Art from Trauma: Genocide and Healing beyond Rwanda

by Rangira Béa Gallimore (Editor), Gerise Herndon (Editor), Patricia Anne Simpson (Foreword by)

Overview

What is the role of aesthetic expression in responding to discrimination, tragedy, violence, even genocide? How does gender shape responses to both literal and structural violence, including implicit linguistic, familial, and cultural violence? How might writing or other works of art contribute to healing? Art from Trauma: Genocide and Healing beyond Rwanda explores the possibility of art as therapeutic, capable of implementation by mental health practitioners crafting mental health policy in Rwanda.

This anthology of scholarly, personal, and hybrid essays was inspired by scholar and activist Chantal Kalisa (1965–2015). At the commemoration of the nineteenth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, organized by the Rwandan Embassy in Washington DC, Kalisa gave a presentation, “Who Speaks for the Survivors of the Genocide against Tutsi?” Kalisa devoted her energy to giving expression to those whose voices had been distorted or silenced. The essays in this anthology address how the production and experience of visual, dramatic, cinematic, and musical arts, in addition to literary arts, contribute to healing from the trauma of mass violence, offering preliminary responses to questions like Kalisa’s and honoring her by continuing the dialogue in which she participated with such passion, sharing the work of scholars and colleagues in genocide studies, gender studies, and francophone literatures.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781496215796
Publisher:	Nebraska
Publication date:	08/01/2019
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	276
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Rangira Béa Gallimore is an associate professor emerita of French at the University of Missouri. She is the coeditor of a book in French on the Rwandan genocide. Gerise Herndon is a professor of English and chair of gender studies at Nebraska Wesleyan University. She is coeditor, with Sarah Barbour, of Emerging Perspectives on Maryse Condé: A Writer of Her Own.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Baby Steps

Margaret Jacobs

I was rushing down the pasta aisle at five in the evening at Leon's, a small neighborhood grocery store in Lincoln, Nebraska, when I ran into Chantal Kalisa. I had met her recently at a Women's and Gender Studies program faculty event at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, but we hadn't had a chance to talk. After the usual day of hurrying from classes to meetings to more classes, I was trying to grab something quick for dinner before heading home to my hungry third-grade and sixth-grade boys. Chantal strolled along the aisle, her newborn, Jacob, lashed to her chest in a bright African wrap as she pushed her cart. She smiled warmly. I tossed some linguine into my basket and stopped to chat. Chantal slowed me down and brought me back to what is important — children, friendship, food.

In the next year or two Chantal and I started co-chairing a new group, Transnational Feminism. Soon we were meeting to share lunch or coffee. As we both careened into midlife and realized we lived just a half mile from one another, we made dates to walk in our tree-canopied neighborhood. Over the years and the miles, we shared our intellectual pursuits and passions and our daily triumphs and tribulations. One minute we talked of our favorite movie stars (Mads Mikkelsen, Denzel Washington) and the next we pondered truth and reconciliation after genocide. We texted feverishly about our favorite contestants on The Voice, and one winter we tried to see all the Oscar-nominated films (but only made it to The Descendants and The Artist). Chantal and her familycame to our house for Thanksgiving feasts and summer dinners in the backyard. We celebrated graduations of her nieces and nephews at her home, a large circle of us dancing in her living room. We turned to each other whenever we needed help — with workplace conflicts, with parenting, with our health, with writing blocks, with intellectual conundrums.

One day I was particularly upset about something; I don't even remember what. Chantal and I were walking through the gardens of Antelope Valley Park. Suddenly she asked, "Have you seen What about Bob?" No, I hadn't. "It's my favorite movie," she continued. A friend had recommended it to her, and she had watched it many times. But Chantal, I thought, I am upset about X. Why are you talking about a movie?

"It's so funny," Chantal went on. "Bill Murray plays this guy named Bob who goes to see this psychologist. He feels like he's finally made a breakthrough, but his psychologist goes on vacation, and Bob doesn't know how he will cope. So Bob shows up at the psychologist's lakeside cottage and becomes good friends with the psychologist's family. It drives the psychologist mad! It is so hilarious! You should watch it." Okay, I thought, was Chantal trying to tell me I was like Bob and she was the psychologist? Or was I the psychologist who was letting a Bob in my life get to me?

"Anyway," she said, "the psychologist gives Bob this advice. He even writes a book on it. And whenever I am having trouble, I always think of it." Yes? I waited eagerly. "Baby steps," Chantal declared. Huh, I thought. "Baby steps," she repeated. Chantal's words slowly sank in.

