French Cultural Studies: Testimonial Encounter: Esther Mujawayo's Dialogic Art of Witnessing

French Cultural Studies
http://frc.sagepub.com Testimonial Encounter: Esther Mujawayo's Dialogic Art of Witnessing

Alexandre Dauge-Roth French Cultural Studies 2009; 20; 165 DOI: 10.1177/0957155809102632 The online version of this article can be found at: http://frc.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/20/2/165
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French Cultural Studies
Testimonial Encounter
Esther Mujawayos Dialogic Art of Witnessing
ALEXANDRE DAUGE-ROTH Bates College
For the survivors of the genocide of the Tutsis, testifying to their traumatic past must be envisioned in relation to the political and ideological tensions that define the representations of Rwandas national history. Bearing witness represents the possibility of and the call for a dialogic space where survivors seek to redefine the present meaning derived from the experience of the genocide and its haunting resonance. In their attempt to re-envision and re-assert themselves through testimony, survivors move from a position of being subjected to political violence to a position that entails the promise of agency. In this regard, Mujawayos dialogic and polyphonic art of witnessing is a unique resource. Her testimonies seek to generate a social space within which the survivors can negotiate, and eventually reclaim, the meaning of their survival and to assert the demands of the traumatic aftermath they face. Keywords: genocide, mourning, Esther Mujawayo, reconciliation, Rwanda, testimony, trauma
For the survivors of the genocide of the Tutsis, the social conditions of bearing witness to their traumatic past are a constant source of tension since the mediation of their suffering is intimately linked to the political and ideological visions and divisions that are still vivid in contemporary Rwanda. Thus the negotiation surrounding the possibility of enunciating such a traumatic past cannot be confined to the private sphere or limited to the psychological resilience and narrative ability of each survivor as they seek social recognition and explore the ways to mourn their dead. As Stevan Weine emphasises in his analysis of testimonies bearing witness to
French Cultural Studies, 20(2): 165180 Copyright SAGE Publications (Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC) http://frc.sagepub.com [200905] 10.1177/0957155809102632
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the traumas of political violence, it is essential that this elaboration [does] not stop at some boundary just outside of the self, and fail to consider broader social, cultural, political, spiritual, developmental, and ethical concerns and struggles (Weine, 2006: 104). Testimony represents, then, one possible avenue through which victims who find themselves too often politically muted, or who have not yet found the means to inscribe their experience within the public sphere, attempt to voice the story of their suffering for themselves as individuals and as a group. By refusing to remain silent or silenced, survivors aim not only to keep the memory of those who died alive, but to also gain social recognition and legitimacy within the ongoing dialogues through which social memory and belonging are shaped. Their testimony, then, aims not only to represent the past as it has been witnessed, but at the same time symbolises a social performance of the survivors agency within their community. The attempt to voice the traumatic past of the genocide and confer to its haunting imprint a readability fulfils numerous hopes: refusing the obliteration of those who died, documenting how the genocide was planned and carried out in 1994, asserting the end of a culture of impunity that prevailed during decades, seeking justice and social recognition, and sharing a traumatic weight to alleviate its haunting grip that keeps so many survivors in a disjointed relationship with their contemporaries. As such, testimony requires the survivors to engage in a polemical dialogue with competing discourses that institute the dominant representations of the genocide and shape the responses to its aftermath. In Rwanda, one of the major sources of tension resides in the fact that the memory of the genocide is intimately linked with the current policy of national reconciliation and reunification of the country. As we will see, the social dialogue through which the memory of the past is socially negotiated takes place within the realm of the gacaca court where perpetrators are given a voice and, in many cases, happen to be the only ones who know what occurred. Moreover, as perpetrators find themselves rewarded for their confessions their sentences being reduced by half in many cases their use of testimony obeys a radically different agenda from that of the survivors. In this unique context of memorialisation and remembrance, where political and judicial paradigms prevail, the survivors find themselves at the mercy of the perpetrators willingness to tell what happened to their relatives. Furthermore, many of them do not necessarily recognise themselves in this official shaping of the past subsumed to a political and judicial agenda that rarely addresses the ongoing situation that the survivors have to face daily. Despite the uniqueness of this situation, numerous survivors bear witness to their suffering and its aftermath, seeing silence as an unacceptable option. It is nevertheless crucial to acknowledge outright that to be
DAUGE-ROTH: TESTIMONIAL ENCOUNTER
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able and willing to testify does not necessarily put ones suffering at a more tolerable distance; nor does it amount to a personal resolution. As Ross Chambers (2004) suggests, testimony is driven by a desire to voice the fact that survivors, rather then having survived a trauma are still surviving experiences that were already themselves an experience of being, somehow, still alive although already dead (2004: 43). The wounds remain open, the scars visible, as does, for many, the feeling of being a stranger to oneself and to the society. This feeling exists simultaneously with seeking to reassert the necessity of ones belonging to a community and negotiating its conditions of possibility. Esther Mujawayo who lost 274 members of her family in the genocide, emphasises this endless disruption and disjunction that lies at the heart of her testimony as follows:
