War Memories and the Refugees’ Representation in Marie-Thérèse Toyi’s Weep not, Refugee

ABSTRACT

During the late twentieth century, numerous Great Lakes countries witnessed and experienced massive killings, disappearances, torture and tremendous suffering. Drawing particularly from the tenets of Cathy Caruth (1995, 153), which stipulate that ‘previously forgotten memory traces return and are reworked or reinterpreted to match subsequent events and desires’, I look into trauma-related memories of the refugees with a focus on not only how memories re-construct their traumatic experience but also on how refugees are represented. I argue that Toyi, in Weep not, Refugee captures the horrific civil war in Burundi and grapples with the refugees’ experience by actively engaging events, discourses and remembering the past through its multiple facets. I further argue that Weep not, Refugee is a trauma fiction that can be read as a memory-site for remembering and bearing witness to the refugees’ past traumatic moments. This paper explores Toyi’s deployment of war memories as a tool for aesthetic and socio-political engagement in narratives of war. While the novel foregrounds complex genealogies of the Great Lakes political conflicts, it also romantically negotiates problematic issues of ethnic rivalries in Burundi. This study intervenes into conceptions of ethnic war, trauma, violence and memory.

KEYWORDS:

• Memory
• refugees
• Burundi
• ethnicity
• civil war

Notes

1 Tanzania is a neighbouring country to Burundi. It is known to have hosted many Burundian refugees since the political crises in 1972, 1993 and 2015. It is also the country where Kiswahili is used as a national language and English as a language of instruction. The characters that Toyi uses in the novel bear all these characteristics.

2 This region comprises Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Rwanda Tanzania and Uganda.

3 Holocaust here refers to the genocide during WWII when European Jews were systematically massacred by Hitler and his collaborators.