Of other times: Temporality,memory and trauma in post-genocide Rwanda

Introduction

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. (Benjamin, 1969 [1940]: 257–258)

This article carves out different temporal practices and experiences within survivors’ attempts to remake worlds after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. At its heart is the practice of ‘care-taking’ (Viebach, 2014) at selected genocide memorials. Some Tutsi survivors have chosen to pledge their everyday-lives to the preservation and care of human remains, even entirely preserved dead bodies, which are often displayed at Rwanda’s genocide memorials. They wash, clean and put lime-powder on these remains to protect them from weather and decay through the passage of time. In their accounts, survivors describe neither joy nor satisfaction in this work; rather, they feel a moral obligation towards the dead. They clean with a heavy heart because as Innocent, a care-taker, stressed, ‘I clean with grief, but I do it because there was loss. I have a bad feeling, but I am patient enough not to resign. I cannot make them come back. I work here because I could have died also. I asked to work here because I feel responsible for my family who died here. This is the only thing I can do for them in the present (Personal interview: 20 January 2012). ¹ Innocent indicates how something happens to time and how something has happened to his relationship with time.

Taking this observation as its starting point, this article asks: how do survivors construct time through informal mnemonic practices at selected memorials? How do they experience time during the commemoration? And what mode of temporality is inscribed in the materiality of memorials and, in particular, is construed and performed through the working of the corporeality of human remains? The analysis of these various dimensions of time, memory and trauma is informed by the experiences and mnemonic practices of care-takers working at memorials and their relationship with time. It includes observations of the annual commemoration of the Genocide against the Tutsi and draws on further contextual data from survivors who do not work at the memorials, but have survived the massacres that took place at those sites in 1994.

The exploration of time and memory is developed across three sections. The first reflects on scholarship on time, whilst the second contextualises memorialisation in Rwanda in light of the politics of memory and the interplay between collective and individual memory. It shows how we can understand individual practices of coming to terms with a violent past in a context of heavily contested and politicised remembrance. This section is followed by a brief reflection on, and description of, research methodology and epistemology. The third and primary section presents the empirical data which analyses temporalisation, such as time reversal, time synchronisation and preservation; and finally the nexus between time, memory and the body within the notion of ‘trauma-time’. It argues that temporal practices and dimensions are deeply anchored in the corporeality of human remains and dead bodies. Caring for the remnants of the dead is a way of symbolically transforming an experienced discontinuity into continuity. Through imagination projected onto the remains and the site itself, the absence of the dead is transformed into an absent presence; the imagination leads to a reversal of time in order to re-member the dead into the community of the living. The conclusion reflects on how these findings can enhance further research on time and transitional justice.

Of time

Time structures our experiences, behaviours and narratives. It is anchored in the very being in the world and serves different purposes at different points in ‘time’. Time can be an expression and exertion of power through forms of waiting (e.g. Hage, 2009; Turnbull, 2016) or a reflection of uncertainty and anxiety when waiting in a hospital (Auyero, 2012). Time is socially produced and reproduced in everyday life; we construct the time we live in. Even when talking about or analysing time we use, according to Munn (1992), media that has time already encoded. Time is furthermore metonymised, measured and ordered – at least in Western societies – in clock time. Without references to time in the form of durational indications, temporal metonyms and measurements, both social relationships and institutional functioning would become problematic, if not impossible.

People construct time through the relationship they have with particular reference points such as sunrise or sunset, clock time, industrial production cycles, seasons, lifetime cycles, or violent events. Fabian has described this refashioning of time as ‘temporalisation’ (Fabian, 1983: 25). Other work (see, e.g. Bourdieu, 1977) has framed the relationship between time, action and subjects as the latter being situated in time or constructing time. These reflections take into account a mode of temporalisation that strategically engages the future or manipulates time as to obscure temporality by ‘masking the pasts and futures embedded in the present’ (Munn, 1992: 108). Temporalisation emphasises time as a symbolic process, continuously produced and reproduced in people’s everyday practices. In other words, the connectivities between people, action, space and objects do not exist out of time (or out of space for that matter) but are entrenched in a symbolic process of time construction. Consequently, when bringing temporal aspects into an analysis of post-conflict informal practices, we need to look precisely at those interconnectivities. This case study, therefore, reflects on the connectivities between human remains, memorials, survivors and the practice of care-taking in producing and reproducing time.