Depuis plus de dix ans, pour entretenir leur mmoire et celle dun million de Tutsi limins, mon temps nest quune course effrne et qui jamais, ne cessera. Tmoigner, tmoigner, toujours tmoigner. Pour eux, Innocent, mon mari, mon pre, ma mre, ma sur Stphanie, ma sur Rachel, mes neveux, les miens, tous les miens absents dont jai tenu le compte, tu te rappelles. Plus je tmoigne, plus je martle leur souvenir. Mais plus je tmoigne, et plus leur souvenir me martle. Je peux, un jour peut-tre, faire le deuil des miens, je ne pourrai jamais faire le deuil de ce quils ont subi. (Mujawayo and Belhaddad, 2006: 1314)
Testimony is here framed by a social practice that does not amount to a definitive catharsis, as Mujawayo faces feelings of mourning, guilt and inner and social estrangement, while embodying a disruptive knowledge whose stranglehold might never be undone. What is at stake is the social acknowledgement of the aftermath defined as a state of out-of-jointness ... of perpetually surviving a trauma that is never over (Chambers, 2004: 43). And yet, despite this double estrangement, the testimonial impulse to have it acknowledged signals a desire for connectedness that requires survivors to forge the social recognition of their disconnection so that their alterity does not amount to their exclusion. This desire for connectedness through testimony must therefore be envisioned in the first place as a performance of survival, an act through which the survivor attests publicly to her longing for a community and reaffirms her current presence despite the obliteration to which she had been subjected. Thus, the essence of testimony cannot necessarily be reduced to narration, that is, to descriptive, informative relations, to knowledge or to narrative; it is first a present act (Derrida, 2000 [1998]: 38). In the context of genocide survival and its aftermath, to bear witness represents the possibility of and the call for a dialogic space where survivors seek to redefine the present meaning derived from their experience and its haunting resonance. In their attempt to re-envision and
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re-assert themselves through testimony, survivors move from a position of being subjected to political violence to a position that entails the promise of agency and the possibility of crafting the meaning of who they are. To bear witness, then, is to generate a social space within which survivors can negotiate, and eventually reclaim on their own terms the meaning of their survival, and to assert the demands of the traumatic aftermath they face in order to lighten its disruptive burden (Felman and Laub, 1992: 856). Surviving implies a daily negotiation that is both personal and collective, where the gesture of passing on ones pain and the absence of so many relatives who were at the heart of ones own social identity becomes one of the possible affirmations of ones survival. If the voices of the survivors are so often repressed, it is in part because they are the symptom of a cultural trauma that would require, if acknowledged, social and cultural change in order to engage in a process of peace and reconciliation. Meanwhile, as Weine stresses, If there is no testimony, no storytelling, no open entre of survivors stories into culture, then what kind of cultural change can there be? (Weine, 2006: 130). In our encounter with the testimonial literature bearing witness to the Rwandan genocide, we must therefore not only face the horror and pain, but also our complicity in political and symbolic violence that silences the survivors. Reading Mujawayo makes us face the forgetting we have sanctioned, the symbolic violence in which we are complicit, and the voices we have muted despite our claim to remember. It is only through uncovering the silence we impose on the survivors that we can grasp our role in continuing their suffering, a suffering I refer to as enunciative trauma and that Sarah Kofman (1998 [1987]) identifies as paroles suffoques.1 For those who survived, the task of testifying is a daunting one that should not be confined to the witness alone, but should involve the listeners and be a reflection on the crucial role they play within the testimonial process. Soud Belhaddad, who is Mujawayos interlocutor and co-author, emphasises that for survivors to remain silent is forbidden, but telling is impossible, which leaves only a third option: being listened to: si dire napaise pas les rescaps, les couter, en revanche, peut y contribuer (Belhaddad, 2007: 178). The issue is, then, to define who is willing to listen and is capable of listening, be it in Rwanda or beyond its borders. What does listening to a survivor entail and require? How does one envision, promote, and create a listening community for survivors? To what extent can we, as listeners, be implicated in and through the act of listening and respond to the survivors demand for social and cultural change? In this regard, Mujawayos art of witnessing presents a unique and valuable resource, as her testimonies do not erase the dialogue through which they have been generated. As was the case with SurVivantes (Mujawayo and Belhaddad, 2004), La Fleur de Stphanie (2006) presents itself as a co-authored work in which Belhaddads role is not limited to
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translating the survivors story into a captivating narrative a common form of collaboration in the cases of survivors who are not professional writers. Here the co-authorship takes another dimension since the interlocutors presence is not erased within the testimony, which presents itself as a testimonial dialogue and encounter. Belhaddads presence performatively asserts a willingness to listen that represents in the survivors eyes the promise of being culturally audible and socially acknowledged. As Mujawayo stresses in her first testimony, she is only too aware that many of those who profess an interest in her story, are neither willing to implicate themselves in the testimonial encounter nor are they willing to be implicated through it since the cultural dialogue she aims to generate challenges the foundations of their beliefs:
