A Sea of Griefs Is Not a Proscenium: On the Rwanda Projects of Alfredo Jaar

Most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the complicity is concealed. "The perfect legibility of the scene, its formulation spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of griefs is not a proscenium, a man dispenses us from receiving the image in all its scandal; reduced to the stale who wails is not a dancing bear. of pure language, the photograph does not disorganize us."1 The story of what happened in Rwanda in 1994 is one ol massive crimi- - AimeCesaire, Return to My Native Land nality and complicity. It is the story of a state- sponsored genocide that look years to plan and direct, but only 100 days to carry out, as the rest ol the world looked on. It constitutes the third genocide ol this century, • ^ t wanda. The name now calls lorth a Hood ol images: corpses clog- Faced with growing opposition^ ilhin Rwanda, and increasing pies I ging the Kagera River; dismembered bodies scattered in a church- sures from without to share power, the single- party government of President B^T yard, under a glowing white statue of Christ; and the gray squalor ol luvenal Habyarimana was showing signs ol increasing instability in 1990. I B the refugee camps.The images were put there to illustrate news sto- "I lulu Power" extremists within the I labyarimana government began to incite I • ries. but in the end they acted independently The truth is, no one re- the Hutu majority population of Rwanda to attack the minority Tutsis, saying ally read the news stories. If they had read them, they would have demanded that they were the source ol all the troubles. that something be done to stop the killing. A Hutu Power politician named Dr. Leon Mugesera gave a speech in The way the politics of images are organized has changed, and this has December 1992 in which he appealed to his fellow Hutus: "We the people arcacted to erode their power and effectiveness. There has always been some- obliged to take responsibility ourselves and wipe out this scum. No matter thing about "real pictures" of real violence that undercuts their political el- whatyou do, do not let them get away." To the Tutsis, he said (echoing old feet, and separates them from experience. racial myths about the ethnic origins of the Tutsis): "I am telling you thalyour In his short essay "Shock- Photos," Roland Barthes addressed this lack home is in Ethiopia and we will sendyou back through the Nyabarongo River of effect. "It is not enough for the photographer to signify the horrible lor us as a shortcut."' In the slaughter to come, the Nyabarongo and other rivers to experience it," he wrote. These images, intended to convey horror, fail to were choked with the corpses of slain Tutsis. do so "because, as we look at them, we are in each case dispossessed ol our Since it is often difficult to tell Hutu F rom Tutsi by sight, death lists had judgement." Such images do not compel us to action, but to acceptance. Our been prepared using the identity cards first issued during the colonialist pe3 K«Nk a Jo u r n al of Co n t e m p o r ar y Af rican Art riod. Hutu youths were formed into militias, called the Interahamwe ("those DdVJCl L.6Vi~StrdUSS who fight together"). When Habyarimana's plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, the Hutu leadership blamed the Tutsi- led RPF for his death (it has since been alleged that the President's plane was actually shot down by the Hutu slaughter, the Canadian commander of the U.N. forces in Rwanda said he extremists themselves, perhaps with the assistance of French soldiers'), and could end the genocide with five to eight thousand troops. Most military unleashed the Interahamwe to begin slaughtering Tutsis. Using the identity leaders now agree that the genocide could have been stopped in two or three lists, the militiamen began to pull Tutsis from their homes and stop them at days with a few thousand properly armed troops (since the Hutu militias did roadblocks, and government officials in the provinces...