The Art of Reconciliation in Rwanda Meredith Shepard Submitted In
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
The Art of Reconciliation in Rwanda Meredith Shepard Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2019 ©2018 Meredith Shepard All rights reserved Table of Contents Acknowledgments ii Preface iii Introduction: The Paradox of Reconciliation 1 Chapter One: The Revenge Cycle as History and Genre 25 Chapter Two: Reconciliation as Transfiguration 57 Chapter Three: Reconciliation as Trial 91 Chapter Four: Reconciliation as Memorialization 123 Coda: Beyond Transfiguration, Trial, and Memorialization 167 Works Cited 170 i Acknowledgments This dissertation could not have been written without the support of countless people. First, I thank the Rwandans who have educated me about their country: Fidel, my first translator and dear friend, Frederick, whose own story and advocacy is as miraculous as it is real, Potien, Claudine, Alex, and my other colleagues at Kagugu School, the guides at Gisozi, Nyamata, Ntarama, Nyarubuye, Bisesero, and Murambi memorials from 2008 to the present, my brilliant in-laws, especially Grace, Charles, Alphonse, Jolly, Victor, Bonita, Tiara, Consul, and Alex, and the countless other Rwandans who have inspired and guided me over the last decade. My education has been blessed with teachers who demonstrated the link between literature and social justice. At Cornell University, it was Eric Cheyfitz’s course on colonial literatures that encouraged me to stay in school instead of running back to Africa. J. Robert Lennon’s unstinting mentorship through four years of my writing about Rwanda kept me believing I had something worthwhile to say. Serendipity landed me in Elizabeth Anker’s classroom. Her teaching and scholarship inspired me to pursue a Ph.D. in literature and human rights, and her continued mentorship got me through it. At Columbia University, I was fortunate enough to work with Joseph Slaughter, whose expertise in the intersections of literature and human rights brought shape and substance to my own thinking. Brent Hayes Edwards honed my writing and helped show me what I was trying to say. Marianne Hirsch introduced me to the rich, difficult world of trauma studies. The working group on “The Rural-Urban Interface in Ghana and Kenya: Statistics and Stories” led by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Reinhold Martin exposed me to new ways of working across the humanities and social sciences in Africa. My dear friends and colleagues at Columbia, ii especially Atefeh Akbari, Nicole Gervasio, Rosa Schneider, Brian Bartell, and Eric Kim kept me afloat. My Colorado and England friends—Galen, Marja, Tam, Raquel, Annelise, Abra, Merle, Caroline, Sara, Devi, Veda, Charlotte, Jay, Marcus, and Elisabeth—you make me grateful every day. The greatest thanks go to my family. My parents, Michael and Susan, who raised me with love for the world and for books. My sister Rebecca, whose genius as a writer is surpassed only by her magnificence as a friend and sibling. My aunts, Allyson, Ann, and Nancy, who showered me with love from near and far. My cousins, Amy and Erica, for reminding me that books and films aren’t just for studying. My grandparents, for forging their own way to an education and for supporting mine. And finally, thanks to my beloved husband John Kimenyi, without whom none of this would have been possible or meaningful. iii Preface One of the central contentions of “The Art of Reconciliation in Rwanda” is that the transition from revenge to reconciliation narratives in Rwanda is relevant to other post- conflict societies. To elucidate this, I engage a focused study of Rwandan aesthetic forms in this dissertation, punctuated by references to canonical Western texts. I do so not to universalize my findings, but to study the important similarities and differences among the aesthetic productions of nations traditionally set in the antithetical categories of North/South; developed/ developing; non-transitional/ transitional; first/third world. Rwandan reconciliation has often been discussed in relation to other post-conflict regions in the Global South that have undergone reconciliation programs, such as South Africa, Uganda, and Chile. And the Rwandan genocide is routinely examined in relation to other sites of major genocides, especially the Holocaust and the Cambodian genocide. But debates about reconciliation and the legacy of conflict have in recent years become increasingly interested in contexts like Canada, Australia, and the United States, stable democracies of the Global North that are not typically included in conversations about places like Rwanda unless it is to contrast rather than to compare (Radzik and Murphy 2). I was led to compare Rwandan and classic Western aesthetic productions about revenge and reconciliation by two observations. The first was the startling similarities of formal strategies in classic Western texts about the founding of the (European) nation and of Rwandan artworks about the (re)founding of the nation after genocide. The second was the equally