Tu commences raconter, raconter, et ils nacceptent pas dcouter, et cest terrible. Ils disent: cest trop horrible. Ils disent: Cest trop, trop ... Cest trop pour qui? Cest trop pour moi ou pour toi qui coutes? ... quand on a fait un voyage l-dedans, dans lhorreur, on na pas le luxe de sen retirer: on est dedans, on est dedans. Tandis que lautre, celui qui coute, il reoit seulement lhorreur comme a et il a le luxe, lui, ou le choix dtre en dehors, de ne pas supporter et de dire: On stoppe lhorreur. Moi, je nai pas ce choix de ne pas supporter, puisque je devais supporter. (Mujawayo and Belhaddad, 2004: 201)
Conscious that she embodies a traumatic experience whose deepest scars and meaning ultimately escape her as much as they trouble her interlocutors, she anticipates the dismissal of her testimony by asking us to question why her suffering is so disconcerting. In her effort to sound out the depth of our desire and our ability to listen to her story, she also addresses the pain our rejection would inflict on survivors who, like her, seek social and personal recognition to restore their sense of humanity and belonging. After having been dehumanised as treacherous cockroaches to justify their massacre, the survivors explore the capacity to negotiate through testimony a vital space of encounter and social recognition. Without a listener, there would be no encounter. Testimony would remain a dead letter and reinforce the social and political status quo it aims to alter. Mujawayos art of bearing witness is, in this sense, fundamentally dialogic as she casts herself as being engaged in a dialogue through which she succeeds in giving resonance to her past due to the relational dynamic of speaking to a listener, and even more decisively with a listener who represents a rhetorical mise en abme of the broader dialogue Mujawayo engages in with us, her readers. My analysis of Mujawayos art of witnessing borrows here from Weines understanding of Bakhtins dialogic work when applied to the analysis of testimony:
The perspective of dialogic work does not depend on the claim that traumatic memory is the source and memory disorder is the
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form of survivors suffering. Rather, Bakhtins dialogic work suggests approaching suffering following catastrophe as a metalinguistic condition. In testimony, the survivor works with a receiver to create a story that, as a polyphonic and dialogic narrative, offers the survivor potential for growth in consciousness and ethics in regard to his or her experience of political violence. (Weine, 2006: 95)
The demand for a social space and cultural scene where the survivors experiences could be audible both to themselves and their interlocutors is not foreign to testimonial literature if it is understood as a social space and practice that allows members of a society to reflect on their shared humanity and to negotiate a common belonging by initiating a demand for cultural change. As Catherine Coquio (2004) eloquently stresses in her analysis of the role writing plays as a third party within the memorial and mourning process of bearing witness, the distinction between literary and testimonial enunciation is often blurred in the genocidal aftermath. Survivors, who have experienced traumatic violence that is both physical and symbolic, speak and write from a position that requires them to craft their testimony both within and against the vacuum generated by the loss of their relatives, the collapse of their former sense of self and of belonging, and the cultural disconnectedness of their experiences. In this particular context of enunciation, writing functions as a call for as well as a performance of remembrance and mourning, as Mujawayos second testimony eloquently attests. In La Fleur de Stphanie, she concludes the narration of her failed attempt to find the body of her sister Stphanie and her three children by declaring performatively that her book constitutes her sisters memorial in order to uproot her from the anonymity and indecency of the stillunidentified mass grave or pit in which her body lies as well as those of the other women and children killed with her: Je toffre ce livre comme spulture, Stphanie, jai convi plein de gens, tous les acteurs seront prsents ton enterrement, celui de tes enfants, celui dAntoinette, de ses petits, et celui dImmacule (Mujawayo and Belhaddad, 2006: 228). Nevertheless, one of the major obstacles in envisioning writing and testimony under such a symbolic and literary light resides in the disbelief in and negation of the survivors stories. According to Coquio (2004), this potential disbelief tends to confine testimonies to a proof rather than a place of creation that would allow the crafting of new ways of mourning and remembering:
Au-del de la preuve des faits ... le tmoin tente de rinscrire sa vie dans un sens partir du non-sens anantissant. En ceci, le tmoignage excde toujours son encadrement juridique et son exploitation historiographique, qui, par une violence particulire, le rduisent au statut de preuve et de document. Cet excs conduit parfois une mise
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en forme crite, sinon littraire, qui vaut comme forme substitutive de deuil ... la recherche des mots et du sens vient en lieu et place des rites funraires impossibles, destins contrer la disparition des vivants et des morts. (Coquio, 2004: 125)
What I would now like to explore, is how Mujawayo evaluates the feasibility of the political injunction to turn the page, to go on with ones life, and to contribute positively to Rwandas reconciliation and renewal. Cathy Caruth (1996) emphasises the crucial negotiation between the personal and the collective relationship to a traumatic past as follows:
The belated experience of trauma ... suggests that history is not only the passing on of a crisis but also the passing on of a survival that can only be possessed within a history larger than any single individual. (1996: 71)
In present-day Rwanda, the call for national reconciliation, the participation in the gacaca courts, and the rewriting of Rwandas past have become the paradigmatic lenses through which the legacy of the genocide is publicly addressed. These paradigms define a new era in the history of witnessing the genocide, which Mujawayo summarises as follows:
Aprs 1994, un silence assourdissant a fig toute la population. Dont les survivants eux-mmes. Tu ne parles pas lorsque tu as la certitude de ne pas tre cout, et surtout, de risquer ta vie. Or, trs peu de temps aprs le gnocide, les liminations de survivants ont commenc. Tu vois, on contraint les uns parler mais on contraint les autres se taire ... Par clanisme ou par certitude idologique, les gnocidaires, eux, ont beaucoup pari sur la mutit installe sur les collines. Personne, absolument personne au Rwanda naurait jamais imagin que les tueurs parleraient un jour ... Avec les gacaca, la parole a circul. (Mujawayo and Belhaddad, 2006: 74)
This new era of witnessing has constraining consequences for the survivors ability to tell their story, to be heard socially or to make political demands. How has the injunction to bear witness changed over the years now that many perpetrators and survivors coexist and must redefine the sociability that governs their lives an often-surrealistic cohabitation and common belonging? The gacaca courts have generated new challenges for survivors: they must publicly listen to the crimes and atrocities committed against their relatives with all the social voyeurism and humiliation it may imply. They must remain silent and respectful when facing those confessing the murder of their loved ones. They must accept seeing their testimony challenged by the alleged perpetrators, live among those released from prison and accept their return, and, ultimately, some survivors must live in the fear of being killed for what they have witnessed if they choose to
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step forward as mandated by the law. The spectrum of the gacaca systems achievements and challenges is complex and broad and it is difficult to generalise since every case is specific depending on the location, the number and the mental state of the survivors, the networks of support or hostility, not to mention the true intentions of those who confessed or claimed their innocence. In order to offer a representative spectrum of social and personal trajectories co-existing in Rwanda, Mujawayo like other writers such as Yolande Mukagasana (1997, 1999, 2001) and Jean Hatzfeld (2000, 2003, 2007a) talked with a variety of respondents, from survivors who are traumatised to the point that they see themselves as the living dead to those who are fully engaged in the implementation of the reconciliation process.2 But she did not limit herself to the views and words of the survivors; she also interviewed perpetrators. Mujawayo talked with the killers of her sister and her children some admitting their crimes, others not. All these narratives share a polyvocal approach, which combines the authors voices and experiences with numerous antagonistic perspectives. The decentring of their own voice allows them to present mediations that are more prone to capture and render the co-existence of contradictory views in Rwanda today and address the persistence of conflicting priorities. As Hatzfeld notices, there is a striking divide in the relationship survivors and perpetrators have towards the past. This difference echoes, even over a decade after the genocide, their radically different positions and defines not so much a memorial gap between them but the difficulty for survivors to see themselves again as human beings as fully alive as they were before, while many perpetrators never questioned their humanity and right to live not to mention, for some, their right to kill: En fin de compte, le vrai problme, cest celui de lhumiliation et non celui de la capacit de se souvenir (Hatzfeld, 2007b). As Felman and Laub have underlined in their work on testimony, it takes more than one person to bear witness, since the very act of bearing witness constitutes a social performance that has to be understood more as an access to the truth than a statement of the truth in the context of genocide and its traumatic legacy (1992: 1516). Thus the dialogic configuration of Mujawayo and Belhaddads testimony acknowledges the social and intersubjective negotiation and recognition of a truth that no one owns since it can only be collectively negotiated. Given the dialogic nature of truth and its indirect and mediated access through testimony, how does Mujawayo build her account of the reconciliation process and how does she position herself within and through her desire to bear witness to the genocide and its aftermath? Firstly, the dialogic staging that is achieved with and through Belhaddad in Mujawayos testimonies is crucial, as it codifies an ethics of listening and reading. Echoing Wendy Hui Kyong Chuns attempt to define a politics of listening (2002: 163) to traumatic accounts, Mujawayos testimony
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offers a space of encounter that requires us to overcome the desire to identify with the survivor as a premise for socially hearing the other and acknowledging her struggle as heir to a traumatic past within a shared present. The possibility of engaging in an intersubjective relation is then the fundamental premise of Mujawayos dialogic approach to testimony. It represents the past, a social encounter and the performance affirming a belonging to a shared humanity. Weine emphasises this interactive and relational context at play within the testimonial encounter as follows:
In testimony ... there are two parties directly present who are occupying the role of the I for another. There is the actual giver of testimony who is a listener to himself or herself. And there is also an actual another present in the room, the listener and recorder of testimony (Weine, 2006: 11011).