Maybe our problems seem insurmountable. Perhaps we have aspirations that cannot be achieved in a morning, a week, a month, a year, or even a lifetime. Maybe there are some mysteries we can never fully comprehend. Still, we stand up, we let go of the safe and familiar — if only for an instant — and we toddle forward. We might only take a few steps before we fall, but we eventually get up and walk again. Baby steps.

For a while "baby steps" became a kind of coded ritual between Chantal and me. Passing each other on campus with no time to stop and talk, one of us would mouth "baby steps." She might lean over and whisper "baby steps" at a meeting. We might both blurt out "baby steps" at the same time as we discussed a challenging situation. It became a small gesture of recognition and care — I see your pain, I see your difficulty. But I also see your strength and power. It helped to ease tense moments, slow us down, and bring us back to what was important.

The world is overwhelming. Life can seem impossible. The Hutu murdered hundreds of thousands of Tutsi, including a large part of your family. How do you ever heal from this? Baby steps. A dear friend, a beloved mother, sister, niece dies just a few days after her fiftieth birthday. How can you go on? Baby steps.

CHAPTER 2

Speaking Nearby Genocide

Gerise Herndon

"Who speaks for the survivors of the genocide against the Tutsi, the Rwandan Tutsi, in particular?" With this question Chantal Kalisa began her remarks at the Nineteenth National Commemoration of the Genocide against Tutsi in Washington DC. After posing the question, Kalisa then questions the question:

Are we saying, "Who actually speaks for the survivors?" or "Who speaks on behalf of survivors?"

"Who speaks for the survivors but shouldn't?"

"Who does not speak but should?"

"Who does not speak, but couldn't?"

"Whose voice is not allowed to come out?

Chantal demonstrates that the dominant voices about the genocide against Tutsi adopt the worldview articulated in Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" (1899). They assume that "the problems are over there [the colonized countries]; the solutions are from here [the United States or the West]."

Kalisa notes how screen images produced and endlessly repeated from this colonial ideology shape the master narrative about the genocide of Tutsi; such spectacles thus curtail the survivors' ability to create their own stories from the outset:

The first knowledge of the story of genocide against Tutsi is produced through images, television, photography, and the cinema. ... These journalists' camera lenses, both physically and figuratively, are still the dominant sources of knowledge about the genocide. In one of the most quoted images, the stream of Rwandan refugees, Hutus fleeing to Congo while the killing of the Tutsi is still going on, are trying to exit Rwanda before the forces of the Rwandan Patriotic Front take over the country. We see people who are absolutely not victims of the genocide of Tutsi, and yet that image is what we remember.

Years later we see a headline in a U.S. newspaper, "A survivor of the Rwandan genocide graduates from high school in the U.S. in the year 2000." Then we find out that this student who fled to Congo was part of that stream of refugees hijacking the story of the genocide of Rwandan Tutsi. It's not the student's fault. I'm happy for the accomplishment of this young person. But it's not the knowledge of the genocide of 1994 that we, as survivors, as Rwandans who lost people, want to dominate the story.

In urging scholars to unravel the net of colonial ideology that has constrained historiography and knowledge about places like Rwanda, Kalisa helps to make space for the voices on the periphery to emerge and grow stronger. How do allies avoid entanglement in the white man's burden? Should non-Rwandans simply remain silent and get out of the way?

"I do not intend to speak about. Just speak nearby." These words from the Vietnamese American director and writer Trinh T. Minh-ha's experimental film Reassemblage reflect a meditation on troubling assumptions by international aid workers, anthropologists, and documentarians. In the early minutes of the film the voiceover asks,

"A film about what?"

The same voice, Trinh's, responds, "On Sénégal."

The voiceover replies, "But what in Sénégal?"

I adapt the lines from the voiceover to ask, "What about Rwanda?" and to respond, "I do not intend to speak about. Just speak nearby."

As a white woman from southern Missouri whose family never experienced war or state-sponsored violence, as a U.S. citizen so caught up in the O. J. Simpson trial in 1994 that I barely remember National Public Radio's coverage of the genocide against the Tutsi, what can I say about the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda? What could I possibly say about the killing of a million people in one hundred days simply because of their perceived (and partially constructed through colonial intervention) ethnicity? Given the countless foreigners who visit Rwanda to feel virtuous about their charity work or to consume some research for their own careers, what right does anyone who is not Rwandan have to write about Rwanda?

Chantal Kalisa's premonitory question "Who speaks for survivors?" serves as a guide to educators who teach what they are not and scholars who research where they are not. Before the publication of Toxic Charity in 2011, before Teju Cole's famous 2012 article on the "White Savior Industrial Complex," in June 2009 Kalisa was teaching Nebraskans to think critically about study and research abroad, especially in the context of a country where international aid organizations have used the genocide to enhance their image as rescuers.