If time is an unescapable and dominant aspect of human life (Munn, 1992), we ought to ask what happens with and to time during mass atrocity and genocide and how such an event mars the connectivities between time, people and objects in its aftermath. Marie-Louise, a survivor of the 1994 Genocide, gave a compelling account indicating an answer to this question, when interviewed by Hatzfeld:

Nyamata was very desolate, since all the roofs, all the doors and windows, had been taken off. But it was time itself that seemed broken…We no longer knew when it had all begun, the number of days and nights it had lasted, what season it was, and truly in the end we didn’t care. (Hatzfeld, 2005: 90)

The notion of a past–present–future relation is also central to formalised or institutionalised practices and mechanisms in the aftermath of conflict operating under, and alongside, informal temporal practices such as ‘care-taking’. Abramovitz has introduced the term ‘postconflict time’ (2014: 183) to describe how the international community operating in the aftermath of the Liberian civil war produced a lived experience of ‘transitional time and space’. This time was not only a time for transformation but a ‘messianic time’ that called for divine retribution and redemption in order to create ‘peace subjects’ (Abramovitz, 2014: 183). The Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission branded its work in terms of forgiveness, redemption and salvation and thus performed a stark separation between war time and peace time.

A different process of temporalisation took place in neighbouring Sierra Leone. As Shaw (2013) explains, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission tried to turn the clock back to ‘zero time’ of the war in order to reset the timeline and manipulate (in the sense of Bourdieu above) time in favour of a controlled, linear temporal sequence of redemption and progress in the aftermath of the civil war. Shaw borrows the notion of ‘synchronisation’ from Freeman (2010) who describes how families, states or institutions shape and manipulate the relationship with time in order to bind its subjects’ everyday routine to a particular temporality. Synchronisation, as used by transitional justice institutions in Sierra Leone, brought the past back into the ‘truth-telling’ process to create a clear-cut break between past and present and to create future peace time.

As these examples illustrate, in transitional justice the ‘before and after time’ that encompasses ‘zero-time’ as a reference point for a linear future trajectory of temporality appears to dominate current perceptions of time in the field (Doughty, 2017; Igreja, 2012; Teitel, 2003). Teitel asserts that transitional justice follows an ‘implied notion of progressive history’ (2003: 86), whilst others emphasise how transitional justice ‘requires a clear cut from past injustices so as to prevent their reoccurrence’ (Buckley-Zistel and Zolkos, 2011, 3). As Nagy (2008) stresses, linearity in the field helps to establish such a clear cut between ‘wartime’ (then) versus ‘peacetime’ (now). This linear temporality is entrenched in transitional justice institutions. For instance, Doughty describes how the legal architecture of the Rwandan gacaca courts ‘was built on, and attempted to be constitutive of, a rupture from the violent past’ (Doughty, 2017: 125). This ‘zero-time’ was reproduced by gacaca’s temporal jurisdiction (October 1990 to December 1994) which differentiated between genocide crimes and other violence that occurred before the genocide and continued into the late 1990s. As Doughty argues, this separation from ‘genocide time’ to ‘peace-time’ was necessary to open the trajectory for a future time that encompasses a united Rwanda and consolidates peace and social cohesion similar to the transitional justice discourse in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

However, different temporalities exist alongside and beneath formal institutional temporalisation processes (see, e.g. Doughty, 2017; Feuchtwang, 2009; Igreja, 2012). Doughty (2017) illustrates further how ‘social waiting’ during, before and after gacaca trials was linked to temporal uncertainty and how, at the same time concurrently, waiting as ‘sociality’ undermined the temporal logic – rupture, linearity and boundedness – of gacaca’s legal architecture by reconnecting to previous interactions and relationships. For the case of Mozambique, Gregor Igreja (2012) points to the dynamics of indigenous practices of healing and justice anchored in the gamba spirits and how these produce different temporalities that foreground transitional justice’s linear ‘before and after’ conception of transition time. Likewise, Krog et al. (2009) illustrate the tensions between individual lived multiple temporalities and transitional justice’s notion of linearity particularly in formalised transitional justice mechanisms such as truth and reconciliation commissions.

