Species Sovereignty in Western Accounts of Rwanda's Genocide

On Canicide and Concern: Species Sovereignty in Western Accounts of Rwanda’s Genocide Jesse Arseneault McMaster University There is no “crime against animality” nor crime of genocide against nonhuman living beings. Jacques Derrida The Beast and the Sovereign Dogs, in their historical complexity, matter here. Dogs are not an alibi for other themes; dogs are fleshly material semiotic presences in the body of technoscience. Dogs are not surrogates for theory; they are not here just to think with. They are here to live with. Part- ners in the crime of human evolution, they are in the garden from the get-go, wily as Coyote. Donna Haraway The Companion Species Manifesto he opening pages of James Dawes’s That the World May Know offer Tone of the few descriptions of the unique fate of dogs in Rwanda’s genocide. The author recounts a story of the Rwanda Patriotic Front (rpf) having encountered, in their liberation of the nation, dogs that “were unusu- ally large and fierce, having fed well on the heaps of corpses choking the roadways. rpf soldiers, sickened by this final indignity, began to shoot the dogs. Immediately, animal rights groups in London launched a protest to protect the dogs” (20). Dawes later cites this protest as evidence ESC 39.1 (March 2013): 125–147 that “the genocide becomes primarily an occasion for whites to fantasize about themselves,” an act of “moral self-congratulation” (33). The genocide of some eight hundred thousand Rwandans (mostly Tutsis) in 1994 was Jesse Arseneault is largely overlooked by the West, and Dawes uses this show of concern for a doctoral candidate in animals to emphasize the flagrant disregard for Rwandan humans between McMaster University’s April and July 1994.1 Although Dawes problematizes the interest in animal Department of English rights that overlooks human rights, his text defines animals exclusively and Cultural Studies. in terms of the indignity they perform on humans, showing no concern Broadly situated in the for their lives and deaths. Given this indignity, are shows of concern for field of African cultural animals allowed? Is it permissible, for instance, to suggest that dogs feed- studies, his research ing on the dead and the production of canine ferocity have a history, not focuses on intersections only in narratives like Dawes’s but also in a genocidal political climate in between animal studies whose memory ethical concern for the non-human is unquestioningly and postcolonial theory suspended? When the un troops stationed in Rwanda declared the dogs a and, in particular, “health problem” (as many texts document), how should we understand the interrogates alignments relationship between this biopolitical claim on dogs’ bodies and concern? between Africa and I begin with Dawes in order to think about how texts direct our concern animality in the global in particular ways when we think of postgenocide Rwanda, especially when cultural imagination, as various figures of animality become categories—applied to both humans well as representations and non-humans—for which concern is suspended. This paper theorizes of animality in African concern as a technology of relationality that affectively orients how we literatures and cultures. associate with others across interpersonal, international, and interspecies contexts, one that accompanies processes of narration and representation to produce certain lives as subjects of legitimate ethical engagement, and others as objects for whom ethical engagement is not, or does not have to be, a consideration. Interrogating Western texts’ handling of the fate of the dogs, I argue that these texts’ attempts to account for, bear witness to, and especially (belatedly) show concern for the Rwandan genocide construct the animal as a marker of non-concern, a category for which concern is always already foreclosed. In the global handling of conflict, the animal is used to direct the trajectory of concern toward the human and away from those deemed beyond the categorical limits of humanness, separating and elevating human concerns from those of non-human life. 1 The number of deaths, as with many details of the genocide, is disputed, but most texts estimate it at approximately eight hundred thousand. This paper, rather than sketching an historical outline of the genocide, is interested in the anthropocentric power structures that dominate its telling. For an historical background of Rwanda prior to, during, and after the genocide, refer to the work of Dawes, Desforges, Gourevitch, Hatzfeld, Mamdani, Moghalu, New- bury, and Prunier. 