional representation of Wenceslas is found in Sehene’s Le Feu sous la soutane, the priest also appears in a number of other texts, either explicitly as in Karangwa’s introduction (6) and Waberi’s ironic reference in Moisson de crânes (36), or implicitly, as in Lamko’s La Phalène des collines which, as discussed in the previous chapter, fuses together the stories of Theresa Mukandori and Wenceslas in a scene of horrific rape and murder which he describes taking place in Wenceslas’s church, the Eglise Sainte Famille (33–46). In Murambi, Jessica tells the story of a beautiful woman blackmailed by an unnamed priest who threatens to hand her over to the Interahamwe if she refuses to have sex with him. Although the beautiful woman does not disclose the name of the priest, Jessica is certain she knows who it is: ‘En fait, je savais très bien de qui il s’agissait. A Kigali, en ces jours de folie, tout le monde savait’ (Diop, 2001: 110) [As a matter of fact, I knew very well who it was all about. In Kigali, during these days of folly, everyone knew (2006: 91)], which to the informed reader again suggests Father Wenceslas, one of the most visible priests in 1994, who frequently appeared in the international media wearing a flak jacket and carrying a gun.4 Through the campaigns of African Rights and Benjamin Sehene to bring Wenceslas to trial, the priest has become a symbol of the Church’s complicity in the genocide. Sehene also uses the Wenceslas story to demonstrate the failure of international justice, a point to which I shall return later in this chapter. Although exceptional examples such as genocide priests make for powerful works of fiction, many perpetrators in genocide stories are not political leaders or priests, but everyday citizens who are often victims’ relatives or friends. Many authors draw perpetrators as unremarkable individuals, reflecting what James Waller, following Hannah Arendt, emphasizes as the ‘ordinariness’ of those who commit acts of ‘extraordinary human evil’ (9). 5 This ordinariness is brilliantly illustrated in Robert Lyons and Scott Straus’s (2006) study Intimate Enemy, in which interviews conducted by Straus with convicted male Rwandan 4 See African Rights (1995) and (1996) for details of the Wenceslas story, including witness accounts. Fellow priest, Father Damascène, whose nephew, Arthur, was threatened by Wenceslas describes the priest as ‘pire que tout le monde’ [worse than anyone else] because people put their trust in him (Mukagasana and Kazinierakis, 94). 5 See also Hannah Arendt (2006), Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil discussed in Waller (98–106).

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perpetrators are followed by a series of photographs by Lyons of a different set of prisoners, including some women.6 Writing about the interview process in the introduction to the book, Straus remarks that: Very soon it became clear that these killers were men who had led quite banal lives before the genocide. They were ordinary husbands, fathers, sons, and boyfriends; they were farmers, fishermen, teachers, and market salesmen. Even more disarming, their testimonies made a certain sense; their rationales were not those of demented, sadistic maniacs. They were narratives of men with a well-developed sense of self-protection. This, of course, is the disturbing conclusion that other scholars who study genocide perpetrators have reached: the aggregate crime is much more extraordinary than those who commit it. (24)

Unlike the photographs in the better-known collection Les Blessures du silence [The Wounds of Silence], by Rwandan survivor Yolande Mukagasana and Belgian photographer, Alain Kazinierakis (2001), Lyons’s photographs have no captions. Instead, an index of the plates is placed at the end of the book in which thumbnail photographs are reproduced alongside short biographical summaries of the subjects including details of any alleged crime. Among the photographs of prisoners, Lyons also includes a small number of survivors, also without captions, making it impossible to distinguish the innocent from the guilty without referring to the index of plates, thereby emphasizing the ordinariness of those who committed the most extraordinary acts of genocide. Lyons confirms this as his aim in the ‘Photographer’s Notes’ that precede the pictures, explaining that he ‘wanted to make the audience enter a more intimate space, ask questions, experience directly the ambiguous physical resemblances between génocidaire and survivor’ (32). As in Les Blessures du silence, readers of Intimate Enemy are confronted with neutral, close-up portraits of ordinary people that challenge the clichéd images of machete-wielding militiamen high on cannabis and beer that have become associated with Rwanda. In their place, we find what the photographer suggests is ‘a more human face’ of genocide (35). Also unique to the genocide in Rwanda is the fact that most of the perpetrators were known to their victims; some of them were members of the victims’ own families. They were, as Lyons and Straus stress, 6 For a critique of the concept of ‘ordinary killers’ in relation to the Hatzfeld trilogy, see Hron (2011).

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‘intimate’ killers. This is particularly striking in Rurangwa’s novel, Au sortir de l’enfer, where Hutu extremist and ruthless killer Casimir Kayiru is the uncle of the protagonist’s wife. Thinking her uncle will protect them when the killings begin, Jeanne-Laurette is horrified to hear Casimir tell her he has cut off her father’s head and genitals as punishment for marrying a Tutsi (2006: 78). Although on one level, emotional closeness makes acts of genocide even more difficult to understand, on another, it perhaps explains the preoccupation with understanding perpetrators in works of fiction. Whereas Charlotte Lacoste in Séductions du bourreau [Seductive Perpetrators] (2010) rejects fictional attempts to understand génocidaires as reactionary, revisionist and ultimately undermining victims’ stories, attempts to present the humanity of perpetrators to different degrees are found in novels by authors with a range of different positional relationships with the events of 1994. As Lacoste notes with disapproval, Diop’s Dr Joseph Karekezi, father of Cornelius, revealed to be the ‘butcher of Murambi’ and a ‘tueur froid et résolu’ (2001: 184) [‘cold-blooded and resolute killer’ (2006: 154)], is nevertheless presented as an individual who was once an idealistic man of principle (Lacoste: 2010, 252–253). A liberal Hutu, Karekezi was married to a Tutsi woman and formerly tortured in prison for being a Tutsi sympathizer. Yet he justifies ordering the death of his own wife (Cornelius’s mother) and two of their children with the words, ‘C’est juste l’histoire qui veut du sang. Et pourquoi verserais-je seulement celui des autres? Le leur est tout aussi pourri’ (Diop, 2001: 129) [‘It’s just history that wants blood. And why would I only spill other people’s? Theirs is just as rotten’ (2006: 107)]. Karekezi intrigues those other characters who witnessed the genocide. French army officer Colonel Etienne Perrin describes his reaction to the architect of the Murambi massacre as ‘cette sorte de répugnance et de fascination que l’on éprouve en présence de ces meurtriers sadiques dont parlent les journaux’ (2001: 141) [‘the sort of repugnance and fascination one feels in the presence of sadistic murderers they talk about in the newspaper’ (2006: 116)]. Survivor Siméon wonders if his brother-in-law Karekezi was actually insane. How else, he asks himself, could he have done what he did? By presenting secondary characters interrogating the actions of Karekezi in the novel, Diop highlights what the text underlines as the urge to understand how people commit genocide. Ultimately, Siméon can only explain Karekezi’s actions as driven by power and greed. As Bénard suggests, Diop uses Murambi to outline the limits of understanding genocide since what ultimately emerges is the

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senselessness of it all (88). Yet, attempts at understanding are what link many of the fictional responses to the genocide. While a small number of fictional texts, notably Rurangwa’s Au sortir de l’enfer and Pierce’s Speak Rwanda, portray génocidaires as single-minded perpetrators of evil, the majority of the novels convey killers as far more complex individuals. Some are depicted as vulnerable, sometimes afraid, unquestioningly following orders for fear of their own death; others, like Kana’s Rwandan army brigadier in Le Défi de survivre, show symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder; in particular, many confound the distinction between victim and perpetrator, a blurring brilliantly illustrated in Robert Lyons’s photographs.7 What is particularly striking is the fact that some of the most fully drawn examples of génocidaires appear in three of the earliest Francophone Rwandan texts: Karangwa’s portrait of a head teacher turned genocide leader in Le Chapelet et la machette, Sehene’s fictionalized confession of real-life alleged perpetrator-priest Wenceslas Munyeshyaka in Le Feu sous la soutane and Gatore’s mute militiaman Niko in Le Passé devant soi. In each of these cases, the relationship of the author to the events of 1994 is markedly different: a survivor now living in South Africa (Karangwa), an exiled RPF sympathizer who was living in France in 1994 (Sehene) and the son of an alleged perpetrator who fled Rwanda with his family during the genocide (Gatore). Yet they have all chosen to create what Froma Zeitlin, writing about the Holocaust, calls ‘imaginary tales in the land of the perpetrators’ (2006). Unlike Holocaust literature, however, these three texts were published only ten or so years after the genocide. According to Robert Eaglestone, what unites all perpetrator fictions about the Holocaust is the desire for an answer to the question of why such atrocities were committed (2011: 15–16). In his view, this question is central to representations of perpetrators and so ‘the omission of its answer is a problem’ (25). Research on Rwandan perpetrators’ motives has produced a variety of sometimes contradictory findings; such is the diversity of disciplines involved in the field of genocide studies. In her review of perpetrator research, Cyanne Loyle identifies a range of different structural and individual explanations for participation in genocide. The dominant motives that emerge from Loyle’s survey of literature on the Rwanda genocide are fear, personal edification and 7 There many are other brief portraits of perpetrators as remorseless killers in genocide fiction, for example the character of Alfred Ndimabati in Ilboudo (2000). See Semujanga (2008: 188-191).

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greed, group pressure, and feeling overpowered and confused by the situation (34–35). One of the studies Loyle cites is Scott Straus’s The Order of Genocide, which singles out ‘pressure from other Hutus, security fears and opportunity’ as ‘the main dynamics driving participation in the violence’ (2006: 97). Also quoted in Loyle’s review is Fujii’s fieldwork in the Rwandan communities of Kimanzi and Ngali, which leads to conclusions that are similar, but different from those of Straus. In Fujii’s analysis, many people participated in the genocide because of ‘situational factors and personal motives’ (77). According to Fujii, ethnic hatred and fear were the consequences rather than the causes of the killings. She explains this as the result of environmental factors, notably coercion, personal motives such as jealousy and greed, and finally what she refers to as the natural and even inevitable ‘logic of contamination’ (99). The suggestion that ethnic hatred spread through contamination rather than being structurally embedded in Rwandan society is echoed in Kayimahe’s character Angelo, the Tutsi leader of the Interahamwe known as the Eradicator, who tells his former friend Lionceau that hatred is contagious and spreads like a cancer (2014: 317). Rwandan Charles Mironko’s interviews with confessed perpetrators also support Fujii’s conclusions. The spirit of the mob (ibitero), he argues, made those who participated do so for fear of their own immediate injury or death: ‘the threat to “kill or be killed”’ (164). Such views differ from those of the better-known scholars of the genocide based in the West: whereas Prunier explains the genocide as driven by a culturally embedded national spirit of obedience (1999: 293) and Mamdani points to a racialized fear of future Tutsi domination (191), Mironko argues that ordinary Hutu decided to participate largely because they were coerced and afraid. Where dominant motives emerge in genocide fiction, these tend to be presented as personal rather than structural. Although all the novels critique the historical processes that contributed to the genocide, singling out in particular the Hamitic hypothesis as a key contributory factor in the evolution of genocide ideology, individual perpetrators are imagined as most commonly driven by motives of greed, peer pressure and fear. Sexual revenge against Tutsi women is the suggested motive of two of the more extreme examples of fictional perpetrators – the CDR militants Célestin Sembagare and Casimir Kayiru in Rurangwa’s Au sortir de l’enfer. In his portrayal of Célestin, Rurangwa presents a character who joins the génocidaires out of a desire for revenge for being spurned by Tutsi women in the past. Rurangwa describes Célestin waiting anxiously

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in anticipation for the genocide to begin so that he can ‘commettre ces atrocités érotiques et donner libre cours à ses fantasmes sexuels les plus monstrueux’ [commit those erotic atrocities and give free rein to his most monstrous sexual fantasies], including gang rape and sexual violence (2006: 71). Through Célestin’s words, Rurangwa evokes the myth perpetuated by Hutu extremists that Tutsi women thought they were too good for Hutu men and so rape was a morally justifiable act of revenge. When fellow CDR militant Casimir rapes his brother’s wife, he tells her, ‘Je vais te baiser, chienne de Tutsi! Comme je t’ai longtemps convoitée!’ [I’m going to fuck you, Tutsi bitch! I’ve fancied you for so long!] (2006: 81).8 Alison Des Forges explains that, ‘Generally esteemed as beautiful, Tutsi women were also said to scorn Hutu men whom they found unworthy of their attention. Many assailants insulted women for their supposed arrogance while they were raping them’ (1999: 215). In Le Feu sous la soutane, Sehene’s perpetrator-priest Stanislas also attempts to justify his rape of the women in his care when he tells himself: il ne faut jamais que j’oublie l’arrogance et le mépris des femmes tutsi pour nous. Ne disaient-elles pas avant le conflit: ‘Le vilain bouc – le Hutu – ne peut monter la brebis’. (2005: 115) [I must never forget the arrogance and disdain that Tutsi women have for us. Didn’t they use to say before the conflict, ‘The ugly goat – the Hutu – can never ride the sheep’]

Such projected ethnic hatred can be traced back to the resentment towards the Tutsi monarchy that preceded the so-called Social Revolution of 1959 and reflects what Lemarchard refers to as the ‘disproportionate part’ played by Tutsi women in extremist Hutu propaganda (60–63). However, among the ordinary killers in fiction, the ‘joiners’, motives tend not to be framed in terms of the ideology of genocide, a narrative choice that fits the evidence from scholars’ fieldwork in Rwanda. Often the most violent perpetrators were, like Rurangwa’s militants, indoctrinated by anti-Tutsi propaganda. Yet, the majority of those who perpetrated, as Straus’s study shows, did not support Hutu Power or its ideology, at least before the genocide (2006: 129–135). Of 209 convicted perpetrators 8 The possibility of raping Tutsi women was one of the ways in which the CDR attempted to persuade Rwandan citizens to participate in the genocide (Burnet, 2012: 62). Rurangwa illustrates this in Au Sortir de l’enfer through the conversation between CDR militant Butihoro and the Benimana family’s domestic servant, Juma (Rurangwa, 2006: 16–17).

