Passing on Voices, Going on Haunted: Witnessing and Hospitality in the Play Rwanda 94

Passing on Voices, Going on Haunted: Witnessing and Hospitality in the Play Rwanda 94 Alexandre Dauge-Roth Pourquoi faisais-je tout cela? Pour me venger? Non. Quelque part, ce n'est pas une vengeance. Juste un rappel à l'ordre... Je veux les mettre devant leurs responsabilités. Les tribunaux ne font rien... Mais quand je reviens, témoin vivant de leurs actes, je prends l'apparence de leur conscience. Annick Kayitesi, Nous existons encore1 READING THE LITERATURE THAT BEARS WITNESS to genocide is an unpleasant and troubling encounter: it forces upon us a proximity with death and cruelty, confronts us with the most radical consequences of hatred and racism, and asks us, ultimately, to face, here and now, what we like to believe is something that is over and happened over there. "Never again!" we are feverishly inclined to repeat as we articulate the relationship with such a traumatic past and define its remembrance. But, in the midst of our archival fever and frenzy for memorials, interjections such as "It's history!" and "Let's move on" betray a symptomatic desire to bypass the genesis and perpetration of genocide and to elude the disturbing legacy its survivors attempt to pass on to us through testimony.2 As one of the ghosts staged in the play Rwanda 94 asserts, the testimonial encounter is disturbing because it can not be confined to the question of remembering: À travers nous l'humanité / vous regarde tristement. Nous, morts d'une injuste mort, / entaillés, mutilés, dépecés, / aujourd'hui déjà : oubliés, niés, insultés. Nous sommes ce million de cris suspendus / au-dessus des collines du Rwanda. Nous sommes, ajamáis, ce nuage accusateur. Nous redirons à jamais l'exigence, / parlant au nom de ceux qui ne sont plus / et au nom de ceux qui sont encore;... vivants nous n'avions qu'une courte vie pour témoigner. Morts, c'est pour l'éternité que nous réclamons notre dû.3 As Henry Rousso has shown in his work on the competing interpretations of Vichy's legacy in France after World War II,4 each commemoration of the past must also, if not primarily, be examined as an attempt to institutionalize forgetting. Each act of official remembrance, regardless of its intended symbolic gesture, while it inscribes a certain visibility of the past within the present , also performs a silencing gesture and a "symbolic violence" by positionVol . XLV, No. 3 85 L'Esprit Créateur ing itself as "the true" representation of the past. According to Pierre Bourdieu , dominant discourses commit "symbolic violence"5 by grounding their legitimacy on the ignorance of their conditions of production and thus operate a contextual erasure that prevents any awareness of positionality. As a result, the power of their eloquence to cast what must be passed on as a given— rather than the explicit result of social negotiation—goes hand in hand with the silencing of any dissenting voices that might question "the order of things," be they past or present. The Rwandan genocide is no exception. The "symbolic violence" of its memorials—-where they exist—combined with the political control of survivors' memory and testimonies, too often censures the survivors' voices by imposing official and impersonal representations in which survivors don't recognize themselves and feel furthermore alienated.6 For survivors of traumatic experiences, the conditions of bearing witness to their past are therefore another source of tension and potential conflict since the mediation of their suffering is intimately linked to political and ideological divisions. But even if survivors of genocide are perceived as the legitimate speakers, testifying does not put their suffering at a more tolerable distance, nor does it amount to a personal resolution. As Ross Chambers suggests in Untimely Interventions, testimony is driven by a desire to assert that survivors , rather then "having survived a trauma" are "still surviving experiences that were already themselves an experience of being, somehow, still alive although already dead." What is here at stake is the acknowledgment of an aftermath defined as a "state of out-of-jointness ... of perpetually surviving a trauma that is never over."7 The wounds remain open, the scars visible, as does...