La Transmission littéraire et cinématographique du génocide des Tutsi au Rwanda by Virginie Brinker (review)

While being concerned primarily with fiction, this deft analysis also examines feature films, documentaries, and television news footage. The essay sets out from the premise that the Rwandan genocide, for all its unfathomable horror, remains speakable. Echoing Agamben’s focus on the double Latin etymology of ‘témoin’ (superstes/testis), Virginie Brinker contends that the task of putting the genocide into words is better executed by the ‘témoin du témoin’ (p. 68), that is, the testis (or ‘tiers scripteur’), than by the survivor (superstes). As suggested by this reference to Agamben, Brinker is keen to develop her main thesis by way of the Holocaust and those who have contributed to its theorization and memorialization (Michael Rinn, Hannah Arendt, Henry Rousso, Claude Lanzmann). However, she is careful to add that the major difference between the two tragedies is that our understanding of the Rwandan genocide remains largely contaminated by televisual images. Therefore the selection of this wide-ranging corpus is predicated on the ambition to explore the production of images, be they literary, cinematic, or televisual, and their (in)ability to convey the truth about the genocide. Brinker highlights the failure of the French media — the Journal de France 2, but also Le Figaro, Libération, and Le Monde — to provide unbiased accounts of these tragic events. Indeed, she identifies their tendency to overstate the humanitarian basis of the ‘opération turquoise’, to blur the divides between the perpetrators and their victims, to rely on euphemistic expressions to evade the term ‘génocide’, and to cling to simplistic ethnic categories invented by colonial anthropologists. Brinker’s appraisal of cinematic representations is less damning, as she recognizes the pedagogical qualities of such films as Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda (2004), Michael Caton-Jones’s Shooting Dogs (2005), or Philippe Van Leeuw’s Le Jour où dieu est parti en voyage (2009). She deplores, however, these films’ reliance on questionable narrative devices — those of the ‘film de divertissement’ (p. 102) — and their partial failure to render the complexity of the genocide. This question — how can ethics and aesthetics be reconciled? — is at the heart of Brinker’s exacting investigation. Via a rigorous assessment of a number of texts produced by ‘tiers scripteurs’— Boubacar Boris Diop, Nocky Djedanoum, Jean Hatzfeld, Monique Ilboudo, Koulsy Lamko, Tierno Monénembo, Scholastique Mukasonga, Véronique Tadjo, Jean-Luc Raharimanana, Abdourahman Waberi, and Groupov, the Belgian theatre company — Brinker very convincingly demonstrates that fiction has a major role to play in this process. She contends that novelists have the power to develop their own images, contribute to a more subtle translation of the genocide, and provide an alternative ‘poéthique’ (p. 14) to the ‘monstration médiatique de la souffrance’ (p. 441). In this literary operation, she focuses particularly on the evocative power of what Ricœur named ‘métaphores vives’ and their ability to suggest new meanings and elicit a ‘transfert d’émotion du scripteur au lecteur’ (p. 435). Brinker’s essay is a very welcome addition to the rich body of secondary sources on the Rwandan genocide and its representations. While it interprets major texts insightfully, it also offers a number of strategies to escape the supremacy of the ‘tout-visible médiatique’ (p. 447).