La Fleur de Stphanie opens with Esther Mujawayos return to Rwanda and her quest to locate the bodies of her sister and her three children. Like many survivors, Mujawayo feels indebted to those who died and equates her survival with the obligation to bury them with dignity and preserve their memory. The main obstacle and source of frustration for her resides in the fact that the possibility of honouring her dead relatives relies on the confessions of those who participated in the genocide and are now admitting some of their crimes. In the chapters relating her encounters with the three presumed killers of her sister and her family, Mujawayo conveys the difficulty of interpreting their discourse and the discomfort generated by the impossibility of ever truly knowing what motivates their willingness to speak. During her participation in various gacaca sessions, Mujawayo evaluates the potentialities and limitations of this judicial system based on the willingness and ability of the local communities to face what happened and confront, more than ten years after the events, the past that continues to haunt their present and weighs insidiously on so many social interactions among Rwandans. What is particularly difficult for Mujawayo is that the survivors are not given the possibility of defining and negotiating the rules and the conditions under which they face the perpetrators; it is the government which imposes, through the gacaca jurisdiction and the policy of national unity and reconciliation, a constraining context of dialogue that weights on what can be said, by whom, and when:
Pour ma part, ma grande inquitude est la suivante: des rescaps qui se sentent encore engloutis dans la mort ... doivent-ils subir cette nouvelle preuve quest la confrontation contrainte leurs tueurs ? ... Tu vas me dire, et tu as raison, que dans cette preuve existe aussi une part de vrit et quelle est ncessaire aux rescaps. Il nous est en effet capital de savoir comment sont morts les ntres, et surtout o sont leurs corps, o, o, o ... Mais le cadre dans lequel cette vrit clate nexige-t-il pas de nous limpossible? (Mujawayo and Belhaddad, 2006: 589)
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In the end, despite the confession of the man who participated in the killing of her sister and her children, Mujawayo finds herself unable to locate the bodies of her relatives. In order to overcome the failure of her quest and her inability to pay tribute to the memory of relatives, Mujawayo writes her book as a memorial to Stphanie and her children. By positioning her book as such, Mujawayo neutralises the perpetrators ability to prevent her paying tribute to her dead. The second part of Mujawayos book is devoted to the stories and words of survivors who are fully implicated in the reconciliation process. As she exposes their words and actions, she tries to understand the motivation behind their engagement, which the author sees to be beyond her strength. For Mujawayo, to engage in the reconciliation process and work with perpetrators represents a potentially suffocating journey for the survivors who, one more time, are asked to make the impossible happen politically, socially and psychologically. To illustrate this point, various chapters convey the stories of the women Mujawayo met. They pay tribute to their involvement and attempt to negotiate the aftermath of the genocide: Thophilia oversees perpetrators working in the context of the Travaux dIntrt Gnral, Josphine goes into the prisons to encourage accused perpetrators to participate in the reconciliation effort by admitting their crimes, Odette works as a judge in a gacaca court, Stphanie manages reconciliation and conflict resolution camps with the British NGO Oxfam, and so on. Thus Mujawayos testimony is dialogic through her conversation with Belhaddad and the use of the secondperson narrative that rhetorically positions us within the dialogic space of sharing and trust of her enunciation. But it is also polyphonic since it orchestrates a multiplicity of voices that do not coincide with the authors position. In Weines analysis of testimonies to political violence and suffering, the use of a polyphonic approach is key and goes hand in hand with the dialogic foundation of testimony as the social creation of a space of mutual recognition and understanding: Within one point of historical experience, even within one persons narration of surviving political violence, there are many different ways of seeing many different things, and each connects interpersonally, culturally, historically, and spiritually with many other views (Weine, 2006: 103). After having conveyed all these stories that can only raise admiration for the strength and altruism the survivors demonstrate, as they implicate themselves in the reconciliation process, Mujawayo emphasises that the faith of these women and friends must be understood as a way of coping with the aftermath of the genocide and the risk of being socially silenced:
Quand tu sens que la socit veut clore le lourd chapitre du gnocide, parfois en trpignant, tu comprends que les rescaps, eux, resteront en marge. Tu te poses alors la question: et dans tout a, comment je vais