126 | Arseneault This reading follows recent postcolonial analyses, in the era of what Rob Nixon calls the “slow violence” of environmental degradation (11), which demonstrate that—particularly in postcolonial fields of knowledge-making and situations of conflict—human and non-human concerns cannot easily be separated as independent from one another.2 The first section of this paper examines how the orientation of concern in certain Western accounts of the genocide produces a species sovereignty of the human that disavows its ties with the non-human. This sovereignty renders humanness the absolute ontological centre of the globe and the sole category toward which concern can be oriented or from which it can derive. This is not to suggest that all humans wield this form of sovereignty, nor are theirs always lives toward which concern gets oriented. Rather, in the case of the Rwandan genocide, animality and various figurations of non-humanness come to be applied to certain bodies (including humans’) in a manner that generates indifference toward their lives. The second section of this paper reads texts in which the Rwandan dogs specifically appear and suggests that these texts engage a species sovereignty that both forecloses concern for animals and orients concern around particular Western iterations of the human. I also read the figure of the stray as one that underlies the production of dogs as subjects of non-concern. In light of the ways that concern is frequently denied the stray and other figures of animality, the final section of this paper explores textual modalities through which we might generate concern for lives scripted as non- or subhuman, including those bodies that do not belong to the human species (especially the stray dog), in the global cultural imaginary. I should also stipulate that, while this paper maintains a consistent focus on Rwanda, the rhetoric of (non)concern on which I focus is by no means limited to a singular geotemporal location but is produced out of a broader discourse around animality as subhumanity, cultivated out of a widely-presumed sovereignty of the human. Sovereignty, Concern, and the Limits of the Human Figures of non-humans of various kinds accompany accounts of the genocide in ways that illuminate the unique positioning of dogs as subjects of non-concern and the orientation of concern toward the human in West- 2 The introduction to Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin’sPostcolonial Ecocriticism contains a lengthy justification for the importance of the non-human world to postcolonial critique. Refer also to Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George B. Handley’s Postcolonial Ecologies, and Jesse Arseneault’s “Brute Violence and Vulnerable Animality.” On Canicide and Concern | 127 ern texts. Prior to the killings, the Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Col- lines (rtlm) had been broadcasting anti-Tutsi propaganda, referring to Tutsis (among others deemed enemies of Hutu nationalism) as Inyenzi (cockroaches). Speaking particularly of the figure of the pest, Clapper- ton Chakanetsa Mavhunga suggests, “the reduction of humans to pests justifies the elimination of pests, sanctions policies of elimination, and blurs the division in weapons required to police people and to police nature” (152). In this case, the figure of the pest, understood as a form of life for which concern is not necessary, operates to suspend concern for the life being eliminated. Different techniques of dehumanization accompany Western narratives of the genocide in which, often, both victim and perpetrator accrue subhuman status against the Western narrator. Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands With the Devil, for example, describes Rwanda during the genocide as “a cesspool of guts, severed limbs, [and] flesh-eating dogs” (323), evoking horror conventions to describe the landscape of his narrative.3 Beyond the conventional ways African nations are “understood in relentlessly negative terms” (Ferguson 8), Dallaire’s narrative is also about the relation of Rwanda to humanness. The casting of Rwanda as a space replete with human body parts but no whole bodies metonymizes the nation as somehow incompletely human. Dallaire’s description consists of broken figures of the human body that, together, animate a severed form of the national body politic. This incompletely or less than fully human status also accompanies his animalization of Rwandans where he describes those hiding from the Interahamwe as “live bait being toyed with by a wild animal, at constant risk of being killed and eaten” (382). Evoking a similar logic to the broadcasts of the rtlm, Dallaire’s reading of the genocide casts victim and perpetrator in a metaphor of predation that places both outside the category of humanness. Perpetrators become depoliticized predators, while Rwandan victims—not precisely aligned with the animalized perpetrator—exist only as objects of the predator’s “wild” appetites. Indeed, Dallaire asserts that the perpetrators “crimes had made them inhuman” (457). Of the victims, he describes the “destruction of their [identity] cards, and of their records” by genocidaires as having “erased [them] from humanity” (281).4 While not the animalization char- acteristic of his description of perpetrators, Dallaire’s text still insists on 3 This description of Rwanda echoes Kristeva’s work on horror, whose account emerges from a description of the abject. According to Kristeva, “the corpse is the utmost of the abject” (4). 4 The identity cards to which Dallaire refers were the result of a system of ethnic identity designation set in place by Belgian colonialism (Dallaire 281).

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