Hearing Witness: Literary Listening as a Duty of Memory in Rwanda

This article examines the dynamics of listening and literary production as expressed in Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel Murambi, le livre des ossements (2000), one of the texts that resulted from the 1998 “Fest’Africa” trip to Rwanda. I argue that this novel performs a meditation on the ethics of representing the 1994 genocide and its aftermath by staging the evolution of its central character’s literary ambition. I also underscore how Diop’s novel is a rich text for teaching the 1994 genocide through literature, especially an upper-division undergraduate course in French dealing with issues of memory, history, and representation.