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me positionner? Te mettre de ct et contempler, comme un spectateur, ce qui se fait et ce qui se joue? De toute faon, rescap, tu nas rien perdre ... Alors, plutt que de subir cette exclusion, tu dcides dtre victime agissante. (Mujawayo and Belhaddad, 2006: 207)
Mujawayo is concerned with the price these survivors will ultimately pay psychologically when opting to live in this daily proximity with perpetrators. Moreover, the fact that Mujawayos friends have neither her privileged position as she admits herself of living outside Rwanda to rebuild themselves, nor a social space where they can unload all the sufferings and atrocities to which they are heirs, is a deep source of concern for Mujawayo. As her friends are working with survivors and perpetrators, elles ont fait le pari fou de vouloir se rapprocher de cet autre qui voulait notre fin. Mais qui se rapproche delles? (2006: 211). What is at stake here is the relationship that the survivors are able to forge between their personal history and the official and dominant understanding of Rwandas past. The survivors risk finding themselves dispossessed of the right and the ability to tell their story according to their understanding, and therefore to be silenced and alienated a second time if unable to recognise themselves in the new framework through which they will be asked to address their trauma and their survival. As Kal Tal asserts in Worlds of Hurt, what matters here is that the negotiation of personal trauma cannot be separated from the collective memory within which survivors seek recognition. The ability to bear witness is therefore intimately linked with how the present society defines the past in its attempt to articulate its collective future:
Bearing witness is an aggressive act. It is born out of a refusal to bow to outside pressure to revise or to repress experience, a decision to embrace conflict rather than conformity, to endure a lifetime of anger and pain rather than to submit to the seductive pull of revision and repression ... If survivors retain control over the interpretation of their trauma, they can sometimes force a shift in the social and political structure. If the dominant culture manages to appropriate the trauma and can codify it in its own terms, the status quo will remain unchanged. (Tal, 1996: 7)
The reluctance of the government to create a compensation and reparation fund for survivors, caused by the fear of being perceived as favouring the Tutsi, offers a sharp contrast with the benefits perpetrators of the genocide receive if they admit their crimes. In both cases, the same economical rationale prevails, but with very different consequences and sacrifices for both groups. Ultimately, it is the survivors who once more are asked, in the name of national reconciliation, to make the biggest sacrifice by accepting the often expedited verdicts; by accepting demands of forgiveness that the killers impose on them; by having to overcome the emotional stress and trauma generated by the return of so many perpetrators to their
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neighbourhoods, and by silencing their desire for a judicial system that would address fully the issue of material compensation for those who were left without a family or have suffered traumatic violence and sexual abuse that exclude them from the majority of social networks. Related to this discussion is the issue of forgiveness, which Mujawayo addresses upfront in the opening pages of the second section of her book Paroles de Rconciliateurs in a chapter entitled Pardonner, disent-ils:
Fondamentalement, du ct du tueur et du ct du rescap, il ne sagit pas du mme pardon pour chacun. Pour le gnocidaire, il est dune certaine faon salvateur, car il reprsente une ventuelle remise de peine ; pour la victime, il ne relve que de limpossibilit ou du sacrifice ... Nous, les rescaps, sentons souvent que le tueur a le sentiment de sabaisser en demandant pardon, le dire est donc moins investissant pour lui. Or il ne peut tre question dinverser les rles: le tueur ne me rend pas service en me formulant une telle demande, il ne maccorde rien ... Et puis le pardon, tu sais, ce nest pas lobsession dun rescap. Un pardon en change de 274 vies. Rien qu cette phrase, tu ralises labsurdit de la mise en balance ... Aussi, au bout de ma pense, voil ce quoi je suis parvenue : parlons de rconciliation, ventuellement, mais laissons tomber le pardon ... Parce que se rconcilier, ce nest pas pardonner. (Mujawayo and Belhaddad, 2006: 12530)
Paradoxically, under the current climate of mandatory reconciliation, while the perpetrators are encouraged to testify and are rewarded for admitting their crimes, the survivors are encouraged to listen and to endure the revelations made by perpetrators, and to keep the stories of their ongoing struggle to themselves except during commemoration events. What is at stake here for many survivors is the refusal to die a second time by being socially smothered and seeing that behind the official claim that the era of impunity is over, the new era is not immune to selective forms of amnesia and deafness when it comes to their needs and claims. Equally crucial for the survivors is the social and political response to their desire to be heard when bearing witness. The progressive ability to overcome the memory of having been forced to behave in a shameful and inhuman manner in order to survive can only be achieved if there is a non-alienating dynamic between their personal memories and the official memory that is currently shaped in Rwanda and in the diaspora. Even if one can understand the economic and political pragmatism motivating this approach focused on long-term policy, it is important to notice that the current political injunction to turn the page and mute any claim for a special status for survivors will ultimately disenfranchise many of them. Especially affected by this exhortation to look forward are the survivors who found themselves orphaned from their former social network and unable to rebuild a sense of belonging and empowerment. A society that denies the needs generated by a traumatic past and refuses a