In preparing students for listening to the testimonials of survivors, Kalisa urged us to ask questions "as opposed to formulating conclusions":

People are bound to ask, "Is there anything we can do, maybe we can go home and raise money?" But the idea I espouse is that, once you get into a conversation, that's already enough. ... You don't have to take the burden. There are a lot of people living there, especially the survivors of genocide, whose suffering you can never erase. We can't ignore what's going on, but we also can't go there and try to solve problems. ...

Through a dialogue you can be transformed, and these conversations should be about transforming both sides. ... For some of the survivors, all they want to do is talk. They don't expect us to solve anything. They just want to be heard, instead of just talking in their own heads.

Kalisa's first question to students interested in Rwanda asked us to expose ourselves to scrutiny: "What are your motivations?" Although Kalisa knew that our first reactions would be pity and the impulse to try to do something in response to the pain of others, she calmly and matter-of-factly advised us not to go to Rwanda with the intention of saving, fixing, or even helping survivors. She encouraged us to listen and exchange stories. A dialogue could inspire change in both Rwandan hosts and in U.S. visitors.

Kalisa educated us about the history and realities, both uncomfortable and impressive, of Rwanda, especially the history of U.S. (non)involvement. Mindful of the ethics of intercultural relationships, she prepared us by emphasizing sensitive, respectful, empathetic listening to and learning from Rwandans. It never occurred to us to imagine Rwandans as less fortunate or in need of saving. Kalisa also asked, "Whom might your research hurt?" Two campaigns by non-Africans — feminists working against female genital cutting in the 1980s and the Kony 2012 project — showed the weakness of the assumption that doing something is better than doing nothing. Activists in international contexts would be better served by collaborating with locals on what matters most to the local community. Transnational solidarity must be attentive to nuances and differences within cultures to avoid, as much as possible, doing harm. Unfortunately the attempt to save cultures from themselves ends up being lost in translation.

To Kalisa's interrogation of dominant voices, I would add Gayatri Spivak's question: "Can the subaltern speak?" While Spivak concludes that the history of colonialism makes it impossible for the subaltern to be heard, her argument cannot apply to genocide survivors if they are to go on living. Having begun listening in 2009, I have come to imagine a space for myself in the interstice of speaking about and speaking for, between objective distance and subjective imagination. Describing her indirect approach as a filmmaker, Trinh describes speaking nearby as "speaking that reflects on itself and can come very close to the subject without seizing it or claiming it ... a layered play between political discourse and poetic language." Political discourse may find its authority in the often positivist and empiricist realm of the social sciences; it may also function as a rhetorical act that aims at persuasion. Poetic language sometimes plays freely with no social responsibility; for socially conscious artists, however, poetry can also work rhetorically. Speaking nearby is not limited by quantitative data but embodies a consciousness of responsibility to the speaking subject, in this case, the survivor of genocide against Tutsi. Speaking nearby is a pedagogical and scholarly position akin to Carolyn Forché's discussion of poetry of witness, in which the personal and the structural must strike a balance. Forché contends that

we are accustomed to rather easy categories: we distinguish between "personal" and "political" poems. ... The distinction ... gives the political realm too much and too little scope; at the same time, it renders the personal too important and not important enough. If we give up the dimension of the personal, we risk relinquishing one of the most powerful sites of resistance. The celebration of the personal, however, can indicate a myopia, an inability to see how larger structures of the economy and the state circumscribe, if not determine, the fragile realm of the individual.

The personal testimony interwoven with multiple stories and sources forms the basis of knowledge for a crime otherwise incomprehensible. Scholars of genocide studies recognize that the testimonial itself is a form of evidence, not the kind of evidence that social scientists necessarily consider significant, but evidence respected in cultures that grew from oral tradition in which all knowledge was originally transmitted through embodied words or actions.

To speak nearby, those who feel deputized to relay what we have heard can serve as signposts pointing the way to survivors. We can assign testimonials by Scholastique Mukasonga, Yolande Mukagasana, Esther Mujawayo, and Immaculée Ilibagiza. We can arrange screenings of Grey Matter, Komora: To Heal, Munyurangabo, and Kinyarwanda. We can accompany students and colleagues on the ground in Rwanda so that they can hear the words firsthand and see the genocide memorials in person; then they themselves can observe the unspeakable suffering and decide how to act in the face of that knowledge. In fact Rwandans may benefit from hosting study abroad groups if students engage in sensitive, respectful listening, recognizing the sacred nature of the gift they are being entrusted with. Survivor Berthe Kayitesi calls genocide "a sacred knowledge that can only be voiced in certain places — a disturbing knowledge" that needs to be heard.

