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Abstract
This paper analyses the connectivities between violence, memory, personhood, place and human substances after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. It explores the practice of ‘care-taking’ at genocide memorials – the preservation and care of human remains – to reveal how survivors of the Genocide remake their worlds through working with the remnants of their dead loved ones. I argue that ‘care-taking’ is a way to rebuild selves and to retain lost relations to the dead that still interfere in the everyday lives of the living. Survivors project their emotions, sentiments and confusion about an uncertain future onto the remains. Care-taking re-verses time because it gives back dignity to those who died ‘bad deaths’ during the Genocide. I further argue that the memorials are a vehicle for what I coin ‘place-bound proximity’ that enables a material space of communication between care-takers and their dead loved ones, provides a last resting place and a ‘home’ for both the living and the dead. Following a ‘victim-approach’ this paper draws on extensive fieldwork conducted in Rwanda since 2011.
Cet article analyse les liens entre la violence, la mémoire, l’identité de personne, le lieu et les substances humaines après le génocide de 1994 contre les Tutsi au Rwanda. Il explore la pratique consistant à ‘prendre soin’ des monuments aux morts du génocide – la préservation et le soin des restes humains – afin de montrer comment les survivants du génocide refont leurs mondes en travaillant avec les restes de leurs proches décédés. Je soutiens que le ‘soin’ est un moyen de se reconstruire et de conserver des relations perdues avec les morts, qui interfèrent encore dans la vie quotidienne des vivants. Les survivants projettent leurs émotions, leurs sentiments et leur confusion face à un avenir incertain. Les soins renversent le temps, car ils redonnent de la dignité à ceux qui sont morts de ‘mauvais décès’ pendant le génocide. Je soutiens en outre que les monuments aux morts sont un véhicule de ce que j'appelle la ‘proximité liée au lieu’ qui permet un espace matériel de communication entre ceux qui prennent soin et leurs proches décédés, constitue un dernier lieu de repos et un ‘foyer’ pour les vivants et les morts. Suivant une ‘approche concentrée sur les victimes’, cet article s’appuie sur de vastes travaux menés sur le terrain au Rwanda depuis 2011.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. Many thanks to Richard Martin and Sarah Turnbull for their constructive comments on earlier versions of this paper. Most importantly, I am grateful to all survivors who shared their difficult stories with me, to my research assistants and to Ibuka and the CNLG for their continuous support of and interest in my research.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 This paper uses the official United Nations terminology Genocide against the Tutsi. The application of this terminology does not in any way reflect a particular position towards the RPF government or a specific narrative of the Genocide. This paper advances a survivors’ perspective: for survivors the use of the term Genocide against the Tutsi is a crucial one since – as many discussions with survivors revealed – this reflects that they were targeted for being Tutsi and it acknowledges their plight.
2 These themes emerged inductively from the data.
3 As Maddrell and Sidaway write, the idea of different forms of ‘scapes’ as a tool of understanding social processes was first introduced by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai (Citation1990).
4 Deathscapes do not only include material sites but virtual spaces, bodies and minds, too. However, this article will look at material sites only.
5 Some interviewees mentioned only 200 memorial sites. The current number of 243 is based on informal conversations with CNLG staff members in 2018. The CNLG supervises and organizes all of Rwanda’s memorial practices; however, other survivors associations are involved in the design, planning and implementation of policies. The CNLG was prescribed in the 2003 constitution and eventually established in 2008. Before the CNLG, memorial sites had been de-centrally administrated by the Ministry of Sport and Education that was at that time responsible for memorial practices at the national level. For a photographic documentation of Rwandan memorial sites see, http://genocidememorials.cga.harvard.edu/home.html (accessed 30 June 2015).
6 The number of memorials in Rwanda are under constant flux since the government decided to close smaller memorials on cell level and to reinter bodies into the bigger memorials on district level. One reason given for this change in interviews with CNLG staff members was that the government wants to ensure that the remains and the sites are properly taken care of which – as they stated – is not possible given the high number of memorials, many of which are in remote places. Due to limited space it is not possible to detail the implications here, but this obviously impacts on survivors’ (and in particular care-takers’) grieving process and the ‘place-bound proximity’ described later in this article.
7 I choose the term “dead bodies” here, since many survivors view the terms ‘corpse’ or ‘remains’ as insensitive. Since 2012, Ibuka has advocated for a rewording of the Law No. 56 on memorials with regard to replacing words such as ‘corpse’ with ‘dead bodies’.