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specific status for the survivors needs can only produce a ticking bomb that might be dangerous in the long term. But dangerous for whom? For the survivors without any doubt. For the current government and the majority of Rwandans it may be a risk worth taking, since the number of survivors unwilling or unable to embrace the politics of reconciliation represent a very small minority within the new demographic landscape of Rwanda. But is this a sufficient reason to leave so many who went through the abyss on the margins of tomorrows Rwanda? This is the challenging question that Esther Mujawayos testimonial dialogue with Soud Belhaddad raises as they bear witness to Mujawayos quest to find her sisters remains, and to the multiple ways survivors seek to face their trauma and negotiate its personal and social resonance. Through her dialogic and polyphonic art of witnessing, Mujawayo not only offers a memorial to Stphanie and a voice to many survivors, but she reminds us that to bury the dead is to honour them through the dialogues they generate among the living. Postface dEsther Mujawayo Cher Alex, merci beaucoup de me donner loccasion de rebondir par rapport ton article. Je te remercie parce que ta proposition de me donner le dernier mot mme sil nest pas celui de la fin relve dun respect et dune honntet intellectuelle que nous ne rencontrons pas souvent. En effet tu pouvais faire ton analyse de mes tmoignages sans devoir massocier. En dcidant daller au-del de lanalyse intellectuelle, fruit du professeur que tu es, tu redeviens trs simplement homme, humain. Ceci est trs important pour moi parce que sil y a une chose qui ma marque durant le gnocide, cest cette perte de lhumain, de lhumanit aussi bien chez les tueurs que chez leurs victimes. En effet, les tueurs ont dabord tu en eux lhumain, la conscience qui pouvait les gner dans leur travail, tandis que les victimes Tutsi taient de toute faon des insectes, des serpents dont il fallait se dbarrasser. Je suis aussi profondment touche par la finesse avec laquelle tu as capt la solitude et la violence intrieure dans laquelle se trouvent les survivants. Une solitude parce quil est impossible de partager, de dire lhorreur qui habite chacun de nous, impossible parce que cest trop horrible et que celui qui nous coute la tlcommande et peut arrter la cassette lorsque a devient insoutenable, tandis que les survivants ont perdu la tlcommande. Le film tourne en boucle, et mme lorsque lcoutant ncoute plus, chez le rescap, la cassette tourne encore. Le film se droule sans fin. Et les images comme les sons ou les odeurs sont dune violence inoue. Violence relle qui ne peut tre dite, hurle ; la haine du bourreau, du violeur qui ne peut tre exprime et qui en fin de compte se retourne contre le rescap.
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Le silence, la biensance, la peur de gner, la peur de se faire remarquer, dtre toujours celle qui est diffrente, lempcheuse de tourner en rond alors on enterre en soi toute cette violence, tout ce non dit impossible dire parce que sans lieu propice pour le dire! Et cest ainsi que nos ventres clatent, les maux de dos, de tte, de partout que lon ne sait pas expliquer. Ensuite, comme tu las soulign, il y a cette ncessit de trouver les corps des ntres pour leur donner une spulture digne. Le soulagement du rescap qui enfin peut tirer les siens des toilettes, des excrments. Leur rendre leur humanit au moins dans la mort. Mais aussi librer nos corps qui sont devenus les cimetires de tous ceux non enterrs. La paix, le relchement, la possibilit enfin de faire son deuil. Je voulais te dire dans cette postface que finalement, aprs notre livre La Fleur de Stphanie qui devenait sa spulture symbolique, nous avons eu la chance, mes surs et moi, de finalement trouver lendroit o ils avaient t jets! Comme le tueur repenti, Pierre, le disait tout le temps, ils avaient bien t jets dans les toilettes chez Pascal. Ctait bien vrai, ils taient l. Nous les avons reconnus grce la fameuse carte didentit qui tait tellement importante que nous la faisions plastifie. Oui, nous avons retrouv, avec les restes des corps quon a remonts, un petit sac en simili cuir appartenant Stphanie, il y avait un reste de bible, un livre de cantiques et la fameuse carte didentit, elle tait encore lisible, son nom et celui des parents! Comme tu le dis dans ton texte, au moins les gacaca auront servi cela, au moins la fin des fins mais avec quelle patience mon Dieu il arrive quun miracle se produise, on retrouve les siens. Stphanie, ses enfants et ses voisines reposent actuellement Gisozi avec les milliers dautres