Reifying, Reinscribing, and Resisting Manicheanisms in Representations of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda
Lauren van der Rede | Stellenbosch University
Publication: Volume 5 Issue 3
Abstract | The genocide which unfolded in Rwanda in 1994 remains one of the most harrowing examples of annihilatory violence in recent memory. It is framed infamously as an expression of violence which in 100 days saw the murder of approximately one million people, the displacement of millions more, and psychological, social, and economic devastation that remains immeasurable. This paper seeks to explore how the literary makes legible the ways in which Manicheanism, which in many ways was foundational to the genocide in Rwanda, is translated into the categories of “perpetrator” and “victim,” and how this contributes to the perpetuation of the single story of the genocide. This paper reads three texts (Uwem Akpan’s short story “My Parents’ Bedroom,” Alan Whelan, Eoghan Rice, and Elena Hermosa’s documentary Let the Devil Sleep: 20 Years after Genocide in Rwanda, and Hugo Blick’s Netflix series Black Earth Rising) which literarily trope the Rwandan Genocide and abide by a logic of Manicheanism according to which the world can be split between good and evil, and its inhabitants organized accordingly. The selected texts gesture toward the unboundedness of trauma but abide by the logic of Manicheanism that textured the colonial legacy in Rwanda, which was in many ways foundational to the genocide. They are distinct in form but individually stage and make available for critique expressions of Manicheanism, before, during, and well after the massacres of 1994. This paper offers a critique of these texts’ literarily troping of the Rwandan Genocide and argues, in abiding by the unboundedness of trauma as it is staged in these texts, that genocide be read as, what Barthes calls, a text. Thus, the paper, in turning to the literary as itself a mode of reading but also a mode of writing grand narratives, attempts to think what is at stake in representations that reify and reinscribe, but also invite resistance to representations that do not abide by plurality.
Key words | Rwandan Genocide, Colonialism, Tutsi, Hutu, Twa, Victims, Perpetrators, Manicheanism, Mahmood Mamdani, Roland Barthes, “My Parents’ Bedroom,” Uwem Akpan, Say You’re One of Them, Let the Devil Sleep: Rwanda 20 Years after Genocide, Black Earth Rising
Lauren van der Rede (lvdr@sun.ac.za) is a lecturer in the Department of English at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Her research explores the intersection of annihilatory violence, literary and cultural studies, and psychoanalysis in relation to the question of memory, from and through the African context. She received her PhD from the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, where she was also a Next Generation Researcher based at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR). Her doctoral dissertation is titled The post-genocidal condition: Ghosts of genocide, genocidal violence, and representation (2018).
MLA Citation for this Article:
Rede, Lauren van der. “Reifying, Reinscribing, and Resisting Manicheanisms in Representations of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda.” Language, Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies, vol. 5, no. 3, 20 May 2023, pp. 61–81, https://ellids.com/archives/2023/05/5.3-Rede.pdf.