8 These memorial sites were changed some years after the Genocide. However, they still exhibit victims’ belongings, skulls and bones. The bloodstains at walls were left intact as well.
9 State-led commemoration on the national level takes place in the so-called week of mourning in April only. During this week businesses have to close early to give their employees the chance to take part in commemoration ceremonies. However, the official mourning period lasts until July.
10 This argument is made in the context of the gacaca trials. Other scholars such as Reyntjens and Ingelaere even claim that researchers who critique this viewpoint have been manipulated by the Rwandan state and/or are afraid of challenging the government for fear of losing their research access and permission.
11 Rombouts details some challenges of a victim-approach such as identifying and defining who is a victim, issues pertaining to the construction and politicization of victimhood and competition between victims. There is also the danger as asserted by Jessee (Citation2017) that researchers duplicate or reiterate hierarchies of victims or dominant narratives about the Genocide.
12 The participation in Genocide commemoration only plays a minor role for this paper’s analysis which is more focused on how survivors make meaning of the memorials and the practice of care-taking.
13 The CNLG granted permission to carry out the research at memorial sites including photography. And some staff members, and in particular those responsible for the preservation of the sites were interview partners and helped clarify factual matters. Otherwise, I worked independently from the Commission that did not perform any oversight function.
14 I interviewed more male care-takers because more men worked as care-takers at the memorials I included in my research. However, roughly the interviews are equally distributed between men and women. The age ranged between 30 years to 65 years. I conducted one focus group with female survivors only because AVEGA (the widow organization) facilitated it.
15 I did not ask about the ethnicity of the individuals I spoke to. Ethnicity is a very sensitive topic in Rwanda and has been banned by law from politics and society.
16 CNLG staff is effectively neither present at the very remote memorials nor at the non-national sites. The CNLG members of staff are mostly survivors as well, but given the politicized context in Rwanda and their proximity to the government, I did not select those individuals for survivor testimonies.
17 Some of these narratives vary, however. In particular the story about Annonciata is what Jessee (Citation2017) frames an ‘iconic story’ that is not necessarily affirmed by facts but rather draws on common or popular knowledge which has often politicized connotations. Jessee further explains how survivors, but also perpetrators she interviewed, link the story of Annonciata and sexualized violence more generally to misguided believes around the superiority of the Tutsi body.
18 More generally Christianity has been very successful in taking roots in Rwanda, often privileging and sustaining those in power (see e.g. Longman Citation2010; Carney Citation2013). Korman here refers to the tension between ‘bad death’ and Christian salvation as an example of contradictions between Rwandan cultural beliefs and religion in public discourse.
19 See for a discussion on the relational relationship between ‘absence-presence’ in the context of mourning processes in the UK and Europe, i.e. after deaths in peacetimes, Maddrell (Citation2013).
20 See for an extended discussion on naming practices in relation to personhood Eramian (Citation2014, Citation2018).
21 I would like to thank one of the anonymous reviewers who encouraged me to emphasize these ambivalences in the informal and formal commemoration of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi.
22 In fact Van’t Spijker stresses that there existed substantial regional variations of funerary rites throughout Rwanda so that one cannot speak of overarching cultural mortuary rites (Van’t Spijker Citation1990).
23 During the years 1963 and 1973 the Tutsi population suffered from ethnic-motivated violence that led to a backlash of refugees to neighboring countries.
24 The significance of an ‘empty home’ was particularly prevalent in more recent interviews with diaspora survivors in the UK who in oral history interviews described in detail how homes were completely destroyed and how without their family members it was difficult for them to ‘build a new home’ (Personal interviews, May, June 2019).
25 In these discussions, we particularly attempted to best describe the materiality of the space and the ways care-takers referred to the decoration and maintenance of the place as well as the cleaning of the remains. Therefore descriptions such as ‘tender’ or ‘careful’ derive from both our observations and discussions, i.e. these are not terms imposed on the matter or indeed indicate a romanticized notion of care-taking at memorials.
26 I am grateful to one of the anonymous reviewers who pointed out and detailed this connection between memorials, home and future making.
27 Burnet (Citation2012) and Eramian (Citation2014) made similar observations in their research.
28 The washing of bones was a common practice after the Genocide when as many interviewees recalled ‘bodies were everywhere’. Survivors then collected and recovered bodies from the landscape to inter them in mass graves. Only more recently has the government started to embrace the washing of bones as part of the state-led exhumation processes (see further on this aspect Major Citation2015).
29 Translation by author.