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interviewed by Straus in 2002, 64% claimed to have participated in killings because of the threat of repercussions if they failed to do so. These repercussions included damage to property, financial penalties, violence and death (136). When the Fest’Africa party visited Rwanda, they also interviewed perpetrators. Similar findings to those gathered by scholars like Straus appear to have informed the characterization in some of their novels. For example, in Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana, Isaac explains how the militia took young people and forced them to fight and kill, warning that, ‘Si tu ne tues pas, nous te tuerons. Si tu ne les tues pas, ils te tueront!’ (2000: 33) [‘If you do not kill, we will kill you. If you do not kill them, they will kill you!’ (2002: 22). Diop’s novel, on the other hand, is more critical of those who joined the Interahamwe, described by survivor Siméon as greedy, stupid, fearful of the authorities and bowing to in-group pressure (2001: 184). Intra-ethnic coercion was a significant factor driving people to participate in the genocide in 1994 and was, according to Straus, a more important determinant of participation than interethnic animosity (2006: 148).9 Ultimately, as Straus points out, ‘any search for a single motivation that causes individuals to commit genocide is surely a futile exercise. Motivation and participation were clearly heterogeneous in the Rwandan genocide, and Rwanda is not exceptional in that regard’ (95). Just as existing fieldwork among prisoners in Rwanda fails to reach a consensus on why people perpetrated genocide, so the motives of perpetrators in Rwandan novels are not always easy to identify, with writers tending to focus on how rather than why the genocide happened (Spiessens, 30). On the other hand, as I suggested above, many fictional works do attempt to portray génocidaires with a degree of psychological complexity that resists reducing perpetrators to an identifiable type. For example, in Le Défi de survivre, Kana portrays a FAR brigadier suffering from post-traumatic impotence. As an army leader who ordered crimes of genocide, the brigadier is a Category I perpetrator according to Rwandan law. Yet the novel focuses on his inability to make love to his wife because ‘les multiples scènes d’horreur dont il avait été acteur involontaire ou témoin avaient laissé trop d’amertume dans son corps’ [the multiple scenes of horror in which he had been an unwitting participant or a witness had left too much bitterness in his 9 Testimony gathered by Fujii also reveals that genocide leaders used social ties to coerce family members, sometimes with the threat of death, into participating in the killings (134–137).

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body] (149). Ten years after the genocide, the brigadier makes a full confession. Similarly, in Le Chapelet et la machette, Karangwa creates the figure of a repentant perpetrator. Having led groups of militia in multiple killings and having personally committed countless acts of rape and violence – so much so that he becomes the hero of the génocidaires – Célestin Gahinda eventually regrets his actions, offering himself up for trial and confessing to his crimes. He tells his fellow prisoners, ‘ce que nous avons fait est indicible. Le monde entier a été choqué’ [what we did is unspeakable. The whole world was shocked] (15). In exchange for a reduced sentence, Célestin becomes an important witness of the genocide, going some way towards satisfying what the novel emphasizes as survivors’ need to know the truth, although he, like many other perpetrators, fails to answer the key question of why he committed genocidal crimes. As a witness, Célestin is ironically presented in the novel as a new kind of hero. The narrator comments: Comme du temps du génocide, son nom fut sur toutes les lèvres. Il était de nouveau un héros. C’était auparavant pour avoir tué beaucoup de tutsis. Cette fois-ci c’était pour l’avoir reconnu. Et qui a dit que l’ironie n’existe pas? (107) [As in the time of the genocide, his name was on everybody’s lips. He was a hero again. Before it was for having killed lots of Tutsi. This time is was for having admitted it. Who said there was no such thing as irony?]

By pointing to the paradox of a Category I perpetrator becoming a post-genocide hero, Karangwa highlights the shifting nature of subject positions both during and after the genocide. At the same time, the narrator’s ironic aside intensifies the reader’s moral unease with the character of Célestin. Moral ambiguity surrounds the representation of the majority of perpetrators in Rwanda genocide fiction. A striking feature of many of the texts, particularly those by Rwandan authors, is the blurring of the categories of perpetrator and victim. The strongest fictional example of this is found in Gatore’s novel Le Passé devant soi [The Past Ahead], which won the Prix des Etonnants Voyageurs in 2008 and has been something of a commercial success. In this novel, Gatore creates a symmetrical narrative which alternates between a survivor’s and a perpetrator’s point of view. Both are presented as traumatized individuals struggling to recover from their experiences of genocide, the survivor attempting first to repress then to work through her trauma,

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the former militiaman living in isolation in a cave where he experiences nightmares, flashbacks and other post-traumatic symptoms. During his initiation into the militia, Niko is given three seconds to murder his own father. Counting down from three to one, a militiaman stands behind Niko with a gun against his head. Niko chooses a club as a weapon so he won’t see any blood. Gatore’s description of the killing, as Elizabeth Applegate remarks, ‘complicates our judgement’ of Niko, identifying him as perpetrator but also suggesting that he too was a victim and perhaps even a survivor (72). If anything, the reader is invited to empathize more closely with perpetrator than survivor, particularly as the narrator directly addresses the reader as ‘tu’ in Niko’s narrative but uses the more formal ‘vous’ in Isaro’s story (Spiessens, 36). Although Gatore’s attempt to paint a fictional portrait of a génocidaire’s subjectivity is by no means unique, it unleashed something of a scandal in the academic world. Critic Catherine Coquio has openly dismissed Le Passé devant soi as a failed genocide novel because it encourages the reader to empathize with a killer, an empathy that she claims is neither possible nor true (2010: 258). Lacoste takes an even more condemnatory view, accusing Gatore of literary revisionism (2010: 347–348). Yet the concept of perpetrator as victim is not so easy to reject in the context of the genocide in Rwanda. Writing about her testimonial photography project Les Blessures du silence, Rwandan survivor Mukagasana criticizes the tendency to condemn all perpetrators en masse. What she discovered in Rwanda in 1999, she writes, was that ‘parmi les bourreaux, il y en a un certain nombre qui sont victimes d’être bourreaux’ [among the perpetrators, they are a certain number who are victims of having been perpetrators] (Mukagasana and Kazinierakis, 82). Indeed, the testimonies of a number of the perpetrators included in Mukagasana’s book challenge conventional notions of innocence and guilt. For example, Hutu mother and prisoner Ancilla M. killed three of her four Tutsi children by forcing them to drink insecticide. She did this, she says, because she was no longer able to hide them.10 Ancilla then attempted to take her own life, but failed because there was not enough insecticide left. She tells Mukagasana that she longs for a death sentence and has so many regrets that she is unable to sleep at night. Mukagasana writes in response that she feels pity for Ancilla and that ‘sa blessure est 10 Ancilla M. is also one of the perpetrators photographed in Lyons and Straus, named here as confessed Category II génocidaire, Ancille Mukaminega (Lyons and Straus, 2006: 151; 175).

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immense et saignera jusqu’à la fin de ses jours’ [her wound is immense and will bleed until the end of her days] (109). The question of whether perpetrators can be victims has been a contentious subject in the field of trauma theory, Ruth Leys famously challenging Cathy Caruth’s claim that perpetrators can be understood as victims of trauma (2000: 297). In Multidirectional Memory, Rothberg engages with the Leys–Caruth debate, suggesting that ‘Leys’s and other critics’ observations derive in part from a category error. Most crucially, Leys elides the category of “victim” with that of the traumatized subject’ (2009: 90). Like Caruth, Rothberg acknowledges that perpetrators can be victims of trauma because, he explains, ‘the categories of victim and perpetrator derive from either a legal or a moral discourse, but the concept of trauma emerges from a diagnostic realm that lies beyond guilt and innocence or good and evil’ (90). However, acknowledging the possibility of a traumatized perpetrator does not, in Rothberg’s view, allow us to conceive of a perpetrator as a victim. Following LaCapra in History and Memory After Auschwitz, Rothberg writes that ‘perpetrators of extreme violence can suffer from trauma – but this makes them no less guilty of their crimes and does not entail claims to victimization or even demands on our sympathy’ (90).11 What Rothberg’s attempt to simplify the distinction between traumatized individual and victim does not do, however, is consider the subject position of a perpetrator forced into performing acts of violence, as happened often in Rwanda. In cases such as these, I would argue that the concept of victim also lies beyond guilt and innocence or good and evil; the distinctions are no longer entirely clear. Although Rothberg’s argument seems to exclude all possibility of a sympathetic perpetrator, a view that resonates with Coquio’s and Lacoste’s rejection of Gatore’s novel, this is challenged by Rwandan survivors like Mukagasana who seek to understand – and even empathize with – those who committed acts of genocide.12 Another interviewee in Les Blessures du silence is fifteen-year-old Evariste, who was ten at the time of the genocide. When the militia came to his house, they told Evariste that they would kill his Tutsi mother 11 See also LaCapra (1998: 41). 12 Rothberg later seems to contradict himself when, concluding his discussion of the story of Tancred and Clorinda as a multidirectional narrative, he posits that Tasso’s parable ‘stages the permeable relation, in cultural texts as well as history, between enemies “inside” and “outside” of empire as well as between “perpetrators” and “victims” and “enemies” and “friends”’ (2009: 95).

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if he did not take a machete to his neighbour’s children. Reflecting on Evariste’s story, Mukagasana writes, ‘Evariste m’a mise en face de moi-même en tant que mère. Si j’avais épousé un Hutu, mes enfants auraient peut-être été des bourreaux!’ [Evariste made me look at myself as a mother. If I had married a Hutu, then perhaps my children would have been perpetrators!] (Mukagasana and Kazinierakis, 97). All of Mukagasana’s own children were massacred in the genocide; yet she is able to imagine herself as the mother of a perpetrator. Through her emotional responses to Ancilla and Evariste, Mukagasana demonstrates precisely the empathic identification that Coquio and Lacoste find so unacceptable in Gatore’s novel. Furthermore, Gatore is not alone is generating empathic identification with perpetrators. In La Chanson de l’aube, when interrogating his former Tutsi friend turned Interahamwe leader Angelo, Lionceau becomes troubled that this man, nicknamed ‘the Eradicator’, may be non pas un monstre parfait, mais un prochain accidentellement souillé par ses crimes, sa soif de puissance, ses appétences, une détestation du Tutsi qu’il avait nourrie avec délice mais dont il n’était pas le géniteur, et qui conservait un restant du cœur. (Kayimahe, 2014: 317–318) [not a perfect monster, but a fellow man accidentally soiled by his crimes, his thirst for power, his desires, his hatred for Tutsi, which he had enthusiastically nourished but not created, and who still had the remains of a heart]

Of course, imagining the humanity of perpetrators who have committed acts of such unimaginable horror is a risky business because it requires empathy, an emotional response that makes both author and reader ethically and aesthetically uncomfortable (Suleiman, 2). To empathize with a perpetrator is to run the risk of mitigating his crimes and negating the experiences of the victims, not to mention the fear that readers will somehow be contaminated by the perpetrator’s ideology, though, in the case of Rwanda, there is evidence to suggest that most ordinary perpetrators did not in fact subscribe to the ‘genocide ideology’ (Chakravarty, 233).13 In Holocaust fiction there was for a long time very little writing about the subjectivity of perpetrators, which explains the huge furore surrounding the publication of Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes some sixty years after the end of the Second World War. Anxieties associated with what Claude Lanzmann has famously 13 See also Fujii (2009) and Straus (2006).

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condemned as ‘the obscenity of the project of understanding’ (207) perhaps explain the long reluctance of Holocaust writers to create fiction from a perpetrator’s point of view. Susan Rubin Suleiman notes that only a handful of Nazi perpetrator fictions were published between 1945 and the end of the twentieth century (1–2). In a more recent article, Eaglestone claims that since the beginning of the twenty-first century there has been what he describes as a ‘boom’ in fictional works about perpetrators (2011: 15), a point corroborated and extended by Margaret-Anne Hutton, who identifies a ‘cluster’ of Nazi perpetrator texts in French and German from the mid-1990s onwards (2). Norridge has suggested that, following Holocaust studies, the area of Rwandan perpetrator testimonies will similarly ‘require a degree of time and distance before it can be fully explored’ (2011b; 257), but her conclusion does not seem to apply to fictional works. On the contrary, the emergence of a number of psychologically complex perpetrators in fiction by Rwandan authors within only ten to fifteen years of the genocide seems to mark a significant departure from the Holocaust tradition. While perpetrator testimonies are often self-interested and therefore unreliable, they have nevertheless played an important part in processes of justice and reconciliation in Rwanda since 1994. A convicted perpetrator often forms part of a commemoration ceremony in which his or her story follows that of a survivor of the genocide. There is a strong expectation from the audience that the perpetrator will not only confess but also show remorse for his crimes. Kayimahe demonstrates this in his novel when the narrator ironically describes a perpetrator publicly asking for forgiveness but showing no remorse (2014: 406).14 Similarly, a central and innovative feature of the traditional gacaca genocide courts system was the role of the confession.15 According to Phil Clark, many suspects confessed for religious reasons, following 14 At the Kwibuka 20 commemoration at ETO school on 5 April 2014, the perpetrator’s testimony provoked laughter among members of the audience who explained that they were laughing because the killer showed no remorse. 15 Rwanda’s 1996 Organic Law on genocide prosecutions identifies four main categories of perpetrators of genocide with the death penalty reserved for Category I offenders. Offenders who confess and plead guilty to their crimes could have their sentence commuted. When it became clear that the ordinary Rwandan courts were unable to cope with the huge number of detainees, the Organic Law of 2001 implemented a system of community courts adapted from a traditional method of dispute resolution known as gacaca (African Rights and Redress, 2008: 26–54). Gacaca ended in 2012.

