Rwanda's bones

Boundary 2

Volumn 36, Issue 2, 2009, Pages 155-175

  Guyer, Sara ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

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EID: 68649098038     PISSN: 01903659     EISSN: 15272141     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/01903659-2009-009     Document Type: Review

References (39)

1. There are many salient examples of this logic. For example, after a long montage of archival footage, which culminates in an unmarked segment drawn from Wanda Jakubowska's fictional film Ostatni Etap (The Last Stop, 1948), the film shifts to vibrant color, and the camera follows the tracks on which a train once coursed to arrive at Auschwitz. The voiceover says: "Aujourd'hui sur la même voie, il fait jour et soleil. On la parcourt lentement, à la recherche du quoi? De la trace des cadavres qui ścroulaient dés l'ouverture des portes?" I discuss Resnais's film (and Paul Celan's translation of the film text into German) in greater length in the penultimate chapter of my Romanticism After Auschwitz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007).
2. The phrase "remnants of Auschwitz" (Quel che resta di Auschwitz) is Giorgio Agamben's. See Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999).
3. Maurice Blanchot, among others, calls attention to the literal meaning of the word holocaust as sacrificial burning: "The holocaust, the absolute event of history-which is a date in history-that utter-burn where all history took fire, where the movement of Meaning was swallowed up, where the gift, which knows nothing of forgiving or consent, shattered without giving place to anything that can be affirmed, that can be denied-gift of very passivity, gift of what cannot be given." See Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 47.
4. One of the many lines of thought evident in this passage concerns the impossibility of denying the Holocaust-whatever the status of evidence. It cannot be denied, because it also cannot be affirmed. Another version of "seeing nothing" resonates in the open dialogue between the male and female interlocutors in Duras and Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour: "LUI: Tu n'as rien vu à Hiroshima. Rien." See Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima, Mon Amour: Scénario et Dialogue (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 22.
5. For an account of "sublime negative knowledge" (knowing that you do not - or did not - know, seeing that you do not - or did not - see), the turn from blindness to freedom that takes this insight as its source, and the unmaintainability of this new stance, see Paul de Man, "The Rhetoric of Temporality," in particular, his reading of William Wordsworth's lyrical ballad "A slumber did my spirit seal."
6. See Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 2nd rev. ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 223-265
7. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 122.
8. There are many other examples of this structure, which recurs in discussions of post-Holocaust testimony. See, in addition to the texts that I mention above, the work of Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman, and Dori Laub. See also Jacques Derrida's Demeure: Fiction and Testimony
9. and Charlotte Delbo's trilogy Auschwitz and After. The epigraph to the first volume of Delbo's trilogy (None of Us Will Return) reads "Today, I am not sure that what I wrote is true. I am certain it is truthful."
10. Andrew Blum, "Searching for Answers, and Discovering That There Are None," New York Times, May 5, 2005.
11. Subsequent quotations from Blum come from this article. See also Philip Gourevitch, "Among the Dead," excerpts from We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, in Disturbing Remains: Memory, History, and Crisis in the Twentieth Century, by Michael S. Roth and Charles G. Salas (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001).
12. Although Gourevitch focuses on Nyarubuye, rather than Nyamata, on which I will focus, his account of the memorial - which includes many of the same strategies and components - offers some of the most thoughtful insight into how these memorials function and how very uncomfortable they are. In addition, see Clea Koff's description of the church at Ntarama, in The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo (New York: Random House, 2004): "There was a large outdoor area where platforms were lined up under a tarp canopy. The platforms were covered in dry bones collected from the surrounding area. The bones were organized by type - all limbs together, all skulls lined up together, as one sees in photographs from Cambodia" (88).