Collectively, this scholarship demonstrates how important a role time plays not only in the lives of survivors but also in the working of transitional justice institutions and their surrounding and purporting discourses. Moreover, the examples of how time is interrupted during violence and how linear time is constructed in its aftermath point to the need for a closer examination of the existence, production and performance of multiple temporalities in the ‘architecture of postconflict time’ (Abramovitz, 2014). For, as Igreja suggests, ‘a comprehensive notion of transitional justice has to be anchored in multiple temporalities in order to grasp the dynamic flow of time and deal with the consequences of violent crimes, which do not fade with the passage of time’ (Igreja, 2012: 409).

Memorialisation in post-genocide Rwanda and its scholarly perception

When I remember, I get troubled. And then they laugh at me that I am foolish (I have lost my mind). If I manage to discover where they were thrown, I get cynic insults that I always spend my time with bones. (Evening of April, Rwandan Commemoration Song, 3. Verse)

There are approximately 250 memorials in Rwanda, ² almost all of which are ‘authentic’ sites of the massacres that took place in the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi. Their authenticity derives from the violence these places, as geographical locations, witnessed and their capacity to communicate the traumatic events that occurred there (Assmann, 2007). These sites include churches, priest compounds, offices of local authorities and schools where people sought refuge during the genocide. Their authenticity supports the government’s politics of memory and creates a highly material, daily presence of the genocide which is reinforced by the display of human remains and even entire preserved bodies. ³

From 2012 onwards, the government has pushed for the re-exhumation of smaller mass graves at cell or sector level and for reburials in memorials at district and provincial levels (Personal interview: 22 September 2014). Bodies are untangled and the remains arranged by individual body parts before being buried in coffins, which are either lowered into (usually unsealed) mass graves or stored on shelves in burial chambers or tombs (see Major, 2015). The annual commemoration is deeply rooted in the official memory politics directed by the RPF. The commemoration ceremonies take place annually from April to July. ⁴ These ceremonies are ritualised, performative and symbolic, with survivor testimonies and burials (of newly discovered remains) providing the focal point. The symbolism is reinforced by holding the ceremonies at the sites of the massacres, which are often at the memorials on the calendric day the massacres took place.

The debate on memorialisation in Rwanda tends to centre on a critique of this state-led approach. Even though there are Hutu victims buried at the memorials, and even Hutus working at some sites, it is undoubtedly true that official remembrance is directed towards Tutsi victims. Brauman et al. (2000) suggest that Hutu victims are side-lined and that, in turn, a so-called ‘tutsification of genocide’ (Prunier, 2009: 3) has taken place as a result of the RPF’s initiatives. Lemarchand (2009: 103) similarly speaks of a ‘thwarted memory’: a memory that is state controlled, determining how and who is to be remembered and victimised (see also Pottier, 2002; Vidal, 2001). Others have criticised the exclusion of Hutu victims and warned of a continuity of ‘symbolic violence’ (Brauman et al., 2000: 13) through memorials. The general conclusion arrived at in these works is one that memorialisation in Rwanda has led to a ‘politicisation of victimhood’ (Burnet, 2009: 80), which impedes reconciliation and peacebuilding efforts (e.g. Buckley-Zistel, 2006; King, 2010).

States’ initiatives to construct a shared version of the past for political interests are, however, nothing new, as work in other contexts has shown (Gillis, 1994; Ibreck, 2010). It is no surprise, then, that some argue that memorials and commemoration are typically conceptualised as tools of politics and nationalism, particularly after violence (Ashplant et al., 2004). Edkins (2003) offers a new take on this strand of the literature, arguing that commemoration is a practice of concealment that aims to reconstitute sovereign power after mass violence. Mass violence and genocide are the ultimate violation of trust in the validity of social norms and values (Robben and Suárez-Orozco, 2000). States commemorate to repair this rupture, but Edkins (2003) reminds us that memory politics are subject to political activism and demands for change from below. States do not necessarily exercise a monopoly on memory politics; rather, various social actors are involved at different times and places, sometimes leading to ‘insurrectionary or counter-hegemonial’ developments (Edkins, 2003: 54; see also Selimovic, 2013; Young, 1992).

