AEGIS ECAS 2007 - View abstract

Panel	13. Memory and Heritage in Post-conflict Societies
Paper ID	493
Author(s)	Kopf, Martina
Paper	View paper (PDF)
Abstract	In this paper, I want to discuss the importance of creative responses to massive violence and trauma with regard to the project “Rwanda – Ecrire par devoir de mémoire” – “Writing in Duty to Memory.” Situated at the interface of socio-political and artistic commitment the project arose a lot of debates about the possibilities, limits and the legitimation of creative writing as a means to approach and transmit the memory of the genocide as well as about the literary quality of the texts that originated from the project. Contrary to the argument, the unrepresentable weight of facts forbids imaginative approaches, I argue here that it demands creative responses. The literary text, when striving for the exploration and representation of traumatic experience, shifts the focus from the identification with reality to the way of how to tell it, to the very forms and means of transmission. In a first step I will concentrate upon the role of art as a form of empathic witnessing. One of the main characteristics of trauma is its resistance to narrative representation. The desire to tell is opposed by the absence of language and meaning the traumatic incident originally provokes. Narrating a trauma therefore constitutes a highly complex process marked by the paradoxical relationship between language, memory, and trauma. In this communicative process active listening and witnessing are of as much importance as the act of narrating itself. This factor is often neglected when it comes to the question of collective trauma work. Yet, as I will argue here, it is also significant for the reception of literature and art that deal with traumatic experience, as well as for acknowledging their specific contribution to the integration and transformation of traumatic memory. Parting from Geoffrey Hartman’s concept of the intellectual witness I then want to explore and compare the narrative strategies and techniques the writers chose in their efforts to meet what the Nigerian writer and Nobel-prize winner Wole Soyinka calls “the burden of memory” in his same-titled essay. While the novels “Murambi – le livre des ossements” of Boris Boubacar Diop as well as “La phalène des colines” of Koulsy Lamko for example widely stay within a perpetrator-victim-dichotomy that allows for easy identification from the part of the reader, Tierno Monénembo draws with his “L’ainé des orphelins” a rather disturbing character – a fifteen year old boy waiting for his execution in one of the overcrowded prisons of post-conflict Rwanda, who reveals himself as a survivor of the genocide only in the end of the novel, leaving the reader uneasy not only about the moral placement of the principal figure of identification, but destabilising the conceptual premises of such a positioning. Taking into consideration reactions to and the reception of the project “Rwanda – Ecrire par devoir de mémoire” I want to discuss its contribution to create a memory of the genocide.

Writing and reading literature as form of empathic witnessing - the example of the "Writing in Duty to Memory"-Project