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the Catholic teaching that confession will lead to divine forgiveness and absolution (268). In real terms, those who confessed could be given reduced sentences, particularly if they confessed before the trial began (e.g. in prison), but only if the confession was judged to be truthful. Perpetrators who confessed, pleaded guilty and asked for forgiveness could sometimes have up to half their sentence commuted into TIG (‘travaux d’intérêt général’ [community service]) (300). Asking for forgiveness was deemed essential for a confession to be accepted as legitimate (279). Many perpetrators, however, remain unrepentant. Describing his visit to Rilima prison with fellow writer Tadjo, Waberi expresses his surprise that even those sentenced to death are ‘pas pénitents du tout’ [not penitent at all] (79). In their 2008 report ‘Survivors and Post-genocide Justice in Rwanda’, African Rights and Redress expose the anger and frustration of survivors with the many different justice solutions that have been tried in Rwanda after 1994. They conclude that ‘Survivors are angered by the current discourse on reconciliation. They regard remorse and acknowledgement as fundamental preconditions to reconciliation and believe that neither have materialized, or even been emphasized, at either the individual or societal levels’ (4–5). Rwanda has been criticized for its culture of impunity both before and after the genocide (Kayigamba, 2008: 40–41). Some fictional works highlight the failures of justice by imagining perpetrators being forced to acknowledge their crimes and seek forgiveness while in real life many live without repercussions. Karangwa’s Le Chapelet et la machette, for example, is a novel that promotes reconciliation by imagining a perpetrator experiencing remorse; however, even Célestin the repentant génocidaire insists that he was simply following orders. At this point in his text, the author intervenes to ask, ‘Mais qui est cet autre qui acceptera finalement d’endosser cette lourde responsabilité du génocide rwandais? Et quand ce sera-t-il?’ [But who is this person who will eventually agree to take on the heavy responsibility of the Rwanda genocide? And when will that be?] (109). Despite Hron’s contention that the repentant killer has become a stereotype, particularly in filmic representations of the genocide (2011: 127), genuinely remorseful perpetrators are not that common in written fiction. Célestin, the main protagonist of Le Chapelet et la machette, is the only example in the corpus of a repentant perpetrator turned official witness for the prosecution. However, examples of perpetrators as unofficial witnesses are found in many other fictional responses to the genocide, presented either through narrative focalization or through

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(semi-)fictional testimony. Tadjo, for example, presents the first-person narrative of peasant-turned-murderer Froduard inside quotation marks as if it were an authentic testimony, thereby distinguishing it from the short fictional pieces also drawn from interviews with Rwandan people. As readers, we have no way of knowing whether Froduard’s testimony is genuine, or indeed whether Froduard actually exists, an uncertainty that is exacerbated by the generically indeterminate nature of Tadjo’s text. Froduard’s narrative reads like a confessional stream of consciousness, most of the information presented in a three-page paragraph. The social importance of perpetrator testimony in Rwanda is reflected in those fictional texts that include confessions. In La Promesse faite à ma sœur, Jean’s discovery that his twin brother Thomas stands accused of crimes of genocide leaves him keen to hear his brother explain the charges against him in his own words. But when he does eventually come face to face with his brother, Thomas’s explanation is slippery. Though Thomas initially tells Jean that he had had no choice but to stand on a barricade for fear of being killed himself, he eventually claims that he has been wrongfully accused not only of being in charge of the barricade, but also of murdering his neighbour’s brother (Ndwaniye, 2006: 179–181). Jean’s reaction to his brother’s story pushes the reader into a position of judgement. Although the narrator explicitly states that his own role is not to judge Thomas, the direct questions he asks himself become transferred to the reader through the first-person narrative: Etait-il réellement un faux coupable, un vrai innocent, comme il le prétendait? Je n’avais aucun élément objectif pour mesurer son rôle individuel dans cette tragédie collective. (2006: 182) [Was he really wrongly accused, truly innocent, as he claimed? I had no objective way of measuring his individual role in this collective tragedy]

Trapped inside the narrator’s head, the reader’s objectivity is also restricted, yet we are implicitly invited to make some kind of judgement here. In Le Feu sous la soutane, the reader is more overtly positioned as the judge of an alleged perpetrator’s confession. Here the entire novel takes the form of a confession related in the first person by the now incarcerated Father Stanislas, fictional proxy of real-life priest Wenceslas Munyeshyaka. As in La Promesse faite à ma sœur, Stanislas’s ‘confession’ is far from straightforward. As Susannah Radstone has shown, literary confession creates what she calls a subject ‘becoming’, insofar as ‘each confessional act both adds to and alters the view of the

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central protagonist offered to the reader’ (171). Le Feu sous la soutane presents the reader with a narrative full of contradictions, its fictional confessant swinging between admissions of guilt and self-justification. Though Sehene does use the first-person narrative to explore possible explanations for the priest’s behaviour, including Rwandan ethnopolitics, dissociation and moral disengagement, his text ultimately condemns Stanislas as a self-deceiving génocidaire (Hitchcott, 2012). Through the fictional confession, Sehene leads the reader to judge not only Stanislas, but also his real-life counterpart, Wenceslas Munyeshyaka. Writing the Wenceslas story in the form of a fictional confession gives Sehene licence to create a version of the real-life priest that is in turn recreated through the act of reading. Sehene’s control of his character-narrator, Stanislas, shapes our view of the real Father Wenceslas who, excluded from his own (albeit fictional) confession, is condemned by association as an unreliable witness in his own fictional trial. While the real-life Wenceslas lives with impunity as a priest and scout leader in Normandy, Sehene’s decision to place his fictional proxy in prison from the outset of the novel invites the reader to judge him guilty as charged. Although it is the only example of what I have termed a ‘trial by fictional proxy’ (Hitchcott, 2012: 22), Sehene’s novel is not unique in judging perpetrators of genocide. Sometimes authors use characters as mouthpieces for their own political position in relation to the events of 1994. In Le Défi de survivre, Kana encourages the reader to condemn the political and administrative leaders of the country as ultimately responsible and to excuse the many thousands of civilians mobilized to kill their friends and neighbours as obedient followers of an authoritarian regime. At the end of a conversation between two UN blue berets, the Ghanaian soldier concludes that: Si on doit à tout prix désigner un coupable, on ne peut que l’imputer à l’élite, car la grande masse du peuple ne fait qu’obéir, survivre et exécuter les ordres. (169) [If we have to find the guilty party at any cost, we can only blame the elite, as most ordinary people simply obey, survive and carry out orders]16

RPF supporter Kana uses his historical novel to articulate his own interpretation of who was responsible for the killings. In doing this, he adopts a structural explanation for the genocide that fits his own 16 It is significant that the soldier is from the Ghanaian UN contingent as this was the only unit to stay in Rwanda during the genocide.

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pro-RPF ideology, but denies individual perpetrators’ responsibility for the genocide. Other authors use their texts to position perpetrators in terms of a moral hierarchy. For example, in L’Ombre d’Imana Tadjo’s portrait of 253 women prisoners suggests that she is personally more shocked by the acts of female than male perpetrators: ‘On les aurait voulues innocentes’ (2000: 117) [‘We would have preferred them to be innocent’ (2002: 102)], she writes. As evidence of what appears to be her particular moral outrage, Tadjo catalogues crimes committed by women in what reads as a long, relentless list (2000: 116–117; 2002: 101).17 Here the frequent repetition of the word ‘femmes’ [women] draws particular attention to the gender of the perpetrators, as do the references to the women prisoners as mothers, culminating in the use of a metaphor of childbirth in the final sentence in this section: ‘Seule l’impunité enfante la mort’ (2000: 117) [‘Only impunity gives birth to death’ (2002; 102)]. It seems that, in Tadjo’s view, women perpetrators of genocide are somehow more ‘unnatural’ than men: ‘ces femmes ont tué leur propre destin de femmes’ (2000: 117) [‘these women killed their own destiny as women’ (2002: 102)].18 Such authorial interventions leave the reader in an uncomfortable position, one that Eaglestone has also identified in Holocaust perpetrator novels, where ethical and aesthetic discomfort ‘are often made manifest as questions of moral judgement: the judgements readers make on texts, but more often judgements that texts contain within themselves or lead the reader to make’ (2011: 15). Some novelists also present characters who make judgements on themselves. These tend to be relatives of perpetrators or bystanders who feel contaminated by their close contact with acts of genocide. The two most powerful examples of characters who experience guilt by association are Théodore Gakwavu in Rurangwa’s Au sortir de l’enfer and Cornelius, the main protagonist in Diop’s Murambi. While 17 None of the crimes Tadjo lists was specific to women whereas women were often the targets of particular gender-based acts of violence. 18 Tadjo’s apparent difficultly in reconciling women’s ‘roles’ with perpetrating genocide is echoed in the findings of Sarah Brown who records the Executive Secretary of IBUKA, Janvier Forongo, telling her in 2011 that ‘it’s somehow very difficult for us to understand how a lady can become a killer, as a mother’. (Brown, 449). Brown goes on to explain that, ‘Far from being a cliché, gendered assumptions about the sacredness of motherhood and female passivity are still real in their function and application in Rwandan society, despite the country’s tremendous success in the area of gender equality’ (451).

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in Belgium, Rurangwa’s protagonist Jean-Léonard encounters Rwandan former university professor Théodore Gakwavu, who is described by his friend André-Martin as ‘détraqué’ [off his head] (135). Although Théodore himself refused to participate in the genocide, he witnessed his brother Théodomir lead a group of Interahamwe in killing his colleague Philibert Semunuma, along with Philibert’s three children and his wife, who was also gang-raped and lacerated through her vagina. A broken man, Théodore is described as ‘port[ant] moralement le crime commis par son frère’ [morally loaded with his brother’s crime] (136) and is haunted by the image of the dead colleague decapitated by his brother. To demonstrate the extent of his trauma, Rurangwa gives Théodore a ten-page psychotic monologue addressed to the ghost of Philibert (136–146). During this monologue Théodore assumes responsibility for crimes he did not commit, claiming that he took a machete, cut off Philibert’s head and then threw it into a latrine. Théodore believes that if he tells a story of the genocide, even if it is not true, he will be free of the ghost of Philibert, the symbol of his personal guilt and trauma. In Murambi, Cornelius also experiences guilt by association, an emotion that is intensified by his visit to the Murambi memorial. Having discovered that his father, Dr Joseph Karekezi, organized the massacre of 50,000 people in the unfinished buildings of what was to be the Murambi technical school, Cornelius wants to tell the guide there that he himself was personally responsible for what happened, but, as he acknowledges, that would not make any sense at all (Diop, 2001: 175). What such examples show is the complex nature of guilt and blame in post-genocide Rwanda. As Mamdani points out, ‘from the point of view of the minority in postgenocide Rwanda, the majority is guilty, either of killing, or condoning, or just looking elsewhere while the killing happened’ (225). What writers of fiction also suggest is that the majority of Rwandans are also victims, including many of those who perpetrated genocide. The difficulty of pushing people into categories of victim or perpetrator is powerfully illustrated in Diop’s novel when Cornelius, having initially positioned himself and his family as victims in the shared memory of genocide, is forced to re-evaluated his position once he discovers the truth about his father’s role in the killings. Diop writes that: à compter de ce jour, sa vie ne serait plus la même. Il était le fils d’un monstre. […] Il se découvrait brusquement sous les traits du Rwandais idéal: à la fois victime et coupable. (2001: 95)

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[from that day on his life would not be the same. He was the son of a monster. […] He had suddenly discovered that he had become the perfect Rwandan: both guilty and a victim (2006: 78)]

As Diop suggests here and as previously discussed, guilt in Rwanda is not limited to those who perpetrated genocide, nor is it always easy to distinguish the innocent from the guilty. However, in post-genocide Rwanda, as Nigel Eltringham demonstrates, there is a tendency to ‘globalize guilt according to ethnic identity’ (69). This, he warns, can have dangerous consequences since ‘the constructed image of two heterogeneous collectivities of “the Hutu” and “the Tutsi” central to genocidal propaganda can be easily overlaid by “génocidaires” (those who committed the genocide) and “rescapés” (survivors of the genocide)’ (72). In other words, ‘Hutu’ sometimes becomes synonymous with ‘perpetrator’. Indeed, critics of Kagame’s government, such as Burnet, condemn official commemorations of the genocide as ‘[perpetuating] generalizations of Tutsi as the innocent victims and Hutu as the bloodstained perpetrators’ (12). As an antidote to such generalizations, Burnet calls for a ‘more nuanced account of the genocide, the civil war, and the postgenocide period’ which, she demonstrates, ‘yields a much more complicated history. Individual violent experiences during the civil war, genocide, or insurgency do not fit neatly into the dyadic Hutu perpetrator/Tutsi victim logic’ (110–111). Writers of fiction offer more nuanced perspectives and deconstruct the globalizing association of Hutu with perpetrator. For example, in the pro-RPF historical novel Le Défi de survivre, Kana creates the character of Simon, a Hutu with a Tutsi mother who hides two of his Tutsi neighbours in his house and takes another away for medical treatment concealed in the back of his van. Despite saving three lives, Simon is all too aware that he will be judged by his Hutu ‘ethnicity’. As he tells his father when the genocide is over, ‘Malheureusement, même les innocents auront à partager cette honte’ [Unfortunately, even innocent people will have to share that shame] (212). His neighbour and RPF soldier Michel Tabaro is initially reluctant to visit Simon after the genocide because Simon is Hutu. Although he knows that Simon’s houseboy took his sister Gisèle to safety, Michel cannot be sure of his neighbour’s innocence (215). Despite the partisanship of his novel, Kana is careful not to condemn all Hutu as collectively guilty. Through the character of Simon, Kana challenges the way in which ‘Hutu’ has become a synonym for ‘perpetrator’ and ‘Tutsi’ for ‘victim’ in the national and

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international consciousness. Furthermore, Le Défi de survivre reminds us that a number of Tutsi also participated in the genocide, some of them organizing and leading the killing. Simon talks to his wife about the president of the Interahamwe militia, who was a Tutsi (100). Here the text is referring to real-life génocidaire Robert Kajuga, founder and president of the Interahamwe. Both Kajuga’s parents were Tutsi but he and his family ‘passed’ as Hutu.19 Like Kana, Monénembo uses fiction to challenge the ethnopolitics that have become so strongly associated with Rwanda and the genocide. In L’Aîné des orphelins, Faustin has a Hutu father and Tutsi mother and so would be identified as a Hutu by the genocidal regime. When he asks his father whether he is Hutu or Tutsi, he father explains that ‘Ça veut pas dire grand-chose, Hutu ou Tutsi, c’est comme si tu perdais ton temps à comparer l’eau et l’eau’ (2000: 139) [‘Hutu, Tutsi, that doesn’t mean much; you might as well compare water with water’ (2004: 85)]. Throughout his novel, Monénembo demonstrates the arbitrary nature of so-called ethnic identity in Rwanda. When he is taken prisoner by an RPF soldier, Faustin is assumed to be a génocidaire, but the soldier also informs him that he could be mistaken for a Tutsi. As discussed in Chapter Four, Monénembo does not reveal the truth about Faustin’s experience until the very end of the novel, when a flashback finds him nursing at his dead mother’s breasts, which are dripping with blood after the massacre at Nyamata. By keeping the reader guessing about both Faustin’s ethnicity and his role in the genocide, Monénembo demonstrates what he sees as the absurdity of the genocide and its afterlife. As Faustin comments, ‘depuis ces fameux avènements, tout fonctionne à l’envers’ (2000: 91) [‘since these famous advents, everything works upside down’ (2004: 55)]. Monénembo presents Rwanda as a topsy-turvy world in which identity and truth are relative and arbitrary. For much of the novel, he manipulates the reader into identifying Faustin as a perpetrator, particularly as the novel opens with him in Kigali’s central prison awaiting execution. When she visits him in prison, Claudine, Faustin’s benefactor, speaks to him about his possible sentence as if he were being tried for a crime of genocide: 19 Kajuga’s brother Wyclif was one of the Tutsi hidden at the Hotel Mille Collines during the genocide (Bartrop, 153–154). Kayimahe’s character of Angelo in La Chanson de l’aube may also be based on Kajuga.