The work of Edkins and others is a response to an essentialising view on collective memory (e.g. Halbwachs, 1992) that approaches it as a coercive and totalising – even annihilating – process in which individual memory is completely aligned, absorbed and integrated into the public dominant memory (Kantsteiner, 2002; Olick, 2008). Criticising this approach to collective memory, Shahzad elucidates that collective memories are ‘dynamic, multiple, shared and contested in their nature’ (Shahzad, 2012: 379), whilst Ryan holds that ‘the analysis of collective memory purely in terms of elites and hegemony mistakenly neglects the reception of the official memory’ and the possibilities for ‘mnemonic resistance’ (Ryan, 2010: 159). As such, memory in Rwanda – as in other contexts – is complex and dynamic, thus complicating the findings of the above-mentioned studies on Rwanda that tend to regard memorialisation as mainly state controlled, with few avenues for memorialisation ‘from below’ and little space for practices of individual remembrance.

Located somewhere in the middle of these two camps, a further strand of scholarship illustrates the complexity of Rwandan remembrance. Longman and Rutagengwa (2006) observe how experiences and perspectives on the genocide are complex and attitudes towards its memorialisation are not necessarily determined by ethnicity. Rwanda, they argue, ‘presents an interesting case study of the limits of a government’s ability to shape the collective memory of a population’ (Longman and Rutagengwa, 2006: 243). Genocide survivors in particular play a crucial role in shaping the agenda of remembrance politics in Rwanda (Ibreck, 2010). The survivor umbrella organisation, Ibuka, for instance successfully lobbied to change the commemoration dates from 1–7 April to 7–12 April and has, from the very beginning, committed a hundred days of mourning to honour their loved ones (Personal interview: 10 August 2014), whereas the state officially commemorates for seven days only.

It is within this scholarly context that we must situate and understand the individual practices of survivors working at memorials. Even though these practices are, undoubtedly, deeply entangled in the broader politics of memory (see, e.g. Burnet, 2012; Longman, 2017), there is a need for a more detailed, appreciative analysis of micro-level memorialisation that can account for survivors’ autonomy and personal meaning-making. Perhaps the most obvious illustration of this micro-memorialisation is the practices that run parallel with the Rwandan law that only allows national memorial sites to display human remains. Despite this rule, the smaller memorials in rural locations still display remains and even entirely preserved dead bodies (e.g. Kinazi or Kaduha). Indeed, it was the idea of survivors of the Kaduha massacres to display bodies in glass coffins. Here, the survivor’s engagement in the production of memory is distinct from, and sometimes at odds with, the state’s attempts to employ memorials and human remains to consolidate its powers (Ibreck, 2010). These state-driven politics of memory, and the individual practices of coming to terms with the past that often simultaneously run alongside, sometimes even against each other at the memorials, filter into a highly complex research context to navigate. The next section will outline and reflect on some of these challenges.

Researching memorialisation in post-genocide Rwanda

Researching a highly politicised context like Rwanda poses certain challenges and limitations. Thomson (2010: 20) argues that the Rwandan government ‘exerts significant control over sociopolitical discourses and seeks to control what people can say about the government and its policies’ (see also Burnet, 2012; Jessee, 2011; Thomson, 2013). Others have ascribed (rural) Rwanda as a ‘pervasive culture of secrecy’ (Waldorf, 2006: 21), arguing that researchers cannot expect people to say the truth about the genocide. ⁵ However, there is contestation about the ‘reach and overreach’ (Ingelaere, 2007) of the state in Rwanda. Clark (2014) and Palmer (2015), amongst others, demonstrate in their work on the gacaca courts that the perception of ‘peasants’ as vessels or passive resisters is misleading and risks essentialising entire groups in society, reducing ‘Rwandan citizens to mere ciphers of government diktat’ (Clark, 2014: 194). Such a view strips ordinary Rwandans – and survivors in particular – of their human agency.

