Remounting, Remembering: Gendered Memorials and Colleen Wagner’s The Monument

On 4 July 2008, colleen wagner’s play the monument—in which a mother seeks revenge for the wartime rape and murder of her daughter— opened in Butare, Rwanda. July fourth is Liberation Day in Rwanda, and opening night was timed to mark the end of that country’s one-hundred-day genocide. The play featured an African cast and crew, Tutsi and Hutu both and, after its opening in Butare, toured in makeshift theatres across Rwanda. Houses were full and postshow talkback sessions often lasted for hours. In an essay about her experience mounting the African production, Canadian director Jennifer Capraru notes how closely Rwandan audiences identified with the play:

One could not ask for a more profound, truthful, or heart-wrenching experience than in mounting The Monument in Rwanda to a rapt, engaged and tough audience…. They owned the show; it was their story and they knew it. They sat around their play in a circle each night, drinking in the words, gestures, song and drumming of the actors. Their actors. They often insisted it had all really been written by a Rwandan.

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In fact, The Monument was written by a Canadian and is likely set—as its few details, such as the characters’ names, Mejra and Stetko, indicate—not in Rwanda but in Bosnia. That Rwandans watching The Monument take it to be “their story” speaks, I contend, both to the virtue and the problem of Wagner’s play: while the play allows for effective substitution (the Rwandan context fits convincingly into the Bosnian text), such substitution risks effacing the differences among women killed in war. This problem places the play, a monument itself in many ways, at the centre of a current debate over the most responsible and productive ways of memorializing violent crimes against women.

The Monument has been performed not only in Rwanda but also across Canada and the United States, and in Australia, China, England, Portugal, and Romania.¹ The play is appealing in part for its balance of real events and unreal circumstances: in it, a mother finds the man who raped and killed her daughter in war; she forces him to confess to his crimes and together they build a monument to all the women he killed. In 1996, The Monument received Canada’s highest literary prize, the Governor General’s Award, and over a decade later it remains one of the most frequently produced Canadian dramas. It has been translated into seven languages, optioned as a film, and chosen as one of only three Canadian selections in The Broadview Anthology of Drama (2003). In his introduction to the play, Broadview co-editor Craig S. Walker writes that The Monument has seen so much success because of the “universality of its themes.” “Yet,” he continues, “wherever we find the so-called ‘universal’ in literature, it always seems to be founded on the exploration of something more specific” (622). Walker understands Wagner’s play to evoke the conflict in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. However, as discussion of the Rwandan production reveals, the play can be understood to be located in almost any time, or any place, and during almost any war; its spare character and set descriptions go some way to making this so. A 2006 Toronto production set the action in the Sudan.

This discrepancy of purpose is my topic here: if The Monument’s setting is so malleable, and if the play carries such universal themes, what does it ask its audience to remember? Can an effective monument actually be universal? What happens when remembrance relies on the generalities of atrocities rather than their specificities? Can a work of art, finally, succeed both at telling the universal truth about war and a single truth?² Women’s memorials, in particular, have the dual task of remembering particular deaths caused by violence and bringing attention to systemic violence against women. In a recent monograph on feminist memorials in Canada, the Cultural Memory Group asks, “How can memorial forms mark the everyday nature of violence without losing any sense of...