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– Le juge m’a dit qu’il y a trois catégories de coupables; les complices (de zéro à cinq ans), les exécutants (de cinq à vingt ans) et les organisateurs (la perpétuité ou la potence). Mais toi, tu es un cas à part. Tu as toujours été un cas à part, Faustin Nsenghimana! (2000: 87) [The judge told me there are three categories of guilty individuals: the accomplices (zero to five years), those who carry out the deed (five to twenty years) and the organizers (life or the gallows). However, you’re a special case. You’ve always been a special case, Faustin Nsenghimana! (2004: 52)]

Faustin does not fit any of the categories listed by the judge because these are the categories for crimes of genocide. His crime is to have shot dead another orphan he found having sex with his sister. Despite not being a génocidaire, Faustin is sentenced to death, but the text suggests that this is largely because he behaves disrespectfully in court and shows no remorse for what he has done. Throughout the novel, Monénembo leads the reader into placing Faustin in different categories at different times: Hutu, Tutsi, perpetrator, victim. When the story of what really happened to Faustin is finally revealed, the reader is invited to identify him as a survivor. Yet, as a Rwandan Hutu, Faustin would not officially be considered a survivor of genocide, despite being a traumatized orphan who experienced one of the most well-known and brutal massacres, and who witnessed many murders, including that of genocide heroine Antonia Locatelli, and the brutal slaughter of his own parents. 20 Through Faustin’s story, Monénembo draws attention to the inadequacies of the criminal justice system in Rwanda. Faustin’s death sentence seems disproportionate and arbitrary, particularly when read against the context of the genocide. 21 The difficulties of achieving justice that is proportionate and fair are also articulated in Tadjo’s text when a prisoner complains that there was no death penalty at the ICTR in Arusha where the masterminds of the genocide faced trial: ‘Ce sont les petites gens qui sont exécutés’ (2000: 114) [‘It’s only the little folk who are executed’ (2002: 100)]. 22 L’Aîné des orphelins portrays a country in 2 0 See Chapter Five for a discussion of Antonia Locatelli. 21 The death penalty was officially abolished in Rwanda for all crimes in 2007. 22 Earlier in the novel, Tadjo recalls the public executions at Nyamirambo (not Nyamata) stadium where, on 24 April 1998, a total of 23 people including Froduald Karamira (See Introduction) were killed by firing squad (Tadjo, 2000: 36) See the Amnesty International document: http://www.amnesty.org/

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which justice, like every other aspect of society, has been turned upside down since 1994 and nothing makes any sense anymore. Outraged by Faustin’s insolence and vulgarity, the judge condemns this traumatized orphan as an inhuman monster, terms more often associated with perpetrators of genocide. In the judge’s final words, ‘Evacuez-moi cette vermine avant que je perde mon contrôle’ (Monénembo, 2000: 138) [‘Get this scum out of here before I lose control’ (2004: 84)], the use of the word ‘vermine’ [vermin] creates a chilling echo of the génocidaires’ condemnation of the Tutsi as cockroaches that had to be eliminated, further undermining the suitability of legal processes in Rwanda. 23 ‘Genocide overwhelms justice’, James Waller observes (16). No criminal justice system has ever been designed to deal with the prosecution of genocide, but justice is essential if Rwanda is to move successfully towards peace and reconciliation. Although a report into post-genocide justice reveals widespread dissatisfaction with systems of justice in Rwanda, it nevertheless emphasizes survivors’ need for ‘some measure of justice that is meaningful to them’ even though survivors understand and accept that ‘justice could only ever be a partial response to the crimes’ (African Rights and Redress, 4). The importance of justice for survivors and their families is implied in works of fiction through frequent examples of individuals’ inability to find answers to questions about what happened in the genocide. For Rwandan writers, this no doubt reflects their personal frustration at finding themselves often unable to find out about lost family members and to bring those responsible for their death to trial. The promise in the title of Ndwaniye’s novel La Promesse faite à ma sœur refers to the ­protagonist’s commitment to one day find the people who murdered his sister. While implied criticisms of local justice in Rwanda are made in a number of texts, Sehene uses fiction to criticize the failure of international justice to respond adequately to the cases of perpetrators now living outside Rwanda. As soon as the genocidal campaign began to be arrested by the RPF, perpetrators started to flee en masse to neighbouring African countries as well as further afield, to Europe, the US, Canada and even New Zealand. Although some have been en/library/asset/AFR47/012/1998/en/a5de58de-dab9-11dd-80bc-797022e51902/ afr470121998en.html accessed 15 October 2013. 23 This analogy is regrettably lost in Monique Fleury Nagem’s translation of ‘vermine’ as ‘scum’ in the English version.

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prosecuted or are under investigation, most are living free and without retribution. Faced with this international culture of impunity, many members of the Tutsi diaspora who were already living abroad, or who left Rwanda in 1990 when the civil war began, see it as their duty to bring these génocidaires to justice, often joined in their struggle by survivors who fled during and after 1994 (African Rights and Redress, 72–75). Sehene is a particularly vocal campaigner who, two years after the publication of Le Feu sous la soutane, wrote two articles on the Father Wenceslas story for the French online magazine Rue89 (2007a, 2007b). While Sehene’s decision to give his fictional priest a custodial sentence implicitly challenges the French legal system’s refusal to bring a génocidaire to trial, his journalistic writings explicitly criticize France’s failure to make perpetrators accountable for their crimes: Le refus obstiné de la France de juger sous régime de compétence universelle ou à extrader les génocideurs présents sur son territoire ne trahit-il pas la crainte de reconnaître sa complicité criminelle et jusqu’auboutiste avec les régimes hutus racistes? (2007b) [Doesn’t France’s stubborn refusal to judge under universal jurisdiction or to extradite génocidaires living in its territory betray a fear of acknowledging France’s criminal, hard-line complicity with the racist Hutu regimes?]

Other writers, such as Diop, go further still, using fiction to accuse France not only of protecting exiled perpetrators and supporting extremist Hutu governments, but also of complicity in the genocide. France’s long and well-documented support of Hutu Power is alluded to in Murambi when, during the genocide, Dr Joseph Karekezi tells Hutu extremist Colonel Musoni that ‘les Français nous ont soutenus contre le monde entier dans cette histoire. Ils devraient aller jusqu’au bout’ (2001: 127) [‘the French supported us against the whole world in this business. They should see it through to the end’ (2006: 105)]. The French government has consistently denied its alleged role in the genocide. However, France was not represented among the international dignitaries at the Kwibuka 20 commemorations, which coincided with the publication of an interview with President Paul Kagame in Jeune Afrique on 6 April 2014. In this interview, Kagame directly accuses France of participating in the genocide: Prenez le cas de la France. Vingt ans après, le seul reproche admissible à ses yeux est celui de ne pas en avoir fait assez pour sauver des vies pendant

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le génocide. C’est un fait, mais cela masque l’essentiel: le rôle direct de la Belgique et de la France dans la préparation politique du génocide et la participation de cette dernière à son exécution même. (Soudan, 2014: 23) [Take the case of France. Twenty years later, the only acceptable reproach in their eyes is for not having saved enough lives during the genocide. That is a fact, but it hides the key issue: the direct role of Belgium and France in the political preparation of the genocide, and France’s participation in its execution]

In Kagame’s view, France was not only an accomplice, but also a perpetrator; the French government, however, denies all responsibility. This longstanding international debate is played out in Murambi through a conversation between Karekezi and Colonel Etienne Perrin in which the latter attempts to exonerate France because, he says, French troops did not join in the massacres. Just as the RPF government and many survivors dispute this point, so Karekezi reminds Perrin that French soldiers built barbecues and volleyball courts on top of mass graves at Murambi and evacuated many perpetrators to safety. 24 At the very least, Karekezi suggests, the French are guilty of having looked the other way. The French government’s long history of cooperation in Rwanda meant that, as Linda Melvern writes, it ‘possessed the most detailed knowledge of what was going on’ (2000: 234). In L’Ombre d’Imana, an ex-pat Frenchman holds France responsible for everything: ‘Je le sais’, he explains, ‘J’en suis témoin: la France a tout gâché. Elle n’a pas tenu ses promesses’ (Tadjo, 2000: 37) [‘I know the truth of this, I am a witness to it: France ruined everything. She did not keep her promises’ (2002: 26)]. Whereas Kagame’s comments in Jeune Afrique led to a major diplomatic incident and the severance of links that had only recently been restored between Rwanda and France, fiction can provide a space for individuals to criticize France’s role with less dramatic consequences. 25 Although Diop was effectively censured for writing 2 4 A sign marking the site of a volleyball court has been placed at the Murambi memorial. Susan Cook reports a Murambi guide telling her that the French troops stationed at Murambi during Operation Turquoise enjoyed playing volleyball with the Interahamwe (289). 25 In November 2006, Rwanda had broken all diplomatic links with France after French Judge Brugière published a report alleging that President Kagame had ordered the assassination of Juvénal Habyarimama. The following year, incoming French President, Nicholas Sarkozy, along with Foreign Minister,

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about Mitterrand’s involvement in the genocide when his preface to Mukasanga and Kazinierakis’s Les Blessures du silence was rejected by French publisher Actes Sud, he makes similar points in Murambi under the guise of fiction. 26 In La Chanson de l’aube, Kayimahe, who was personally abandoned by the French as outlined in his testimony FranceRwanda: les coulisses du génocide (2000), singles out the French troops ostensibly in Rwanda to keep the peace as ‘empêtrées’ [tangled up] in the genocide (2014: 132). In a veiled reference to the French so-called humanitarian mission Operation Turquoise, one of Kana’s characters, Nkurikiye, condemns the cynicism of ‘les puissances étrangères’ [foreign powers] (171) who failed to act to prevent or stop genocide, but then chose to intervene at the last minute to help the genocidal government avoid defeat and help perpetrators escape to safety. 27 Although essays such as Kayimahe’s France-Rwanda: les coulisses du génocide and Diop’s ‘Kigali-Paris: le monstre à deux têtes’ [Kigali-Paris: The Two-Headed Monster], present facts about France’s involvement in the genocide, fiction in French may well prove more effective in exposing it, as novels lead readers to make judgements about France’s responsibility through identification with Rwandan characters and narrators. As English translations of genocide stories begin to trickle into the global book market, so readers in the UK and the US are also encouraged to reflect on their own countries’ roles in aiding and abetting genocide (Dallaire, 323). Readers, then, become active players in what Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith call ‘the court of world opinion’ (3). While France emerges as the most strongly implicated in many of the Francophone texts, some works refer more generally to the failings of the international community as a whole. In La Promesse faite à ma sœur, for example, Ndwaniye makes ironic reference to ‘ces “Bwana”, les plus grands d’entre nous qui gouvernent le monde’ [those ‘Bwana’, the greatest among us, who rule the world] (2006: 200), people who, according to the text, at the very least deserve a prison sentence like Jean’s twin brother for their participation in the genocide. As members of the international Bernard Kouchner, began a sustained attempt to rebuild bilateral relations with Rwanda. The events of 2014 have caused significant damage to relations between Rwanda and France. 2 6 The preface was later published by Philippe Rey in Diop’s collection of essays, L’Afrique au-delà du miroir (2007). 27 For an account of the planning and execution of Operation Turquoise, see Prunier (1999: 335–369).

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community, readers of fictional texts are invited to reflect on our own failure to react in 1994. Just as we are encouraged to pass judgements on perpetrators, be they individual killers or national governments and their armies, so we are also encouraged to judge ourselves. For Tadjo, there is no ambiguity: ‘Nous portons tous la responsabilité de cet échec humanitaire’ (2000: 45) [‘We must all bear the responsibility for this humanitarian failure’ (2002: 34)]. Overall, the Fest’Africa authors’ fiction reveals a strong desire to implicate the international community, particularly France, in the genocide in Rwanda. Those writers from outside Rwanda who participated in the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ mission tend to project their own guilt about the world’s failure to intervene into their texts. Most, but not all of the Rwandan authors, on the other hand, tend to focus less on the international community and more on individual perpetrators, perhaps because, for them, the genocide was a profoundly personal experience. However, a common feature of most of the fictional responses, regardless of the origin of their writer, is a degree of moral ambivalence around the representation of individual génocidaires. What all these fictional texts do is highlight the difficulties and dangers of putting people into categories in post-genocide Rwanda, particularly as the official narrative of the genocide now allows only Tutsi to be identified as victims or survivors and so risks labelling all Hutu collectively as perpetrators. Although the use of the terms Hutu, Tutsi and Twa in public discourse is not, as many critics have suggested, actually illegal, the RPF government’s introduction of laws concerning discrimination and genocide ideology are commonly interpreted by the Rwandan people as a ban on speaking about ethnicity at all (Eltringham, 273–274). Kagame’s government identifies divisionism as the primary cause of the genocide and so declares that the people are ‘Banyarwanda’ [Rwandans] rather than Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. Despite attempts to eliminate ‘ethnic’ divisions, the official story of the genocide risks creating the opposite effect. Moreover, different groups of people involved in the genocide will all see the events through different lenses that might be, but are not necessarily, ethnically inflected (Lemarchand, 101–103). The Tutsi group includes witnesses and survivors, but also RPF soldiers who killed and tortured Hutu civilians when they returned to Rwanda to stop the genocide. Not all Tutsi were victims: some attempted to save their own lives by posing as Hutu, often with fake identity papers; some, like Robert Kajuga, chose to play an active role in the militia, becoming killers to secure their own survival. A clear agenda

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emerges in fictional responses to the genocide, a shared critique of the ethnopolitical division of individuals into the post-genocide categories of perpetrator and victim. In ‘Sa Voix’, Tadjo’s protagonist never knows whether her husband was guilty or not, but the story ends with his alleged victim, Nkuranya, telling her that Rwandan society needs to move on: Il faut punir ceux qui méritent de l’être, ceux qui ont initié le règne de la cruauté. Mais les autres doivent être libérés du poids de la culpabilité. (2000: 70) [We must punish those who deserve to be punished, those who began the reign of cruelty. But the others must be freed of the burden of guilt (2002: 57)]

At the end of Gatore’s Le Passé devant soi, we discover that Niko the perpetrator is in fact a character in the book that Isaro, the survivor, is writing. As in Tadjo’s ‘Sa Voix’, Gatore imagines a survivor who speaks with the voice of a perpetrator, suggesting, like Mukagasana, that the way towards peace and reconciliation is precisely through people putting themselves inside other people’s heads and trying to understand what, on the face of it, is utterly incomprehensible. When challenged by Coquio about the character of Niko, Gatore explains that he asked himself the following question: ‘qu’est-ce qui se passe dans la tête de quelqu’un pour le transformer en bourreau?’ [what happens inside someone’s head to transform him or her into a perpetrator?] (in Lévy-Bertherat and Schoentjes, 296). As survivors and perpetrators in Rwanda find themselves having to live together as neighbours after 1994, there is a pressing need for mutual understanding. Perpetrators’ stories are an essential part of the quest for justice for the survivors, but are also necessary for reconciliation and prevention of future genocide. This need for understanding is reflected in the testimonial photography projects of Lyons and Straus, and Mukagasana and Kazinierakis, but also in creative writers’ attempts to explain the actions of perpetrators through works of the imagination. What fiction can do is explore the complexities of the multiple failures of humanity that culminate in genocide. Through their texts, authors such as Tadjo, Karangwa, Sehene and Gatore challenge the familiar but reductive readings of the genocide as tribal conflict, African barbarity or absolute evil, offering instead nuanced reflections on the ordinary people who participated in such extraordinary horror. Moreover, by creating texts in which readers can sympathize, or even empathize, with