13. For photographs of Nyarubuye, Nyamata, and a third church memorial, Ntarama, see Simon Norfolk's photographs in the section entitled "Rwanda: The Atrocity Exhibition," collected in For Most of It I Have No Words: Genocide, Landscape, Memory (Stockport, UK: Dewi Lewis Publishing, 1998).
14. Some similar observations could be made about the Choeung Ek and Tuol Sleng genocide memorials in Cambodia. For an excellent discussion of those memorials, which he calls "unmediated sites," see Paul Williams, "Witnessing Genocide: Vigilance and Remembrance at Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek," Holocaust and Genocide Studies 18, no.2 (Fall 2004): 234-54. Williams considers the Cambodian memorials (and the tourist experience that they occasion) in their difference from Holocaust memorials in Europe, the United States, and Israel. He writes, "That the study of memorials has been focused on those related to the Holocaust reflects, of course, their number, variety, and importance in Western nations. But if the discourse on Holocaust memorials is concerned with the relationship between the mass killing and the retention of memory through built forms, an analysis of unmediated sites such as Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek is invaluable for the insights it can offer" (235; my emphasis). I wish to suggest, however, that even if they are made of actual human remains, in order for these sites to function as memorials to genocide they cannot be unmediated. Williams does not refer to the Rwandan memorials in his essay.
15. See Claudine Vidal, "Les Commémorations du Génocide au Rwanda," Les Temps Modernes 613 (March-April-May 2001): 1-46: "Les anciens Rwandais, s'ils ne fétichisaient en aucune façon la dépouille de leurs morts, ne les oubliaient pas pour autant. Le nom des parents disparus était conserve par le culte des ancêtres, dont le procédures conservaient la mémoire des liens géné alogiques entre les défunts et les vivants" (16).
16. Susanne Buckley-Zistel recalls the statement of a young (presumably Hutu) woman in the Nyamata region: "We cannot identify the people they put into the memorial sites. They took all bones. And no particular ethnicity died, all Hutu and Tutsi died. The problem is when they remember, they remember only Tutsi, while during the war RPF killed many Hutu, so they should remember also our people who died during that period." See Susanne Buckley-Zistel, "Remembering to Forget: Chosen Amnesia as a Strategy for Local Coexistence in Post-Genocidal Rwanda," Africa 76, no.2 (2006): 138.
17. See Susan Cook, "The Politics of Preservation in Rwanda," in Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda: New Perspectives, ed. Susan E. Cook (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 2006), 281-99.
18. Filip Reyntjens, "Rwanda Ten Years On: From Genocide to Dictatorship," African Affairs 103 (2004): 193.
19. Reyntjens, "Rwanda Ten Years On," 199.
20. This silence is evident in the titles of two books of photography: Giles Peress, The Silence-Rwanda (Zurich: Scalo Publishers, 1995);
21. and Norfolk, For Most of It I Have No Words. See also Cook's description of her visit to Murambi: "As visitors, as foreigners, and as witnesses to the carnage that had taken place there, we felt compelled to be silent, to allow our gaze to fall on each individual body, and to pause for several moments in each room" (Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda, 288).
22. Scott Straus, The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Rwanda (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 243-244
23. On memorials, see, above all, James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994).
24. On testimony and witnessing, see Blanchot, Agamben, Derrida, Caruth, and Felman, cited above. See also Jean-François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. George van den Abeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). For a rather different set of ethical and political questions pertaining to the preservation and presentation of bones, consider the example of the 1990 Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) in the United States.
25. For fine accounts of Rwandans responses to the memorials, see Cook, Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda; and Vidal, "Les Commémorations du Génocide au Rwanda." I visited Nyamata, Ntarama, and Murambi - as well as several other memorials - and the construction site that was Gisozi in July 2002. Over the past five years, the sites have continued to change, both intentionally (through acts of NGOs and others especially concerned to honor the tenth anniversary of the genocide in 2004) and unintentionally (they are frozen in time but also continue to decay). I have not visited Nyarubuye.
26. Gourevitch, "Among the Dead," 70.
