Politics of Memorialisation in a Rwandan Witness Memoir: Marie Béatrice Umutesi’s Surviving the Slaughter

Abstract

The memorialisation of the various layers of the genocides in Rwanda’s history has always elicited mixed reactions, with some observers insisting that there was only one actual genocide: the 1994 Rwandan genocide. This article considers Marie Béatrice Umutesi’s contestation of genocide memorialisation in Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaïre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). My contention is that in this memoir the author records her experiences to recast Rwanda’s annual commemoration discourse, which selectively memorialises Tutsi pain at the expense of Hutu suffering. The author draws on her experiences as a refugee in eastern Zaïre (today the Democratic Republic of Congo) to excavate and reinterpret Rwanda’s unheeded atrocities, reconfigure and interrogate selective mourning, and create a shared memory of a forgotten violent past. To illustrate the ideological purpose at work, I reference John Beverley’s notion of “testimonio” (Testimonio: On the Politics of Truth. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004) as an interpretive framework for understanding Surviving the Slaughter as a resistance narrative.

Keywords:

• genocide memorialisation
• Marie Béatrice Umutesi
• Surviving the Slaughter
• Rwanda
• atrocities
• testimonio
• genocide denialism