startling yet disturbing similarities between the political divisiveness and revenge rhetoric within the United States during the Trump era and within Rwanda during the lead up to and execution of the genocide. The latter observation led urgency to the former; the starker iv the resonances of political divisionism, the more important it became to produce comparative analysis between two archives and geopolitical contexts that some readers might not want to recognize as comparable. There is no doubt that my subject position—as an American citizen who worked in Rwanda over the last decade and is in the process of receiving Rwandan citizenship through marriage—has attuned me to the importance of studying reconciliation as a phenomenon of great import to both the countries in which I have a civic and personal stake. In the latter years of writing this dissertation, from 2016 to 2018, it was difficult not to think of ethnic divisionism in Rwanda when inundated by news of American political divisiveness and the high rates of racial bias passed on across generations. This was a sobering comparison to face. But thinking about Rwanda was also a source of cautious optimism when considering the divisive landscape of American politics and social life. If a country like Rwanda could transform into one of the most peaceful places in Africa after a genocide that implicated nearly every individual as a victim, perpetrator, survivor, bystander, or rescuer, there is reason enough to think seriously about the possibilities (and pitfalls) of reconciliation elsewhere. This is not to claim that Rwanda’s reconciliation process can or should be applied as a model in other sites; as will become clear in the chapters that follow, much of the work reconciliation accomplishes or fails at is tied to the specificities of its historical and cultural context. But I am making the risky and uncomfortable claim that the divisiveness in Rwanda before and during the genocide is perhaps not as distant from the contemporary United States, or for that matter the United Kingdom or Europe, than some of us living in those countries might like to think. The pressure of that divisiveness is, I contend, an incentive to consider reconciliation in a place like Rwanda as urgently relevant to Western needs. v That said, “The Art of Reconciliation in Rwanda” is not explicitly about comparing Rwanda to the West, although that subject certainly gives fodder for future projects. My primary focus is to examine the aesthetic genres of reconciliation in Rwanda as they interact with legal and political forms of reconciliation. The accompanying literary analysis of Western texts, which punctuates an otherwise Rwanda-centered dissertation, is intended as an initial venture into comparative inquiry of a different sort; one that is less interested in historicizing the relationship between the art and politics of a specific context, and more engaged with a long view of history and of art that sees aesthetic patterns across time and space. It is my hope that readers will find in these approaches something of import to sites both within and beyond the geographical boundaries to which this study cleaves. vi Introduction: The Paradox of Reconciliation “The Art of Reconciliation in Rwanda” examines the paradox I first confronted when I began working in Rwanda in 2007: how could a country that endured an infamously bloody genocide transform into one of the most peaceful places in Africa only thirteen years later? How is it that Rwandans live together today as though “in the fifties, you had Poland, Germany, France and Israel all within the same borders, with no possibility for Jews to leave the territory and the same for the people who had attempted to exterminate them?” 1 The term used by both international scholars and the Rwandan government to describe Rwanda’s transformation after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi is “reconciliation.” But the definition of reconciliation remains a subject of intense debate. What does reconciliation entail? Who creates it? How is it qualified and quantified? Is reconciliation judicial, as with Rwanda’s transitional justice courts of Gacaca that granted reduced prison sentences in exchange for confession and apology to victims’ families? Is it political, as with Rwanda’s amended constitution of 2003 that prohibits discrimination by ethnicity? Is it cultural, as with the State-funded and private cultural productions that model transitions from revenge to reconciliation? Scholarship on Rwanda and other post-conflict sites worldwide demonstrates that 1 After filming a documentary of Rwanda’s transitional justice “Gacaca” courts over the course of six years, Belgian-American filmmaker Anne Aghion contextualized post-genocide Rwanda in an interview in terms of what post-World War II Europe did not do (Aghion 2013, 22). This rhetorical move indicates how readily Rwandan history is theorized through Western history; Aghion anticipates that it is easier for an international audience to understand what didn’t happen in Europe than what did happen in Rwanda.