27. Many survivors have detailed the acts of dismemberment that occurred during the genocide. For particularly vivid descriptions, see Jean Hatzfeld, Dans le nu de la vie: Récits des marias rwandaise (Paris: Seuil, 1993). Gourevitch also notes that even the statues at Nyarubuye were decapitated, and Norfolk includes a photograph that he calls "A boy's legs pushed into a vase," which represents the bones of a child forced - with flowers - into a tin box. Norfolk explains that this was a way of enacting the imperative to drown all the Tutsi in the Nile (the area from which, according to the racial theory behind the genocide, the Tutsi are said to have come). In the absence of the Nile - or another body of water - the flowerpot stands in. On the facing page, Norfolk places a photograph of a prosthetic leg, troubling the difference between bones and other remains.
28. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1992), 9-11.
29. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families (New York: Picador USA, 1999), 15-16.
30. Aidan Hartley, The Zanzibar Chest: A Story of Life, Love, and Death in Foreign Lands (New York: Grove/Atlantic, 2004), 369.
31. See also Koff's description of the stench of Rwanda's mass graves in The Bone Woman, 51 and 54.
32. Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You, 19.
33. Here again, it may be worth comparing the Rwandan genocide memorials to those in Cambodia. See Rachel Hughes, "Memory and Sovereignty in Post-1979 Cambodia: Choeung Ek and Local Genocide Memorials," in Cook, Genocide in Cambodia and Rwanda, 257-80. The monument at the Choeung Ek Center for Genocide Crimes, just outside of Phnom Penh, evokes a traditional Buddhist stupa, a sacred structure that holds the remains of the dead. The centerpiece of the memorial is a display of the uncremated remains of the unknown dead, rather than, as would typically be the case, the body of a well-known, usually revered, individual. The resonance with Nyamata is obvious. However, the memorials differ in their intentions. Nyamata leaves a massacre site intact, whereas Choeung Ek is a highly self-conscious, architecturally driven project. As Hughes describes, "Lim Ourk was employed to design a new memorial stupa for Choeung Ek. He drew three possible designs for the site, inspired by the sublime architectural forms of the Royal Palace of Cambodia in Phnom Penh. . . . The Choeung Ek Memorial is an inescapably postmodern monument. Although it draws on a number of traditional religious architectural forms, these forms are transformed under a thoroughly late-twentieth century dilemma: how to memorialize a genocide. The total monument is an assemblage of multiple cultural forms, and is disturbing to both Cambodians and non-Cambodians, if in different ways" (262).
34. See also Williams, "Witnessing Genocide," 240-241, for a description of the use of anonymous skulls in the memorial.
35. Gourevitch's account of stepping on a skull stands as an allegory for the impossibility of good conscience. He writes, "We went on through the first room [at Nyarubuye] and out the far side. There was another room and another and another and another. They were all full of bodies, and more bodies were scattered in the grass, and there were stray skulls in the grass, which was thick and wonderfully green. Standing outside there, I heard a crunch. The old Canadian colonel stumbled in front of me, and I saw, though he did not notice, that his foot had rolled on a skull and broken it. For the first time at Nyarubuye my feelings focused, and what I felt was a small but keen anger at this man. Then I heard another crunch and felt a vibration underfoot. I had stepped on one, too" ("Among the Dead," 66).
36. See Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, "George Segal: The Holocaust, 1984," ArtForum 37, no.6 (February 1999): 78-79.
37. For another account of the inability to remember that which we have never known and a critique of this imperative to remember - in lieu of an imperative to imagine, see Amy Hungerford, The Holocaust of Texts: Genocide, Literature, and Personification (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
38. Cook, "The Politics of Preservation in Rwanda," 287-288
39. See Scott Straus, "Contested Meanings and Conflicting Imperatives: A Conceptual Analysis of Genocide," Journal of Genocide Research 3, no.3 (2001): 349-75. Straus writes, "For establishing a working definition of genocide, I would suggest that Chalk and Johanssohn's formulation be modified to annihilation of a 'group that a perpetrator constitutes as an organic collectivity.' Organic collectivity indicates that a group is seen as a natural, interconnected unit with reproductive capacity and biological qualities. When a perpetrator claims a group has a genetic kinship, or racial basis, that group is being constituted as an organic collectivity" (366).