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perpetrators of genocide, writers of fiction also invite us to question ourselves. What, Tadjo asks, would she have done in 1994? Dans la nuit de l’aveuglement absolu, qu’aurais-je fait si j’avais été prise dans l’engrenage du massacre? Aurais-je été lâche ou courageuse? Aurais-je tué ou me serais-je laissé tuer? Le Rwanda est en moi, en toi, en nous. (2000: 50) [In the dark night of absolute blindness, what would I have done if I had been caught up in the spiralling violence of the massacre? Would I have resisted betrayal? Would I have been cowardly or brave? Would I have killed or would I have let myself be killed? Rwanda is inside me, in you, in all of us (2002: 37)]

Conclusion Conclusion

When visitors come to the end of the permanent exhibition at the Murambi genocide memorial, a sign on the wall asks the question, ‘Now that you have heard the story of Murambi, what is in your heart and what are you moved to do?’ It is not enough, the sign suggests, simply to receive the story. Visitors are encouraged to reflect on what they have heard and to think about their own role in commemorating the genocide. Participation is a key feature of commemorative strategies in Rwanda. What this book has shown is that encouraging participation is also a key feature of fictional responses to the genocide. Through analysis of the figures of tourists, witnesses, survivors, victims and perpetrators, I have identified the ways in which readers are compelled to re-evaluate their knowledge of Rwanda and take an active role in commemorative processes: as self-critical tourists, ethical witnesses, judges or culpable bystanders, we are encouraged to acknowledge and assume our own responsibility for what happened in 1994. While other critics have identified the reader’s role in genocide narratives as that of an indirect witness (Bornand; Dauge-Roth, 2010), this book has emphasized the ways in which readers become implicated further still in stories about what happened in Rwanda. Whatever the position created for the reader by the fictional text, she is always invited to play the role of an active and engaged participant in remembering and understanding the genocide. The ethical dilemmas facing authors writing about Rwanda, particularly those writing as outsiders, encourage readers and critics to consider and reflect upon our own subject positions and require us to take responsibility. The question of responsibility is at the root of all the fictional responses to the genocide. The Fest’Africa writers’ sense of a moral duty is made explicit in the title of their project: they wrote about Rwanda because they felt they had a duty to remember. This duty is not,

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however, limited to the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ group; rather, it is what links all the novels and stories focused on the events of 1994. This concluding chapter will draw together what previous chapters suggest are the distinctive characteristics of Rwanda genocide fiction in an attempt to provide a working definition of what Norridge pertinently describes as ‘an evolving generic space’ (2011b: 256). It will reflect on the usefulness of creating imaginative texts about an event that defies most people’s imagination and will attempt to synthesize the ethical implications of writing genocide fiction that have emerged through the course of this book. In doing so, this final chapter will suggest that there are also important ethical considerations for readers and critics of stories of the Rwanda genocide. For the most complete understanding of what happened in 1994, a range of stories from different perspectives needs to be heard. Common to all the novels and short stories analysed is an emphasis on the importance of recording and remembering. Even where individual characters try to forget, the past returns to haunt them in the form of ghosts, flashbacks, trauma or, in the case of Jean-Léonard and Jeanne-Laurette in Au sortir de l’enfer, through being reunited with a spouse they had believed to be dead. The emphasis on remembering is sometimes expressed as being at odds with the official narrative of the genocide, which encourages survivors to move on with their lives and attempts to contain the commemorative process to particular places (the genocide memorials) and particular times (the three-month commemorative period from April to June each year). As discussed in Chapter Four, the Rwandan government’s campaign for reconciliation has generated a national discourse of forgiveness and forgetting, which leaves many survivors feeling pushed to the margins. In reaction to this perceived delimitation of memory in Rwanda, authors of fiction emphasize the importance of preserving memories in a diversity of forms, including writing. Indeed, literary texts make reference to a range of memorial spaces, including tombstones, plaques and testimonies, sometimes challenging official forms of remembering such as the display of victims’ skeletons and the public commemorative events, and always creating new, imagined versions of memories of the genocide. Despite the status of fictional texts as works of the imagination, all the authors discussed in this book share a preoccupation with grounding their texts in historical fact. Even Gatore, the only writer who refuses to name Rwanda, his birth country, in his novel, provides various textual clues that point the reader to conclude that this is the

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location (Hitchcott, 2013: 80–81). Behind this emphasis on remembering and recording evidence lies a more political agenda to educate readers on the subject of the truth about the genocide. In particular, authors are keen to correct misunderstandings based on the mythologization of Rwanda as a dark and dangerous place prone to spontaneous outbreaks of interethnic conflict or tribal warfare. This mythologization, which Tal identifies as a strategy for cultural coping, ‘works by reducing a traumatic event to a set of standardized narratives (twiceand thrice-told tales that come to represent “the story” of the trauma) turning it from a frightening and uncontrollable event into a contained and predictable narrative’ (6).1 In the case of Rwanda, the experience of the genocide has become appropriated and codified as an exploding plane, Hutu and Tutsi ‘tribes’, and brutal machete killings. In Au sortir de l’enfer, Rurangwa openly critiques the mythologization of Rwanda when the protagonist Jean-Léonard is taken by his fiancée’s family to a restaurant in the Mauritian capital of Port-Louis. Here they meet Roger-Gérard, a journalist for Radio Mauritius who, when he learns where Jean-Léonard is from, asks him if he is not ashamed to be Rwandan. After all, he explains, ‘le Rwanda, c’est l’horreur!’ [Rwanda equals horror!]. In Chapter Two, I discussed the overdetermination of Rwanda as a land of genocide and gorillas. Now, in a sentence, the journalist reduces the country to a single, abstract signified: Rwanda is a metonym for horror. Subsequently challenged by Jean-Léonard to explain why he thinks the genocide happened in Rwanda, Roger-Gérard tells him: Il y a eu génocide parce que les pasteurs hamites avaient fait paître leurs troupeaux de vaches dans les champs des agriculteurs bantous. Mais cela est connu de tout le monde! […] Les pasteurs hamites sont les Hutsu et les agriculteurs bantous sont les Tutsu. Je regarde la télé, moi! J’écoute la radio et je lis les journaux! (170) [There was genocide because the Hamite herdsmen had let their herds of cows graze in the fields of the Bantu cultivators. But everyone knows that! […] The Hamite herdsmen are the Hutsu and the Bantu cultivators the Tutsu. I watch TV, you know! I listen to the radio and read the papers!] 1 ‘Mythologization’ is one of three strategies of cultural coping with trauma identified by Tal who bases her study on the Holocaust, the Vietnam War and sexual violence against women and children. The other two strategies are ‘medicalization’ (the claim that trauma victims are ill and can be cured) and ‘disappearance’ (denial that a particular kind of trauma exists).

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Such a ridiculously muddled version of the history of the genocide, spoken by a successful radio journalist, effectively parodies and challenges the rest of the world’s ignorance about the events of 1994. At the same time, the incomprehensibility of what happened in Rwanda compels writers and readers to look for explanations. Rurangwa expresses this through the character of Théodore Gakwavu, the exiled Hutu living in Belgium haunted by witnessing his brother’s participation in the genocide. Through the figure of this tormented bystander, Rurangwa illustrates the difficulty of telling the story of 1994. In an attempt to assuage his guilt, Théodore resolves to tell the ghost of his brother’s victim everything. However, this is not always a straightforward process, as Théodore explains: Le problème est que le récit de ce qui s’est passé au Rwanda en 1994 n’est pas intelligible s’il n’est pas expliqué et explicité. Et maintenant je ne sais pas si je raconte en expliquant ou si j’explique en racontant. Peu importe! Au besoin faisons les deux! (2006: 139–140) [The problem is that the story of what happened in Rwanda in 1994 is not intelligible if it isn’t explained and clarified. And now I don’t know if I’m telling while explaining or explaining while telling. Never mind! If needs be, let’s do both!]

Through Théodore’s words, Rurangwa presents the challenge of telling and receiving genocide stories. The didactic role adopted by writers of fiction is not always easy to reconcile with the fact that the stories are never neutral. As a Hutu bystander, Théodore’s version will differ from that of Rurangwa’s Tutsi survivor-protagonist, Jean-Léonard. Moreover, Théodore’s story has been imagined by Rurangwa, an exiled Tutsi author, a survivor by destination. What this emphasis on different perspectives illustrates is the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of ever arriving at a final truth. The use of fiction exacerbates this difficulty while simultaneously providing a useful means of demonstrating it. Tadjo engages more explicitly with the relationship between truth and fiction when, in L’Ombre d’Imana, she records a story entitled ‘Dans Kigali, on raconte l’histoire suivante’ [‘In Kigali, They Tell the Following Story’]. The story is that of a woman raped, infected with HIV and widowed during the genocide, who witnessed her only son being murdered by her neighbour. When she becomes ill, this woman ends up being cared for by the same neighbour who killed her son, and eventually marrying him. Many of the questions raised by the story remain unanswered: is the couple still together? Is the woman still alive?

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The big question, which Tadjo poses directly in the story, is whether the story is actually true. By explicitly asking this question, Tadjo implicitly undermines the veracity of all the other stories in her text. Yet, in doing so, she also suggests that whether individual stories are true is not, in fact, what matters. The ‘truth’ can only be found by gradually piecing together the fragments of the many different stories. This explains why Tadjo, like Diop, presents her text as a patchwork of narrative voices, each with its own perspective on the genocide. Writing about a youth centre for street kids that she visits near Nyanza, Tadjo notes that the children there often tell lies about where they come from and why they left their homes: C’est seulement le soir, quand l’obscurité s’est installée, que vous entendrez parfois des bribes de vérité. Les morceaux de leur histoire s’imbriquent les uns dans les autres, et puis enfin, l’image se dessine. (2000: 98–99) [It is only at night, when darkness has fallen, that occasionally you will hear snatches of the truth. The fragments of their stories overlap with each other, and finally, a picture emerges (2002: 86)]

This necessary piecing together of stories demonstrates what Straus describes as the impossibility of narrating the genocide which, he explains, is ‘an aggregate category, a composite of thousands of acts that occurred throughout Rwanda from April to July 1994. Each incident of violence – each mobilization, each attack, each murder – has a singularity and a specificity that the composite category erases’ (Lyons and Straus, 15). What fiction does is restore the singularity and specificity of experiences of genocide through an emphasis on the perspectives of individuals. At the same time, it is only by reading all the stories together that anything resembling the truth can begin to emerge. This is why I have chosen to analyse together rather than separately the many different fictional responses to the genocide. The complex relationship between fiction and truth can leave authors open to criticism for failing to engage closely enough or accurately enough with the historical realities of genocide. Hron articulates this view in her article on fiction and the Franco-African imaginary (2009b: 170–171). Of course, it can be argued that writers of genocide fiction have a responsibility to remember the past accurately, but, as this book has shown, there are many different versions of the historical realities of the Rwanda genocide. Faced with a society which has for too long been characterized in terms of ‘us’ and ‘them’, writers need to be conscious of the dangers of recycling the kind of polarization that contributed to the

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genocide and which, as Buckley-Zistel suggests, will be an obstacle to future peace and reconciliation: The experience of pain and suffering is deeply inscribed in individual and collective memory, and perpetuated through the stories people narrate about the event, often keeping the dichotomy of us/them or friend/ enemy alive, and obstructing paths to reconciliation. A necessary social transformation, which renders future massacres impossible, therefore depends to a large extent on the way the past is remembered. (125)

How to negotiate the ethnopolitically charged question of the truth about the genocide leaves many writers with a certain degree of uncertainty about the legitimacy of a fictional response. My analyses have identified the ways in which the writer’s sense of ethical responsibility is often conveyed through manifestations of anxiety about writing fiction about real people’s lives and deaths. Through their interrogations of the figures of the tourist, the witness and the victim, writers of fiction articulate their own authorial anxieties. For example, in La Phalène des collines, the moth-narrator is highly critical of the way the guide recounts the story of her death to the tourists. She explains that displays of emotion mutilate her further, so the guide needs to find an appropriate tone with which to tell her tale (Lamko, 26). Lamko’s response to the need to find an appropriate tone for writing about the genocide is unusual. As we have seen, he creates a fantastical narrative based on the true story of real-life victim Theresa Mukandori. The other Fest’Africa writers are generally more cautious in their approach, trying to remain true to the original real-life stories while at the same time attempting to avoid affective identification, not always with complete success. By setting themselves up as literary witnesses, writers of fiction inevitably find themselves in a position of ambiguity. Even Monénembo, who works hard to distance himself and his readers from his antipathetic fictional narrator, Faustin, nevertheless creates the impression of a real survivor’s voice. The Rwandan authors, on the other hand, demonstrate less circumspection in their approach to fictional acts of witnessing. Here, anxieties about speaking on behalf of survivors or victims are often replaced by a determination to describe the atrocities of the genocide in all their horrifying detail. There is little emphasis here on what Small, writing about the Fest’Africa texts, calls ‘the distress of the writer’, which she defines as ‘a certain tone of shock, of the distress of searching for a mode of speaking’ (202). Rather, as we have seen in texts by Rwandan writers Rurangwa, Kayimahe and Karege, there appears

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to be an unapologetic attempt to shock the reader with the details of the genocide, forcing her to witness though the act of reading what, in 1994, she refused to acknowledge or understand. Indeed, the Rwandan fictions oblige us to acknowledge Sontag’s point that ‘to make the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda is a painful task that we have no right to shirk – it is part of being a moral adult’ (2005: viii). In their attempts to implicate the reader, all of these works of fiction call for an ethical reception. As Wayne Booth writes, ethical criticism suggests not only judgements made by readers, but also readers’ responsibilities to the stories they receive (9). According to Booth, ‘the ethical reader will behave responsibly towards the text and its author, but that reader will also take responsibility for the ethical quality of his or her “reading”, once that new text is made public’ (10). In the Introduction, I explained my decision not to adopt a trauma studies approach to reading Rwanda genocide stories as driven by a commitment to reading African texts on their own terms. In the end, my analyses have shown that trauma studies is not the most suitable framework for reading these works of fiction, since the relationships constructed between readers and texts are not necessarily those of what Dauge-Roth calls the ‘testimonial encounter’, a common model in trauma texts (2009). 2 In his analysis of Esther Mujawayo’s witness testimonies, Dauge-Roth draws on trauma theory to analyse what he describes as Mujawayo’s ‘dialogic and polyphonic art of witnessing’ (2009: 177). Based on what is usually a Eurocentric psychoanalytical model, trauma theory tends to position the reader as the empathic listener or vicarious victim of the trauma being described. While this may generate a legitimate reading of testimonial narratives such as Mujawayo’s, which have been written in collaboration with an interlocutor based in the West, my analyses have shown that, in fiction based on the genocide, authors create a range of dialogic encounters in which readers are invited to re-examine their own subject position. Here, my findings concur with those of Craps in Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. In his discussion of the position of the reader in African trauma texts, Craps draws on the essays by Amy Novak and Robert Eaglestone in his earlier co-edited special issue of Studies in the Novel (2008). He contends that much trauma literature from the African continent implicates Western readers as bystanders or potential collaborators 2 See Craps and Buelens (4–5) for a postcolonial critique of this therapeutic model.

