Rwanda After Genocide: Gender, Identity and Post-Traumatic Growth by Caroline Williamson Sinalo (review)

In the last twenty years, there has been a proliferation of scholarly mono-graphs, collected volumes, and articles on the Francophone and Anglo-phone literature, testimonies, and film of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda (see in particular Dauge-Roth; Hitchcott; Coquio; Semujanga; Norridge; Grayson; Gilbert). Caroline Williamson Sinalo’s 2018 book, Rwanda After Genocide: Gender, Identity and Post-Traumatic Growth, brings this extant scholarly corpus into dialogue with canonical trauma theory (which she strongly critiques), postcolonial trauma theory, and recent work in clinical psychology, as applied to a corpus of forty-two audio-visual Tutsi survivor testimonies which she analyzes in both the English and French translation as well as the original Kinyarwanda. The testimonies are housed in the Genocide Archive of Rwanda, an organization established by Aegis Trust (a UK-based NGO) and the Rwandan government-funded National Commission for the Fight Against Genocide.

Sinalo’s central argument is that “Western concepts such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), belatedness, unknowability and unrepresentability may have limited useful application in a post-colonial, post-genocide context such as Rwanda and may even exacerbate, rather than remedy, the problems of trauma survivors” (xv). Her first chapter, “Defying Silence, Defying Theory” lays out the case against trauma theory and its concept of unrepresentability which Sinalo claims is “particularly harmful in an environment where survivors are continuously encouraged to ‘move on’ and adopt silent coping” (28). Her critique of trauma theory is blistering, concluding with “[m]y overall view is that there is very little, if anything, to ‘recuperate’ from traditional trauma theory” (28). Instead, she offers post-traumatic growth as a model of trauma that she finds better suited to the Rwandan context than trauma theory or the medical model of PTSD. She defines post-traumatic growth as distinct from recovery or resilience in that it “refers to the experience of subjectively higher levels of psychological or social functioning” (7) following an individual’s experience of trauma such as genocide or sexual violence.

The book’s second chapter, “Post-Colonial Post-Traumatic Growth in Rwandan Men,” is a largely positive appraisal of the Rwandan government’s policy of Rwandicity and its ability to give men a new post-genocide identity no longer rooted in violence. After giving many vivid and graphic excerpts from male survivor testimonies, Sinalo concludes that the state’s Rwandicity policy “may go some way to address the long-term trauma of colonialism and identity destruction” (81).

The third and fourth chapters, respectively “Rwanda’s Women and Post-Traumatic Individualism” and “Communal Men and Agentic Women,” analyze gender differences in post-traumatic growth between the men and women interviewed by the Aegis Trust. Sinalo first analyzes female survivor testimonies for signs of growth following the traumatic experience of genocide. She concludes that the testimonies show signs of “agentic growth” that is linked to self-perception but that women’s interpersonal relationships continued to suffer. As an example of agentic growth, one woman describes how she was able to find housing and raise her child after the genocide on her own, whereas previously she had felt constricted by women’s traditional role in Rwandan society. However, Sinalo concludes that women were less likely to have their “communal motivations satisfied” (134), giving examples of female survivor testimony which tended to critique the government’s efforts to impose top down reconciliation on survivors of genocide.

In the fifth chapter, “What is Really Unspeakable?: Gender and Post-Traumatic Growth at the International Level,” Sinalo examines the original Kinyarwanda transcripts that appeared in a published collection of testimonies entitled We Survived: Genocide in Rwanda (2006), published by the Aegis Trust and edited by Wendy Whitworth. Sinalo is critical of Whit-worth’s editorial process, describing how her choices for the English translations led to“. . . the portrayal of survivors as ‘nicer’ than the original versions, the removal of gendered dimensions of the genocide and the censoring of criticism of outsiders” (158). For instance...