Gender-based violence in Monique Ilboudo's fiction

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Visions of civil war and genocide in fiction from Rwanda

On October 1, 1990, the Rwandan Patriotic Army invaded Rwanda from Uganda, thereby launching a civil war that was to last until the end of the 1994 genocide. While a number of fictional responses to the one-hundred-day genocide have appeared since 1994, very little fiction has been written in response to the civil war itself. This article discusses two little known novels written by Rwandan authors who engage specifically with the civil war: Aimable Twagilimana's 1996 novel, Manifold Annihilation, and Anicet Karege's Sous le déluge rwandais, published in 2005. While both authors have very different relationships with the events of 1994, they paint a similar picture of Rwanda in the early 1990s, which they both experienced firsthand. Through their fictional representations of Rwanda on the eve of genocide, they challenge the ill-informed, mythologized versions of the history of Rwanda that were so widespread in 1994 and continue to this day.PostprintPeer reviewe

Calixthe Beyala: black face(s) on French TV

As president and spokeswoman of the French black rights movement, Collectif Egalité, Cameroonian-born novelist Calixthe Beyala is committed to pushing for an improvement in the representation of black people on television in France. This article discusses the ways in which the Collectif has attempted to draw the French public's attention to the lack of 'visible minorities' on French TV. It takes as a test case the controversial figure of Beyala herself who has become something of a minor TV celebrity in her own right. What emerges as an apparent contradiction between Beyala's own media representation and the Collectif's campaign will serve to illustrate the ambivalent positioning of black citizens in contemporary France

Seeing the Genocide against the Tutsi through someone else's eyes : prosthetic memory and Hotel Rwanda

Alison Landsberg’s theory of ‘prosthetic memory’ suggests that memories are not ‘owned’, that is they do not depend on lived experience, but rather they can occur as a result of an individual’s engagement with a mediated representation (e.g. a film, a museum, a TV series, a novel). One of the best-known mass cultural responses to the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda is Terry George’s 2004 feature film, Hotel Rwanda. While the film was a huge commercial success, Rwandan survivor testimonies paint a very different picture of what happened in the real ‘Hotel Rwanda’ (the Hôtel des Mille Collines in the Rwandan capital of Kigali). This article discusses the different versions of the ‘Hotel Rwanda’ story through the lens of prosthetic memory and considers the usefulness of Landsberg’s theory for analysing memory narratives from or about Rwanda. While Landsberg promotes prosthetic memories as ‘in the best cases’ capable of generating empathy and political alliances, I show that, when mass-mediated representations create revisionist false ‘memories’, this can have harmful consequences for survivors of trauma. After focusing on the ethical implications of what Landsberg describes as ‘seeing through someone else’s eyes’, I conclude that prosthetic memory is a concept that should be treated with caution.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

‘More than just a genocide country’ : recuperating Rwanda in the writings of Scholastique Mukasonga

How can we write fiction about 21st-century Rwanda? This article analyses the writing trajectory of the most successful Rwandan writer, Scholastique Mukasonga. Through close analysis of her published works, it traces a literary passage from mourning to recuperation. It also examines the interaction between Mukasonga’s most recent fictional texts (a second novel and a second collection of short stories) and the series of digitized artefacts presented on her website. Combining a postcolonial framework with insights from clinical and political psychology, the article shows how Mukasonga’s most recent writing encourages us to think about Rwanda differently, and suggests a new way of reading literary responses to the 1994 genocide.PostprintPeer reviewe

The (un)believable truth about Rwanda

Since the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, a proliferation of fictional and non-fictional narratives has appeared, many of them claiming to represent the truth about what really happened in 1994. These include a small but significant number of Rwandan-authored novels which, this article suggests, invite the reader to accept what I call a “documentary pact”. While there is no single version of the truth about what happened in Rwanda, one of the common features of fictional responses to the genocide is an emphasis on truth claims. Drawing on examples of both fictional and non-fictional responses to the genocide, this essay discusses the implications of Rwandan authors’ insistence on the veracity of narratives that are sometimes difficult to believe. Emphasizing the importance for Rwandan writers, particularly survivors, of eliciting empathy from their readers, this essay will show that the documentary pact is an effective means of appealing to our shared human experience.PostprintPeer reviewe

“I am Rwandan”: unity and reconciliation in post-genocide Rwanda

Drawing on a corpus of ten oral interviews with survivors and perpetrators of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, we examine how the government’s policy of unity and reconciliation has shaped post-genocide identities and intergroup relations in local Rwandan communities. By focusing on the relationships between individuals and the national post-genocide narrative, we show how the socio-political context in Rwanda influences how people locate themselves and how they ascribe rights and duties to and in relation to others. Specifically, we use positioning theory as an interpretive lens to argue that individuals view adherence to the government’s post-genocide narrative of unity and reconciliation as a moral duty, which is vital to continued political stability and economic development in Rwanda. Our discussion focuses on explaining how the social positioning of the national post-genocide narrative may function to reinforce the ethnic tensions the government has pledged to eradicate

Can people experience post-traumatic growth after committing violent acts?

The concept of post-traumatic growth refers to the positive psychological changes that some people experience as a result of their struggle with highly stressful and often traumatic circumstances. Research into post-traumatic growth has typically focused on survivors of violent victimisation or other uncontrollable and tragic circumstances. However, emerging research into service members in the armed forces has shown that post-traumatic growth can also occur in this population. We synthesise existing research to propose a preliminary model outlining the psychosocial processes that may facilitate post-traumatic growth among people who have perpetrated acts of violence. We end by discussing some of the important questions that future theoretical and empirical work will need to address

Distinguishing post-traumatic growth from psychological adjustment among Rwandan genocide survivors

Research into post-traumatic growth describes the potentially transformative and positive impact that highly challenging and traumatic life experiences can have on an individual’s identity, relationships and worldviews. The positive changes individuals identify in the aftermath of challenging circumstances are theorised to be more than fleeting positive illusions, and instead represent enduring character development. However, a central debate in this literature is whether post-traumatic growth is really more than psychological adjustment to a difficult post-trauma reality. In this chapter, we draw upon testimonial data from a sample of survivors of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda to differentiate these two processes. This population provides a relevant context with which to evaluate this question, as the severity of the genocide made adjustment to post-genocide life a tragic necessity.PostprintPeer reviewe