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as opposed to positioning them in the role of the analyst who may experience trauma by association: Rather than inviting the reader to become a vicarious victim, these texts denounce and fight the indifference of a privileged and empowered Western public to the suffering of the racial, ethnic and cultural other. The sense of political urgency informing these texts may go some way towards explaining their reliance on a no-frills, realist aesthetic, which sets them apart from the emergent canon of trauma literature: the overriding concern is to get the message across and to mobilize. (42). 3

Although the Fest’Africa novels are, on the whole, more formally innovative than the fictional works by Rwandan authors, there is nevertheless a shared resistance to moving too far from a realist aesthetic. As Diop writes, he and his fellow travellers in 1998 all felt that the best way to write about the genocide was as straightforwardly as possible: A la lecture de nos ouvrages sur le génocide, on s’aperçoit très vite qu’ils on en commun, au-delà des différences d’approche et de personnalité, le dépouillement et une certaine pudeur. (2007: 28) [When you read our works on the genocide, you notice very quickly that what they all have in common, beyond any differences in approach and personality, is a stripped-back quality and a certain sense of propriety]

Whereas Whitehead concludes her study of trauma fiction by identifying the genre as one that is suspended ‘between its attempt to convey the literality of the event and its figurative evocation of the symptomatic response to trauma through formal and stylistic innovation’ (162), Rwanda genocide stories are much more concerned with conveying the literality of the event than with evoking traumatic responses through form and style. This is not to deny their importance as aestheticized narratives, but rather to underline the distinction between these works and Western trauma fiction. It is striking that even the more formally experimental writers, such as Diop and Monénembo, have produced different kinds of texts in response to the Rwanda genocide. Diop’s Murambi is a far less complex narrative than any of his previous works. Similarly, despite Monénembo’s attempts to create distance from the reality of the genocide through a non-linear narrative and the use of irony, L’Aîné des orphelins is his most straightforward text in terms of form, and is easily identified as grounded in events corroborated by history. 3 See also Novak (2008) and Eaglestone (2008b).

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Writing mainly about texts by authors from outside Rwanda, Norridge categorizes literary responses to the genocide as ‘testimonial narrative (non)fiction’. For Norridge, the defining features of this evolving generic space are: common authorial intentions (the commemoration and prevention of genocide), similar stylistic approaches (the interspersing of deeply personal narratives with contextualizing history), a set of common reference points (the Holocaust, specific Rwanda memorial sites) and international concerns (juggling reductive views of Africa with international conceptions of genocide). (2011b: 256)

While Norridge’s list of features is pertinent and valid, as demonstrated by much of the analysis in this book, my own readings have also identified features distinctive to fictional works. Firstly, as discussed above, fictional texts by both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ demonstrate a shared concern to implicate readers in active processes of acknowledgement and commemoration. Secondly, I have demonstrated a common meta-narrative of authorial anxiety in many fictional works, notably those written by ‘outsiders’ such as the Fest’Africa group, which Dauge-Roth calls a ‘self-reflexive work of remembering’ (2010: 104). Although it is not always easy to draw distinctions between ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, I have nevertheless identified important differences between the Rwandan ‘insider’ texts and those written by the African tourist ‘outsiders’ who took part in the ‘Ecrire par devoir de mémoire’ project. A parallel can be drawn here between the references to specific memorial sites and the extent to which the narrative of genocide is mediated for Western audiences. Just as the different genocide memorials in Rwanda exhibit differing degrees of tourist accessibility, the Kigali Memorial Centre being ‘the most easily accessed site, […] the least graphic and the most “Westernized” in style and approach’ (Hohenhaus, 149), so different novels present differing degrees of mediation, with the Fest’Africa authors making a greater attempt to filter the consumption of genocide for a Western audience and placing greater emphasis on the better-known memorials in the construction of their texts. By contrast, Rwandan novelists make little attempt to protect international readers from the horrors of 1994. Furthermore, they tend not to base their novels around the tourist-centred memorials to the dead, but rather focus on imagined stories of the living before, during and after the genocide. Norridge concludes her discussion of writing from and about Rwanda by reflecting on the directions future literature make take: ‘How might

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writing about Rwanda develop when it appears to be defined by an anti-genocidal stance that is consistently rooted in descriptions and re-descriptions of the events of 1994’? (2011b: 256). It is true that, for the time being at least, testimonial fiction still dominates in Rwanda, as confirmed by the publication of Kayimahe’s testimonial novel La Chanson de l’aube in the year of the twentieth anniversary of the genocide. However, just as the Rwandan government is emphasizing the need for the country to move on from 1994, so are there small signs that Rwandan fiction is also beginning to take new directions. Interestingly, the two fictional texts that are starting to shift the focus of Rwandan fiction away from 1994 are both set in pre-genocide Rwanda: Mukasonga’s latest short story collection Ce que murmurent les collines [Whispers from the Hills] (2014), published by her long-time publisher, Gallimard, and Ndwaniye’s second novel, Le Muzungu mangeur d’hommes [The Muzungu People Eater], published by the Belgian press Aden in 2012. Whereas Ndwaniye’s first novel, La Promesse faite à ma sœur, focused on the devastation and transformation of his birth country after the genocide, his new novel presents us with a very different journey to Rwanda, this time in the 1970s, the time of the author’s adolescence (Beullens and Corbeel, 2013). In Le Muzungu mangeur d’hommes, Dutch couple Lies and Arno Van der Heyden move to the small Rwandan town of Kavumu, where Lies is to start work as a hospital doctor. Overwhelmed by the culture shock they encounter in Rwanda, the couple’s marriage fails; Lies returns to the Netherlands, leaving Arno behind. While out fishing on Lake Kivu, a storm forces Arno onto an island where he meets an old mixed-race man, Bwana Funda Haïda, the son of the dead ‘Muzungu’ of the novel’s title. This man, it later transpires, was also Lies’s uncle. At the end of the novel, Lies returns to Rwanda, where she is reunited with Arno. In the final scene, the old man’s words emphasize the importance of not remaining imprisoned by the past as he himself has been, living like a hermit on an island, waiting for the return of the father he never knew. Although this is not a novel about the genocide, the mysterious old man’s words seem strangely pertinent in the context of post-genocide Rwanda. He tells the couple: Vous devriez commencer par vous débarrasser du passé qui ne cesse de s’accumuler dans votre présent. Il est parfois nécessaire de prendre un autre départ, vers une autre direction, quitte à se tromper, pour savoir qui on est vraiment. (2012: 141)

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[You should start by getting rid of the past that keeps building up in your present. Sometimes you need to set off again in a different direction, even if it means going the wrong way, in order to find out who you really are]

To a large extent, Rwanda has become overdetermined by the 1994 genocide, fixed in the global consciousness as ‘a twentieth-century “Heart of Darkness”’ (Hitchcott, 2009a: 151). There is thus a danger that, in continuing to record the atrocities of the genocide, fiction will reinforce the reification of Rwanda and its people. This is not to dismiss the importance of continuing to commemorate the genocide through fiction, but rather to suggest that novelists also have an important role to play in representing Rwanda as a nation that is defined not only in terms of 1994. Renaudot prizewinner Scholastique Mukasonga recognizes this. Although most of her fiction does not deal explicitly with what happened in 1994, the genocide nevertheless hangs retrospectively over many of Mukasonga’s narratives, as discussed earlier in this book. In her most recent collection, however, she has made a conscious choice not to write about genocide. In an interview with Africultures, she calls for writers to show that Rwanda ‘n’est pas qu’un pays de génocide’ [is not just a genocide country]: Cette Histoire douloureuse fait partie du Rwanda. Mais d’autres parts, les rescapés, les survivants comme moi, disent qu’on ne doit pas en être otages. Dans mes nouvelles Ce que murmurent les collines je parle d’un Rwanda ancien qui n’a rien à voir avec le génocide. Je vais à la recherche d’un Rwanda tel qu’il aurait dû rester. Le génocide a malheureusement représenté 34 ans de la vie des Rwandais. Les écrits sont là. Nous avons déposé ce qu’il fallait déposer. Maintenant il faut être mobilisé pour construire un pays où tous les Rwandais ont leur place. (Le Gros) [That painful history is part of Rwanda. But, on the other hand, survivors like me say that we mustn’t be hostages to that history. In my short stories in Whispers from the Hills I talk about a bygone Rwanda that has nothing to do with the genocide. I go looking for the Rwanda that should have continued to be. Genocide unfortunately took up thirty-four years of Rwandans’ lives. The writings are there. We have put down what had to be put down. Now we need to mobilize to build a country where all Rwandans have their place]

Although Mukasonga’s and Ndwaniye’s recent works remind us that Rwanda was not always a land of genocide, there is a striking lack of fictional texts, in French or in English, dealing with twenty-first-century Rwanda. This can in part be explained by the absence of a national

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reading culture, as discussed in Chapter One. Ndwaniye confirms this when asked in interview about writing novels in French: Ma frustration première est que très peu de Rwandais me lisent. Il faut dire qu’on ne lit pas beaucoup là-bas. Il y a bien sûr un gros problème de distribution, une question d’argent, mais l’anglais est devenu la langue dominante au Rwanda, et le français se marginalise. (Beullens and Corbeel, 2013). [My greatest frustration is that very few Rwandans read me. It has to be said that people don’t read much over there. There is, of course, a huge distribution problem, a question of money, but English has become the dominant language in Rwanda, and French is becoming marginalized]

As Ndwaniye suggests here, the shift from French to English as the dominant language of Rwanda has left Francophone writers with an ever-diminishing indigenous readership despite the fact that the majority of the literate population is Francophone rather than Anglophone (Samuelson and Freedman, 194). This shift also has ethnopolitical implications, as English is the language used by the largely Tutsi returnees, and French that of the generation of Rwandans who were not slaughtered in the genocide, the majority – but by no means all – of whom are Hutu. In other words, as Samuelson and Freedman have pointed out, ‘language choice of French or English has become a factor in group affiliation determinations’ (197). In their view, French has effectively become identified as ‘the language of the 1994 killers’ whereas ‘English is the language of the victors’ (194). Yet such linguistic associations are not borne out in fictional works, as almost all of the texts written by Rwandans have been published in French, and these include texts by a range of people with different group affiliations: former members or supporters of the RPF (Kana, Sehene) Tutsi survivors (Karangwa, Kayimahe), a ‘moderate Hutu’ who resisted the genocide (Karege), a Hutu exile (Ndwaniye), a Tutsi exile (Rurangwa) and the child of an alleged Hutu perpetrator (Gatore). While it is true that the only Rwandan author to have written novels about the genocide in English is John Rusimbi, a Tutsi returnee, literary responses in English have mostly been written by non-Rwandans or have taken the form of non-fictional, testimonial texts.4 4 The non-fictional texts in English by Rwandan authors include the memoir, God Sleeps in Rwanda (2009) by former speaker of the Rwandan Parliament, Joseph Sebarenzi, also a returnee. Having returned to Rwanda after the genocide,

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It will, of course, take time for the shift in language policy to really have an impact on literary production. But it is clear that, if future generations of Rwandan authors want their works to be read by their own people, then they will need to publish their books in English or Kinyarwanda. There is currently a marked contradiction between the languages of public commemoration in Rwanda, Kinyarwanda and English, and the language of fictional commemoration, which is mostly French. As this book has shown, the target audience of fictional texts based on the 1994 genocide is located outside Rwanda in the international community, particularly in France. This explains the common emphasis on implicating readers in commemorative processes that require readers to respond. Novels written in French invite readers to participate in acknowledging France’s responsibility for what happened in Rwanda and, as we saw in the previous chapter, France’s continued failure to bring alleged genocide perpetrators to trial. This is not to claim that the intended readership of these texts is restricted to France, but rather to highlight the role of fiction in drawing attention to elements of the story that are absent or suppressed in official, national narratives of what happened in the genocide. The predominance of French as the language of genocide fiction also goes some way towards explaining the omnipresence of a small number of the Fest’Africa texts in the field. Whereas Rwandan authors lack access to international publishing and distribution networks, Tadjo, Diop, Monénembo and Waberi were all first published by well-established presses based in France: Actes Sud, Stock, Le Seuil and Le Serpent à Plumes. Most of the Rwandan texts are published either at the author’s own expense with French self-publishing platforms, such as Edilivre and Persée, or with Parisian publisher L’Harmattan, which also requires an authorial subvention. It is not surprising, then, that the most successful Rwandan author, Mukasonga, is the only one to have secured a contract with one of the major players in French publishing, Editions Gallimard, and one of only three Rwandan authors to be translated into English. Publishing therefore plays an important role in how the genocide is remembered in fiction. Without access to indigenous publishing and international distribution networks, there is a risk that Rwandan authors’ genocide stories will not be widely heard. Who and

Sebarenzi fled the country again in 2000 when he learned of a plot to assassinate him (Sebarenzi and Mullane, 184–186).

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what gets published can play a critical role in shaping the way in which the genocide is received and understood by the world. Although Diop predicted in 2003 that it would take several generations for Rwandans to begin producing great works of fiction about the genocide (81), this book has shown that Rwandan writers were already beginning to publish novels as soon as ten years after the genocide. Starting from the observation that Rwanda’s story has for too long been told by outsiders, Rwanda Genocide Stories is testimony to the range and diversity of genocide fiction written by Africans, including an important number of Rwandan authors. As Burnet writes, ‘the genocide in Rwanda includes a multitude of experiences of a highly differentiated populace. No single version of events can encapsulate them all’ (93). In the small but growing corpus of fictional responses to the genocide, the diversity of Rwandan authors demonstrates the range of experiences of 1994 and resists the reduction of the story to a single, homogenized version. Against a post-genocide culture that attempts to reify identities such as victim and perpetrator along ethnopolitical lines, writers of fiction choose to stage a plurality of voices from a range of different subject positions. In doing so, they help us move towards a more complete, multidirectional understanding of what happened in Rwanda in 1994.

