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  • Performing ReconciliationTransnational Advocacy in Rwanda
  • Amanda Montei (bio)

In June 2010, I traveled to Kigali, Rwanda with a group of academics, community theatre professionals, performance artists, students, and genocide scholars from the U.S., Afghanistan, Mexico, Singapore, Belarus, Uganda, and Rwanda. While in Kigali we went to various genocide memorials and historical sites, toured a national prison, and spoke with political and academic experts from the region about such complex topics as the politics of witness and testimony, processes of reconciliation, (inter-)national recovery, and local (if any socio-political issue can be said to be limited thusly anymore) and transnational memory. The summer program hails such well-known alumna as Lynn Nottage, who on the same trip began writing her recent Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined, which explores the latent effects of sexual violence in the Congo.

The locus of this meeting of the minds was Centre by Centre, a multidisciplinary festival led by Erik Ehn, who heads the Playwriting program at Brown University and the Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center (IGSC), housed in Kigali. The IGSC is a Kigali-based nonprofit founded by Ehn and Professor Jean-Pierre Karegeye. The three-day event included performances curated by local and international theatre companies, writing and performance workshops led by various participants, and dialogues centering on the work of testimony and witness within the discourse of violence. A few of those groups in attendance included the Belarus Free Theatre, a nomadic underground theatre company highly focused on the conditional nature and performance of taboo subjects; Theatre Factory, a Ugandan comedy troupe that believes humor truly is the best national healing device; the Afghanistan Human Rights and Democracy Organization (AHRDO), who are using methods such as Playback Theatre (a technique pioneered by Jonathan Fox), and Augusto Boal’s theatre of the oppressed techniques to elicit productive conversation in a largely silenced body politic; and Violeta Luna, a performance artist whose work focuses primarily on the effects of globalization in Mexico.

The aim of the festival was to bring practical and tangible examples of dramatic interventions to the stage and to allow practitioners to share dramatic modes of intervention and interrogation. Productions showcased a wide range of formal explorations of both local and global questions, as a way of moving towards a [End Page 80] transnational conversation about the possibilities of the stage. Workshops demonstrated these cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary exchanges: I led a writing workshop in which participants produced work in at least five languages; AHRDO taught and performed Fox’s Playback method; Belarus Free Theatre led a theatre exercise aimed at exploring the malleability of social taboos; and many other workshops on topics such as movement, comedy, and writing or engaging with trauma-induced silence were also held.

Ehn, who has been visiting Rwanda since 2001, has observed that Rwandan dialogue on the genocide experiences an ebb and flow. Immediately after the atrocities of 1994, for both psychological and social reasons, victims were suspicious of outsiders looking to hear stories. Over the years that followed, survivors became more eager to speak about their experiences, as trauma counselors and political figures encouraged testimony as not only an emotional healing device, but as a political necessity. The national character is now one of icyizere (Kinyarwanda for “hope”), thanks to a campaign led by President Paul Kagame. With this message, Rwandans have become increasingly ambivalent about talking with foreigners about their experiences during the genocide. Brent Blair, who was also in attendance at this summer’s festival in Kigali, has recently pointed out the culture of silence in Rwanda, but it is my experience that survivors of the genocide are simply becoming more interested in forgetting the horror of the country’s past, in moving forward and recreating their national character. Largely as a result of Kagame’s aggressive policies meant to increase tourism and rebuild infrastructure, locals now often present foreign visitors with similar phrases of the promise and progress of Rwanda.

At the end of WWI, Germany lost control of Rwanda and Belgium assumed governance. Prior to this time, various influences, including early missionaries, had begun composing and spreading divisive ideological theories about two major ethnic groups in the region...

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