Speaking nearby considers research that indicates the complexity and multilayered nature of what makes possible the worst crime in the history of humanity. Speaking nearby considers changing circumstances, reflecting on more than two decades of historical research documenting transitions during the decades following mass violence. Speaking nearby asks how we can bear witness and impart knowledge without trivializing it. Speaking nearby realizes that the affective dimension matters and that the experience of secondary trauma must be acknowledged apart from political questions that cannot negate or lessen the unspeakable horror. Listeners cannot speak about Rwanda when the survivors themselves are grappling with the unspeakable. Perhaps our silences also speak to the inadequacies of language when trying to represent a horror most people consider unimaginable.

Giving testimony can itself be therapeutic. Students have heard the testimony of Speciose Mukayiranga, who remarked that the only time she feels happy is when she is telling the story of the murder of her family and of her own survival. Perhaps the memories, the tears, and the silences are powerful communicative tools that show how the narrative, along with its indirectness, pauses, and lacunae, may become a therapeutic experience when the survivor is in the presence of the listener.

How does anyone survive genocide, particularly when sexual torture was used to dominate Tutsi women? Survivors from INEZA and ABASA (women's cooperatives) testified that they found each other. Regardless of ethnic identity, survivors of sexual assault slowly started speaking and realizing that others had also been raped, tortured, and deliberately infected with HIV. In realizing they were not alone, in sharing their stories and crying, survivors found ways to stay alive together. Just as survivors of violence and sexual assault feel alone and ashamed, once they start speaking they realize that their experience is shared and in fact that their experience is all too common; up until the moment of speech, that experience had simply been hidden.

Those who have heard survivors release their experience in words may point to those words in hopes of raising awareness, all the while realizing that our own knowledge is incomplete and shifting. We speak nearby in hopes of dispelling media images and connecting humans across oceans and national borders. We signal in the direction of Rwandans and survivors in the hope that more people will be able to stop, sit, be silent, wait, and allow speech to emerge when it is possible. Perhaps in the sitting together, in silence, in sounds, in sighs, in tears, and in embraces, listeners and testifiers can find a moment of connection. The listener is then deputized and can bear secondary witness to the historical reality of what happens when ethnic difference is reified.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

List of Illustrations,
Foreword, by Patricia A. Simpson,
Acknowledgments,
Introduction Rangira Béa Gallimore and Gerise Herndon,
Part 1. In Memoriam: Lessons Learned from Chantal Kalisa,
1. Baby Steps Margaret Jacobs,
2. Speaking Nearby Genocide Gerise Herndon,
3. Chantal's Voice: A Guiding Light Natalia Ledford,
4. Bittersweet Realities: Field Research, Human Rights, and Questioning Intentions Laura Roost and Ryan Lowry, with Patrice McMahon,
5. Memory, Language, and Healing Isabel Velázquez,
Part 2. Performing Arts and Healing from the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda,
6. Theater and the Rwandan Genocide Chantal Kalisa,
7. Ingoma Nshya: Forbidden Fruit Brings Healing and Empowerment to Rwandan Female Drummers Rangira Béa Gallimore,
Part 3. Visualizing Violence, Silence, and Trauma,
8. The Films of Kivu Ruhorahoza: Staging a New Sense of Direction? Odile Cazenave and Patricia-Pia Célérier,
9. Héla Ammar: Art and Beyond Anna Rocca,
10. Filming with Orphans of the Genocide: A Transformative Dialogue through a Double-Lens Approach Alexandre Dauge-Roth,
11. Art for Teaching and Art for Surviving: From the Holocaust to Healing Eileen M. Angelini and Heather E. Connell,
Part 4. Narrating Atrocities and Dealing with Trauma,
12. Gender-Based Violence in Monique Ilboudo's Fiction Nicki Hitchcott,
13. Narrating Itsembabwoko and the Quest for Empathy Josias Semujanga,
14. "Lay Down Body, Lay Down": Mitigating Transgenerational Trauma through Spirituality in Jewell Parker Rhodes's Magic City Kalenda Eaton,
Part 5. Scripting Self and Healing in Women's Narratives,
15. Women's Friendship in Exile: Healing in the Epistolary Correspondence between Zenobia Camprubí and Pilar de Zubiaurre Iker González-Allende,
16. Preserving Memories, Celebrating Lives: War, Motherhood, and Grief in Scholastique Mukasonga's La femme aux pieds nus Marzia Caporale,
List of Contributors,
Index,