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——. 2013. ‘Mourning’. Trans. Suzy Ceulan Hughes. New Welsh Review, 102: 30–44. Munyaburanga Basengo, Louis. n.d. Une saison au cœur de l’Afrique. n.p. Ndwaniye, Joseph. 2006. La Promesse faite à ma sœur. Liège: Les Impressions Nouvelles. Parkin, Gaile. 2009. Baking Cakes in Kigali. London: Atlantic Books. Pierce, Julian R. 1999. Speak Rwanda. New York: Picador. Rurangwa, Jean-Marie V. 2006. Au sortir de l’enfer. Paris: L’Harmattan. Rusimbi, John. 1999. By the Time She Returned. London: Janus. ——. 2007. The Hyena’s Wedding: The Untold Horrors of Genocide. London: Janus. Sehene, Benjamin. 2005. Le Feu sous la soutane: un prêtre au cœur du génocide rwandais. Paris: L’Esprit frappeur. Tadjo, Véronique. 2000. L’Ombre d’Imana: voyages au bout du Rwanda. Arles: Actes Sud. ——. 2002. The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda. Trans. Véronique Wakerley. Oxford: Heinemann. Waberi, Abdourahman A. 2004 (2000). Moisson de crânes. Monaco: Alphée/ Le Serpent à plumes/Motifs. OTHER WORKS CITED Adekunle, Julius O. 2007. Culture and Customs of Rwanda. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. African Rights. 1995. Backwards and Forwards: The Struggle for Justice; Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka is Arrested and Released in France. Witness to Genocide, 1. London: African Rights. ——. 1999. Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka: In the Eyes of the Survivors of Sainte Famille. Witness to Genocide, 9. London: African Rights. ——. 2007. ‘Go. If You Die, Perhaps I Will Live’: A Collective Account of Genocide and Survival in Murambi, Gikongoro, April–July 1994, Kigali: African Rights. African Rights and Redress. 2008. Survivors and Justice in Post-Genocide Justice in Rwanda: Their Experiences, Perspectives and Hopes. London: African Rights. Agamben, Giorgio. 1999. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books. Aglietti, Stephanie. 2013. ‘Tourism in Rwanda: Genocide Memorials as well as Gorillas’. http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/08/01/tourism-in-rwandagenocide-memorials-as-well-as-gorillas/ [accessed 6 January 2013]. Amnesty International. 2004. ‘Rwanda: “Marked for Death”, Rape Survivors Living with HIV/AIDS in Rwanda’. 6 April. AFR 47/007/2004. http:// www.refworld.org.docid/4129fd524.html [accessed 5 April 2014].

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Applegate, Elizabeth. 2012. ‘Reimagining the Swallow and the Toad: Narrating Identity and Reconciliation in Postgenocide Rwanda’. Research in African Literatures, 43.1: 71–87. Arendt, Hannah. 2006 (1963). Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. London: Penguin. Bartrop, Paul R. 2012. A Biographical Encyclopedia of Contemporary Genocide: Portraits of Evil and Good. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Beech, John. 2009. ‘Genocide Tourism’. In Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone, The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications: 207–223. Bénard, Noémie. 2003. ‘Le “témoignage” sur le génocide rwandais en littérature d’Afrique noire francophone: Tierno Monénembo et Boubacar Boris Diop’. Lendemains, 112 (special issue Rwanda – 2004: témoignages et littérature): 82–91. Bennett, Jill and Rosanne Kennedy (eds). 2003. World Memory: Personal Trajectories in Global Time. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Berry, John A. and Carol Pott Berry (eds). 1999. Genocide in Rwanda: A Collective Memory. Washington, DC: Howard University Press. Berqué, Pascal. 2005. Afrique centrale: cadres juridiques et pratiques du pluralisme radiophonique. Paris: Karthala. Beullens, Martha and Lorent Corbeel. 2013. ‘Joseph Ndwaniye, l’humble voyageur’. Interview first published in Indications and reprinted on Ndwaniye’s blog. http://jndwaniye.skynetblogs.be [accessed 11 November 2013]. Bonnet, Véronique. 2004. ‘La Shoah et le génocide des Rwandais tutsis: deux constructions obliques des mémoires enfantines’. In Véronique Bonnet (ed.), Conflits de mémoire. Paris: Karthala: 187–196. Booth, Wayne C., 1988. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Bornand, Marie. 2004. Témoignage et fiction: les récits de rescapés dans la littérature française (1945–2000). Geneva: Droz. Braeckman, Colette. 1994. Rwanda. Histoire d’un génocide. Paris: Fayard. Brezault, Eloïse. 2007. ‘A propos de Moissons de crânes, textes pour les Rwanda: Entretien avec Abdourahman A. Waberi’. Africultures, 34. http:// www.africultures.com/php/index.php?nav=article&no=1711&texte_ recherche=waberi%20brezault [accessed 2 October 2013]. Briggs, Philip. 2012. Rwanda. Chalfont St Peter: Bradt Travel Guides. Brown, Sarah E. 2014. ‘Female Perpetrators of the Rwandan Genocide’. International Journal of Feminist Politics, 16.3: 448–469. Buckley-Zistel, Susanne. 2006. ‘Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocide Rwanda’. Africa, 76.2: 131–150. ——. 2008. ‘We Are Pretending Peace: Local Memory and the Absence of

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Schaffer, Kay and Sidionie Smith. 2004. Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Schipper, Mineke. 1987. ‘Mother Africa on a Pedestal: The Male Heritage in African Literature and Criticism’. African Literature Today, 15: 35–54. Sebarenzi, Joseph and Laura Ann Mullane. 2009. God Sleeps in Rwanda. New York: Atria. Sehene, Benjamin. 2007a. ‘Rwanda: Munyeshyaka, le prêtre bourreau de Gisors.’ Rue89. 20 July. http://rue89.nouvelobs.com/2007/07/20/rwandamunyeshyaka-le-pretre-bourreau-de-gisors [accessed 23 September 2014]. ——. 2007b. ‘Rwanda: la justice des hommes a encore failli’, Rue89. 13 August. http://www.rue89.com/2007/08/13/rwanda-la-justice-des-hommes-aencore-failli [accessed 21 October 2013]. Semujanga, Josias. 2003. Origins of Rwandan Genocide. Amherst: Humanity Books. ——. 2006., ‘Murambi et Moisson de crânes: Comment la fiction raconte un génocide. Présence Francophone, 67: 93–114 ——. 2008. Le Génocide, sujet de fiction? Analyse des récits du massacre des Tutsi dans la littérature africaine. Montreal: Nota Bene. Sharpley, Richard. 2009. ‘Shedding Light on Dark Tourism’. In Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone (eds), The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications: 3–22. Small, Audrey. 2006. ‘Tierno Monénembo: Morality, Mockery and the Rwandan Genocide’. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 42.1: 200–211. Songolo, Aliko. 2005. ‘Marie Béatrice Umutesi’s Truth: The Other Rwanda Genocide?’ African Studies Review, 48.3: 107–119. Sontag, Susan, 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin. ——. 2005. ‘Preface’. In Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak. Trans. Linda Coverdale. New York: Picador: vii–viii. Soudan, François. 2014. ‘Entretien Paul Kagamé: Du génocide à la rwandité’. Jeune Afrique. 6 April: 22–28. Soumaré, Zakaria. 2013. Le Génocide rwandais dans la littérature africaine francophone. Paris: L’Harmattan. Spiessens, Anneleen. 2009. ‘La Mise en scène du bourreau: Jean Hatzfeld et Gilbert Gatore’. Témoigner: entre histoire et mémoire, 102: 29–39. Stanton, Gregory H. 2004. ‘Could the Rwandan Genocide have been Prevented?’ Journal of Genocide Research, 6.2: 211–228. Stone, Philip R. 2009. ‘Dark Tourism: Morality and New Moral Spaces’. In Richard Sharpley and Philip R. Stone (eds), The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism. Bristol: Channel View Publications: 56–72. Straus, Scott. 2004. ‘How Many Perpetrators were there in the Rwandan Genocide? An Estimate’. Journal of Genocide Research, 6: 85–98.

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Index Index

Adorno, Theodor W. 21–22 African Rights and Redress 38n21, 160–161, 163, 175 Agamben, Giorgio 92 Remnants of Auschwitz 90–91, 92 Applegate, Elizabeth 171 Arendt, Hannah 157, 163 Arusha peace agreement 5n6, 6, 7n11, 39 Bagogwe massacre 39n23 Baldwin, Hannah 101 Barahira, Ignace 2 Belgium 4 introduction of ethnic identity cards 5 racialization of Rwanda 5 Bénard, Noémie 92–93, 144, 165–166 Benaron, Naomi, Running the Rift 11–12 Bennett, Jill 21 Bikindi, Simon 152 Boitaud, Dalila 34 Bonnet, Véronique 153 book culture 30–36 bookshops 32 dominance of French as published language 36–37, 202, 203–204 lack of publishing infrastructure 29–31, 34–37, 202, 203–204 literacy levels 31–32, 202

publishers 13, 29–30, 34, 35–36, 37, 42, 46n36, 52, 54, 84, 85, 88, 121, 185–186 Booth, Wayne 197 Bornand, Marie 27 Brezault, Eloïse 22 Brown, Andrew, Inyenzi: A Story of Love and Genocide 10, 11 Brown, Sarah 178n18 Buckley-Zistel, Susanne 112, 133, 195–196 Buelens, Gert 19–20 Buhigiro, Jacques 34 Burnet, Jennie 78, 81, 112, 116, 180, 204 Burnett, Patrick 117–118 Café Littéraire 33–34, 103 Caritas bookshop 32, 33 Caruth, Cathy 172 ‘Trauma and Experience’ 20 Catholic Church 42 role in genocide 161–162, 163 support of Hutu nationalism 5 Celan, Paul 22n23 Césaire, Aimé 22, 152, 157 Chalaye, Sylvia 105 Christopher, Warren 7 Clark, Phil 174–175 Clarke, Bruce 55n2, 56 Garden of Memory 136, 138, 159 Cook, Susan 185n24

222

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Coquio, Catherine 85, 93, 102–103, 103–104, 171, 172, 173, 188 Coulibaly, Maïmouna 55 Courtemanche, Gil, Une dimanche à la piscine à Kigali 9, 13, 14, 129 Couto, Mia 152 CPCR (Collectif des Parties Civiles pour le Rwanda) 38n21 Craps, Stef 19–20, 155, 197–198 Crawshaw, Carol 73 Dallaire, Roméo 2, 6 dark tourism 59–79, 127, 141, 146 Dauge-Roth, Alexandre 4, 63, 65, 109–110, 123, 124–125, 130, 131, 133 discusses treatment of victims in fiction 145, 149, 152n27, 197, 199 Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda 26 Dawes, James 14n22 Des Forges, Alison 168 Diop, Boubacar Boris 3, 4–5, 7–8, 25–26, 33, 34, 54, 55–56, 61, 94–95, 96–97, 195, 203–204 allusions to Holocaust 153, 157 attempts to outline the limits of understanding genocide 165–166 attempts to remain true to victims’ stories 123–124, 129–130, 141, 152, 198 critical of France’s role in genocide 185–186 Le Cavalier et son ombre 25, 103 Murambi: le livre des ossements 8–9n13, 56, 58, 73, 75, 82–83, 92–93, 97–98, 106, 119–120 portrayal of génocidaires 169, 178–180 Djedanoum, Nocky 8n13, 55–56 Dumas, Hélène 137–138, 139

Eaglestone, Robert 166, 174, 178, 197 The Holocaust and the Postmodern 20 Eltringham, Nigel 180 ethnopolitics, Rwanda 46–47, 53, 126, 187, 202, 204 Fassin, Didier, The Empire of Trauma 17 Felman, Shoshana 106 female, crimes committed by women judged more shocking 178 Fest’Africa literary project 8, 24, 25–27, 32, 54, 55–79, 71, 94, 123–124, 169, 191–192 anxieties about remaining true to victims’ stories 196–197 critical of international community 187 description of commemoration as ongoing process 136 survivors’ requests to group to not write fiction 83 fiction 8–10, 41–42, 204 attempts to play down emotional identification with victims 94–95, 127–128, 133 authors accused of appropriation or exploitation 112, 196 blurring between fiction and testimony 57, 83–85, 94, 96, 112 comparisons with Holocaust fiction 23, 90–91, 153, 166, 173–174 ethical anxieties about writing about the genocide 57, 94, 191, 196, 199 literary realism 20–21 ‘positionality’ of fiction authors 16, 37–38, 84–85, 127 ‘positionality’ of subjects 17–18 role of fiction in commemoration 139, 195–196 ‘tourists’ 55–79, 102 trauma 19–21

Index travel narratives 57–58, 61 use of biblical images to represent genocide 162 FitzGerald, Warren, The Go-Away Bird 9–10 Foley, Malcolm 60 Fonkoua, Romuald 30–31, 156–157 France accused of complicity in genocide 184–186, 203 government inquiry into French role in genocide 63, 184, 203 relationship with Rwanda 66–67, 185 Freedman, Sarah Warshauer 202 Fujii, Lee Ann 17–18, 161, 167, 169n9 gacaca 101n15, 112, 136n4, 174 Gasake, Augustin 34 Gasarabwe, Edouard 31 Gatore, Gilbert 9, 11, 85–86 challenges reductive readings of genocide 188–189, 192–193 Le Passé devant soi 41n28, 43n32, 52–53, 54, 85 portrayal of génocidaires 166, 170–171, 172 reluctance to be seen simply as a witness 85–86 Gauthier, Alain 38 genocide commemoration 56, 57, 59, 74–75, 111, 112–113, 135, 141, 174–175, 191–192, 192 comparison with Holocaust 85, 90–91, 106, 136, 153–155, 166 dehumanizing ideology 142, 146–147, 167 denial of 2, 41–42, 113, 140, 157–158 differing accounts 1–2 difficulty of proper burial of victims 134–135, 137–138

223

ethical anxieties about writing about the genocide 57, 94, 191, 196, 199 features of degradation and sexual violence 2–3, 100–101, 101–102, 122–123, 131–132, 146–147, 149, 162, 167–168 fiction see Fest’Africa literary project; fiction homogenization of victims in commemorations 138–139, 140–141, 146–147, 180 international failure to react 3, 7, 83, 108, 113, 136, 186–187 motives for participation 160–162, 167, 169 perpetrators 160–189, 191, 204 ‘positionality’ of authors and subjects 16, 17–18, 102 survivors 109–133, 192 tourists 59–79, 85, 102, 191 use of biblical images to represent genocide 162 victim statistics 139–140 victims 134–159, 191, 204 witnesses 80–108, 191 genocide fiction see fiction Genoud, Robert 50n44 Gourevitch, Philip 13n21, 83–84 Guede, Michael 99 Gyr-Ukunda, Agnes 37 Habyarimana, Juvénal 1, 2, 6, 7n11, 39, 40, 43n31, 51, 87, 120, 150, 185n25 Haines, Kate 35 Hamitic hypothesis 4, 7, 152, 167 Harrow, Kenneth 74, 159 Hatzfeld, Jean 12–13, 21, 83–84, 93–94, 153–154 Dans le nu de la vie 12, 93–94 Englebert des collines 13n20 La Stratégie des antilopes 12, 93–94 Une saison de machettes 12, 93–94, 153