victimes, jamais, mais au moins comme des humains, pas comme des dchets! Je ne sais dailleurs pas qui se repose? Eux ou bien plutt nous? Nous qui avons enfin trouv repos face la tourmente de lme, qui avons surmont la culpabilit de ne pas avoir accompli le dernier des rituels accords tout tre humain, mais encore combien plus important, celui accord ceux qui te sont/ttaient si chers! Pour au moins cela, nous sommes prts nous retenir, rester polis, dans les gacaca, parce que peut-tre nous saurons, comme jai pu savoir, o sont les ntres afin de les enterrer dignement! Toutefois, comme tu las si bien saisi et dit aussi, puisquon demande trop au rescap, pourquoi ne pas lui reconnatre aussi le minimum de ses droits? Sil y avait un fonds de compensation et pas seulement un fond dassistance pour les plus ncessiteux mme si nous reconnaissons que ceci est dj un grand pas le rescap pourrait au moins se remettre debout, soigner ses blessures physiques. Aujourdhui encore, il y a beaucoup de rescaps qui vivent avec des handicaps physiques qui vont en empirant. Si ceux-ci ne sont pas soigns, cest souvent parce quil faut recourir des chirurgies complexes ltranger. Heureusement, que la trithrapie
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contre le VIH sida est maintenant disponible, mais combien de femmes et de filles infectes via le viol systmatique des femmes tutsies sont dj mortes ... Rappelez-vous, le livre SurVivantes est ddi Daphrosa, jeune fille viole 14 ans et qui mourut 19 ans faute de mdicaments pendant que ceux accuss de viol Arusha et malades du sida taient eux soigns aux frais de lONU!!! Au regard de ce qui nous est arriv, nous ne demandons pas limpossible, juste savoir o ont t jets les ntres pour que nous puissions les enterrer dignement et ainsi faire notre deuil, avoir la possibilit de soigner nos blessures/maladies physiques, avoir un toit au-dessus de nos ttes. Ce minimum synonyme dune vie normale en somme, sincrement, est-ce trop demander? Merci beaucoup Alex de mavoir donn loccasion de continuer le dialogue avec toi, et en mme temps avec les lecteurs de ton article, merci davoir donn encore une fois une voix, un visage aux ntres. Les morts ne sont pas morts. Ils meurent seulement lorsquil ny a plus personne pour se souvenir deux. Mais je me souviens, tu te souviens, nous nous souvenons, vous vous souviendrez, ils vivent! Notes
1. In Paroles suffoques (1998) Sarah Kofman, through a discussion of Antelme, Blanchot and Levinas, exposes the trauma of having outlived her father and survived the Holocaust, until she committed suicide in 1995. 2. For a cinematic approach of the issues raised by these works, see Gilbert Ndahayos remarkable film entitled Behind this Convent (2008).
References
Belhaddad, Soud (2007) Dire est impossible, in Jean Mouttapa (ed.), Rwanda. Pour un dialogue des mmoires, pp. 16579. Paris: Albin Michel. Caruth, Cathy (1996) Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Chambers, Ross (2004) Untimely Interventions. AIDS Writing, Testimonial, and the Rhetoric of Haunting. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong (2002) Unbearable Witness: Toward a Politics of Listening, in Nancy K. Miller and Jason Tougaw (eds), Extremities. Trauma Testimony and Community, pp. 14365. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Coquio, Catherine (2004) Rwanda: le rel et les rcits. Paris: Belin. Derrida, Jacques (2000 [1998]) Demeure: Fiction and Testimony, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Felman, Shoshana and Laub, Dori (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. New York: Routledge. Hatzfeld, Jean (2000) Dans le nu de la vie. Rcits des marais rwandais. Paris: Seuil. Hatzfeld, Jean (2003) Une saison de machettes. Paris: Seuil. Hatzfeld, Jean (2007a) La Stratgie des antilopes. Paris: Seuil.
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Hatzfeld, Jean (2007b) LImpasse: Interview of Jean Hatzfeld by Pierre Michel, Actualit Livres Evene.fr, available at: www.evene.fr/livres/actualite/interview-jean-hatzfeldstrategie-antilopes-977.php (accessed 30 December 2008). Kofman, Sarah (1998 [1987]) Smothered Words, trans. Madeleine Dobie. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Mujawayo, Esther and Belhaddad, Soud (2004) SurVivantes: Rwanda, dix ans aprs le gnocide. Paris: ditions de lAube. Mujawayo, Esther and Belhaddad, Soud (2006) La Fleur de Stphanie. Rwanda entre rconciliation et dni. Paris: Flammarion. Mukagasana, Yolande (1997) La Mort ne veut pas de moi. Paris: Fixot. Mukagasana, Yolande (1999) Naie pas peur de savoir. Paris: Robert Laffont. Mukagasana, Yolande (2001) Les Blessures du silence. Tmoignages du gnocide au Rwanda, photographes by Alain Kazinierakis. Arles: Actes Sud and Mdecins sans Frontires. Tal, Kal (1996) Worlds of Hurt. Reading the Literature of Trauma. New York: Cambridge University Press. Weine, Stevan (2006) Testimony after Catastrophe. Narrating the Traumas of Political Violence. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Alexandre Dauge-Roth is Professor of French and Francophone Studies, Bates College. Address for correspondence: Department of Romance Languages, Bates College, Lewiston, MA 04240, USA [email: adaugero@bates.edu]

French Cultural Studies: Testimonial Encounter: Esther Mujawayo's Dialogic Art of Witnessing

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