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Herman, Judith 107–108 Hilsum, Lindsey 98n13 Hintjens, Helen 16, 116, 117 Hohenhaus, Peter 60, 67–68 Holland, Patrick 9 Holocaust comparison with Rwanda genocide 85, 90–91, 106, 136, 153–155, 166 fiction 23, 90–91, 153, 166, 173–174 Horvitz, Deborah 106 Housee, Shirin 64 Hron, Madelaine 15, 21, 175, 195 Huggan, Graham 9, 13n21 Hutton, Margaret-Anne 174 Hutu classification as ‘perpetrators’ 126, 180–181, 187, 193 colonization’s creation of ‘Hutu’ race 4 ethnic identity 3–4 exclusion from official narratives of remembrance 44, 116–117, 157–158, 180 ‘Hutu Ten Commandments’ 6–7, 39 ideology 2, 168–169, 184 see also Hamitic hypothesis IBUKA 138, 178n18 Ikirezi bookshop 32, 33 Ilboudou, Monique 8n13, 33, 55–56, 94–95, 119 identification with survivors 130–131, 147 Murekatete 56n4, 58, 61, 67, 95, 106–107, 122–124, 125, 132 portrayal of génocidaires 166n7 profoundly affected by Rwandan trip 126–127, 144 Ingabire, Victoire 157–158 Interahamwe militia 2, 67, 169, 181 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) 10, 43, 92, 98n13, 182

Inyenzi 6, 121, 153 Ishyo Arts Centre 32–33, 135 Kagame, Alexis 31 Kagame, President Paul 1–2, 53, 87n6, 157, 180 critical of France 184–185 Kajuga, Robert 181, 187 Kalisa, Chantal 126–127 Kana, Robusto 9, 48–49, 85, 86–87, 117n10 allusions to Holocaust 154 articulates who should be held responsible 177–178 challenges the way ‘Hutu’ is synonomous with ‘perpetrator’ 180–181 Le Défi de survivre 48–49, 78n18, 86–87 portrayal of génocidaires 166, 169–170 Kanamugire, Cyrien see Robusto Kana Kangura, ‘Hutu Ten Commandments’ 6–7, 39 Kaplan, E. Ann 24, 104–105 Karamira, Froduald 47–48, 182–183n22 Karangwa, Camille 9, 85, 103–104, 117–118n8 challenges reductive readings of genocide 188–189 Le Chapelet et la machette 42–43, 44, 101–102, 118, 132, 161–162, 163 portrayal of génocidaires 166, 170, 175 Karege, Anicet 9, 44–45, 47, 85, 97, 103–104 allusions to Holocaust 154 Entre brouillards et ténèbres 45, 51, 53 La Chute du monarche boiteux 45 Sous le déluge rwandais 44–45, 51, 87–88, 97, 100–101, 120–121, 162

Index Karemera, Carole 135–136 Kayibanda, Grégoire 5, 6 Kayigamba, Jean-Baptiste 115–116, 125 Kayimahe, Vénuste 8n13, 55–56, 81, 97, 110, 117 allusions to Holocaust 154 critical of French complicity 186 France-Rwanda: Les coulisses du génocide 8n13, 50, 186 La Chanson de l’aube 30, 49–51, 67n12, 82, 100, 108, 113–114, 119, 132 portrayal of génocidaires 173 as survivor 84, 85, 103–104, 108, 112–113, 200 Kazinierakis, Alain, Les Blessures du silence 164, 185–186, 188–189 Keen, Suzanne, Empathy and the Novel 18–19 Kennedy, Roseanne 21 Ki-Moon, Ban 7n12 Kigali Genocide Memorial 59, 67, 138, 157–158, 199 street children survivors 129, 195 Kinyarwanda 36–37 Kopf, Martina 61, 104, 105, 106 Korman, Rémi 138, 139 Kouchner, Bernard 185–186n25 Kourouma, Ahmadou 40, 127 Krog, Antjie 152 ‘Kwibuka 20’ commemorations 33, 103, 174n14 absence of France 184–185 Kyomuhendo, Goretti, Secrets no More 10–11 LaCapra, Dominick 24, 104, 107, 172 Writing History, Writing Trauma 23, 104, 105 Lacoste, Charlotte 171, 172, 173 Séductions du bourreau 165

225

Lamko, Koulsy 8n13, 33, 55–56, 57, 61, 62–63, 95 highlights preoccupation with victim statistics 140 La Phalène des collines 23, 58–59, 63–64, 67–68, 102, 105–106 questions motives of genocide tourists 66–67, 69, 71, 102 techniques to resist betraying survivors 123–124, 152n27, 196 Lanzmann, Claude 173–174 Lee, Sonia 145–146 Lemarchand, René 4, 7, 158, 168 Lennon, John 60 Levi, Primo 22, 152 The Drowned and the Saved 90–91, 92, 153 Leys, Ruth 172 Lijdsman, Chiel 32 Littell, Jonathan, Les Bienveillantes 173–174 Locatelli, Antonia 142–145, 182 Loyle, Cyanne 166–167 Luckhurst, Roger 20–21, 116, 150–151 Lydic, Lauren 129 Lyons, Robert, Intimate Enemy 163–165, 166, 171n10, 188–189 McCann, Lisa 104 Mamdani, Mahmood 3–4, 79, 167, 179 Manji, Firoze 117–118 Marcelli, Sylvain 62 Melvern, Linda 185 Mironko, Charles 167 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 155 Mitterrand, François 185–186 Moeller, Susan 3 Moncel, Corinne 24 Monénembo, Tierno 54, 55–56, 203 allusions to Holocaust 153–154 challenges ethnopolitics of genocide 181–183

226

Rwanda Genocide Stories

lack of empathy with narrator’s voice 127–128, 196 L’Aîné des orphelins 8–9n13, 26, 33, 56, 58–59, 61–62, 69–71, 93, 94, 96, 123–124, 125–126, 198 questions ethics of exposing victims’ suffering 146–147 Mongo-Mboussa, Boniface 149 Mugesera, Léon 152 Mujawayo, Esther 197 Mukagasana, Yolande 119, 188 Les Blessures du silence 164, 171, 172–173, 185–186, 188–189 Mukaminega, Ancille 171–172n10 Mukandori, Theresa 59, 71, 105, 126–127, 142, 144–149, 163, 196 Mukarugira, Julienne 37n19 Mukasonga, Scholastique 9, 11, 22, 29, 33, 36, 38, 54, 91–92, 103, 203 Ce que murmurent les collines 200, 201 Inyenzi ou les cafards 52 La Femme aux pieds nus 52 ‘Le Deuil’ 134–135, 137, 140–141, 151–152 L’Iguifou 52, 91 Notre-Dame du Nil 29, 33, 52, 54, 121–122 publisher’s presentation of author as ‘survivor’ 121–122 Munyaburanga, Louis Basengo 34 Une saison au cœur d’Afrique 33–34 Munyarugerero, François-Xavier 29–30n2 Munyeshyaka, Father Wenceslas 23, 43–44, 149n21, 161–163, 166, 176, 177, 184 Murambi memorial site 58n6, 59, 60, 71, 74, 139 Muyigenzi, Victor 10

Mwangi, Meja 8n13, 55–56 Great Sadness 56n4 Nagem, Monique Fleury 183n23 Naigiziki, J. Saverio, Mes transes à trente ans 31 Ndahiro, Tom 44 N’Diaye, Samba Félix 55n2 Ndwaniye, Joseph 31, 77n17, 150 indirect references to sexual violence 131–132 La Promesse faite à ma sœur 22, 33, 46, 57, 75–79, 88–92 Le Muzungu mangeur d’hommes 200–202 portrayal of character on ‘genocide pilgrimage’ 137 portrayal of génocidaires 176 promise of justice for victims 183 references to failings of international community 186–187 searching for witnesses 80–81 Newbury, Catharine 101 Nganang, Patrice 24 Niwese, Maurice, Celui qui sut vaincre 53 Niyonsaba, Cassius 112 Njoroge, Timothy 34 Nkejabahizi, Jean-Chrysostome 29–30, 32, 34, 37 Norridge, Zoe 73, 84–85, 141–142, 147n19, 155, 174, 192, 199–200 Novak, Amy 197 Nsengimanda, Joseph 29–30n2 Ntarama church 59, 62, 71, 74, 138 Ntaryamira, Cyprien 1 Nyamata memorial site 58–59, 59, 62, 68, 71, 74, 91, 112, 140, 144 Parkin, Gaile 10, 11, 60 Baking Cakes in Kigali 10, 60, 96, 121 Parmehutu (Hutu emancipation movement) 5, 6, 161–162

Index Pearlman, Laurie Anne 104 Perfetti, Gianluca 84 perpetrators generalization of Hutu as ‘perpetrators’ 126, 180–181, 187, 193 genocide 160–189, 191, 204 as ‘victims’ 172 Pierce, Julian R., Speak Rwanda 13, 14–15, 69n13, 86n4, 128–129, 131, 166 Pontecorvo, Gillo 154n28 Prunier, Gérard 5–6, 167 publishers 13, 29–30, 34, 35–36, 37, 42, 46n36, 52, 54, 84, 85, 88, 121, 185–186 Quilès, Paul 63, 152n27 Radio-Télévision Libre des Mille Collines (RTLM) 7 Radstone, Susannah 176–177 Raharimanana, Jean-Luc, Rêves sur le linceul 56–57, 156n30 Rechtman, Richard, The Empire of Trauma 17 Rettig, Max 116 Rojek, Chris 65 Rothberg, Michael 17, 23, 136, 153, 156, 157, 158 Multidirectional Memory 172 Rugamba, Dorcy 32n9, 80n1 Rugano, Kalisa 34, 56n3 Rurangwa, Jean-Marie Vianney 8n13, 46–47, 55–56, 70n14, 84n3 allusions to Holocaust 154 Au sortir de l’enfer 80, 84, 97–100, 109–111, 114–115, 119, 122–123, 134–135, 150, 162 challenges mythologization of Rwanda 192, 193, 194 portrayal of génocidaires 165, 166, 167–168, 178–179, 194 testimonial texts 84–85

227

Rusimbi, John 34, 40–41, 202 By the Time She Returned 34, 40, 41 The Hyena’s Wedding 40, 47, 148 Ruti, Antoine 30–31 Ruzibiza, Abdul 87n6 Rwabigwi, Gilbert 33 Rwanda 1959 ‘Social Revolution’ 5–6, 39, 168 book culture 30–36 bookshops 32 dominance of French as published language 36–37, 202, 203–204 lack of publishing infrastructure 29–31, 34–37, 202, 203–204 literacy levels 31–32, 202 publishers 13, 29–30, 34, 35–36, 37, 42, 46n36, 52, 54, 84, 85, 88, 121, 185–186 civil war (1990) 6, 45, 81, 180, 184 commodification of commemoration 141, 146–147 criminal justice system 182–184 education system 32, 35 emphasis on need to move on from 1994 genocide 200 ethnopolitics 46–47, 53, 126, 187, 202, 204 importance of proper burial for dead 134–135, 137–138 introduction of ethnic identity cards 5 mythologization as dark and dangerous 193–194, 201 overdetermination as ‘land of genocide and gorillas’ 193–194 politicization of mourning 111–112, 135, 138–139, 192 racialization of ‘Hutu’ and ‘Tutsi’ 4 tourism 59–79, 141 see also genocide Rwandan Patriotic Army 6

228

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Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) 6, 39, 47, 87 Rwandan Writers’ Association 34 Rwigyema, Fred Gisa 150n24 Rwililiza, Innocent 115–116, 125 Samuel, Karin 10 Samuelson, Beth Lewis 202 Sarkozy, Nicholas 185n25 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 55n1 Schaffer, Kay 186 Schipper, Mineke 24 Sebarenzi, Joseph, God Sleeps in Rwanda 202–203n4 Sehene, Benjamin 9, 38 challenges reductive readings of genocide 188–189 Le Feu sous la soutane 43–44, 161, 162, 163 portrayal of génocidaires 166, 168, 176–177, 184 Sembura (African Great Lakes Writers Association) 34–35 Semujanga, Josias 29–30, 33, 39n25, 155–156 sexual violence 101–102, 122–123, 131–132, 146–147, 149, 162, 167–168 Sharpley, Richard 146 Simbikangwa, Pascal 38n21 Slovo, Gillian 156–157 Small, Audrey 38n22, 128, 196 Smith, Sidonie 186 Songolo, Aliko 54n49 Sontag, Susan 74, 197 Regarding the Pain of Others 68 Soyinka, Wole 22, 79, 152 Spiessens, Anneleen 153–154 Stanton, Gregory H. 5n6, 7 Stone, Philip 67–68 Straus, Scott 160n1, 169, 195 Intimate Enemy 163–165, 171n10, 188–189 The Order of Genocide 167, 168–169

Suleiman, Susan Rubin 174 survivors 109–133, 192 ambivalence of position in post-genocide Rwanda 110–112 ‘by destination’ 88, 115, 122 definition of 115–122 generalization of Tutsi as ‘survivors’ 116–117, 126, 180–181, 187, 193 stigmatization of 119, 132 treatment by government 111–112 Syrotinski, Michael 94–96 Tadjo, Véronique 54, 55–56, 61, 64–65, 73, 94–95, 178, 203 attempts to humanize victims 123–125, 130–131, 139, 143 challenges reductive readings of genocide 188–189, 194–195 highlights emphasis on statistics 139–140, 141–142 L’Ombre d’Imana 8–9n13, 21–22, 33, 56, 57, 60, 62, 64–66, 93, 104, 151–152, 160, 185, 188 portrayal of génocidaires 169, 175, 176 Tal, Kalí 24, 193 Worlds of Hurt 15 Tansi, Sony Labou 40 Taylor, Christopher 1 Tegera, Pierre 53 testimony 17, 20, 27, 47 blurring of the lines between fiction and testimony 83–85 Torchin, Leshu 69 tourists 59–79, 85, 102, 191 see also dark tourism trauma theory 19–20, 24, 104, 193, 197 vicarious trauma 104–106, 197 Tutsi classification as ‘victims’ or ‘survivors’ 116–117, 126, 180–181, 187, 193

Index colonization’s creation of ‘Tutsi’ race 4 disproportionate part played by Tutsi women in Hutu propaganda 168–169 ethnic identity 3–4, 5, 116 see also genocide; Hamitic hypothesis Twa, third group in Rwanda 4n5, 187 Twagilimana, Aimable 30, 81 Manifold Annihilation 30, 38–40, 143 Umutesi, Marie-Béatrice 13n21, 53–54 Urry, John 62, 73 Uwilingiyimana, Agathe 2, 45n35 victims generalization of Tutsi as ‘victims’ 116–117, 126, 180–181, 187, 193 genocide 134–159, 191, 204 statistics 139–140 Vidal, Claudine 68–69, 71–72, 116, 136–137, 158

229

Waberi, Abdourahman 5, 8n13, 22, 32, 55–56, 73, 94–95, 203 describes lack of repentance in génocidaires 175 discusses the humanity of victims 152–153, 156 Moisson de crânes 21–23, 33, 57, 61, 72–73, 95, 109, 123–124, 144, 163 position as witness 103–104 Wakerley, Véronique 145n18 Waller, James 163, 183 Walter, Tony 74 Weiss, Peter 80n1 Whitehead, Anne 19, 20–21 Williams, Paul 139n8 witnesses 80–108, 191 reluctance to give accounts of genocide 81–82, 92–93 Woukouache, François 55n2, 57 Nous ne sommes plus morts 57 Yaeger, Patricia 15 YouLi (Youth Literacy Organization) 33 Zeitlin, Froma 166