In an effort to mitigate the risk of politicised ‘iconic stories’ (Jessee, 2017), I searched for very personal and intimate accounts of how survivors re-made their worlds after the Genocide. I acknowledge, however, that survivor accounts and testimonies can be co-opted and instrumentalised by state elites for power purposes and the search for legitimacy. I am also aware that individual life narratives are embedded in broader national, political and social meta-narratives (see, e.g. Antze and Lambek, 1996) that might be adapted and integrated into personal biographies and memories. As outlined above, however, there is always also space for counter-narratives and ‘mnemonic resistance’ (Ryan, 2010: 159). As argued by Shahzad (2012: 279), individuals can be invested in multiple versions of an event depending on agency, access to technologies and membership of social networks. An appreciation of this intersection of collective and individual memory opens up space to interpret accounts of survival alongside individual experiences and personal biographies.

My research follows a ‘victims-approach’ where the starting point is the victim and the findings are based on victims’ realities (Roumbouts, 2002). ⁶ My research included semi-structured interviews, survivor testimonies, focus group discussions with female survivors between 2009 and 2014 and participatory observation of commemoration ceremonies on cell, sector, district, province and national levels in 2012 and 2014. I collaborated with oversight and government bodies, such as the Commission for the Fight Against Genocide (CNLG), which manages all relevant aspects of memorialisation in Rwanda, Ibuka (the survivor umbrella organisation) and Avega (a widow organisation). In total, I interviewed around 60 individuals, including care-takers, memorial staff, staff of survivor organisations including Ibuka and Avega, CNLG staff members and individuals remotely involved in memorialisation. I chose national memorial sites, as well as very remote memorials mainly unknown to outsiders (e.g. Kaduha, Kinazi, Cyahinda or Cyanika). Most of those are only under marginal influence of the central government or even local authorities (Auchter, 2015). The memorials covered in this article are: Cyahinda; Murambi; Nyamata; Ntarama; Nyarabuye; Kinazi; and Bisesero. This sample includes the different provinces to ensure a geographical balance, which is particularly important given that the genocide played out differently across the regions.

To recruit participants for the study, I asked care-takers and survivors if they wanted to share their memories with me. I defined care-takers as survivors who volunteered at the memorials and who cleaned and preserved human remains and dead bodies. ⁷ It is important to stress that care-taking is different from the often-coercive communal work, umuganda, or the imposed ingando camps. Care-takers engage in this particular work at the memorials for very personal reasons related to their experience of loss, grief and witnessing the cruel death of loved ones; care-taking is not a top-down enforced activity. I therefore differentiated between care-takers and official memorial staff. The latter usually work for the CNLG and are responsible for giving tours for visitors and managing the day-to-day working of the memorial, at least at the national sites. I also spoke to survivors who did not work as care-takers at the memorials but had experienced the massacres at the particular sites.

Survivors in Rwanda are a diverse group of people with different views, beliefs and understandings of memory and dealing with the past more generally. Some survivors have expressed their opposition to the particular way of memorialising the dead (see Auchter, 2015; Hatzfeld, 2005), whilst others have chosen to disengage with survivor organisations out of fear these had become co-opted by political elites (Burnet, 2012). The survivors I spoke to cannot, therefore, be said to represent a ‘general view’. When I speak of ‘survivors’, I refer to those individuals who were part of my research and were mainly, but not only, ‘care-takers’, without claiming to generalise viewpoints or experiences. It is also important to note that most of the interviews were conducted with survivors who do not belong to a well-educated, urban elite active in organising remembrance or raising funds, nor do they work for international agencies or the state. Furthermore, this study was limited to Tutsi survivors, thus leaving out the narratives and experiences of Hutu who were victimised during or after the genocide.

I had to speak through a proxy – a Rwandan research assistant – who negotiated access on my behalf, explaining why I was conducting the research and what exactly I would be asking about. The testimonies were given in Kinyarwanda with contemporaneous translation into English by my research assistant; I then wrote down the translated version or occasionally recorded testimonies by taking written notes. The encounter was very much inscribed in cultural and colonial hierarchies: as a muzungu (white person), an identity ascribed to foreigners. I am a privileged person who has financial means and educational resources, which in this situation establishes a hierarchy of race, in addition to the binary of Global North and Global South. This, in turn, affects the production of data. The stories collected here are products of ‘interconnection across difference’ (Tsing, 2005: 3–4).

I did not go into the field to test or prove theoretical concepts. I understood violence as an experience and was interested in how people remember the genocide and how they remake their lives after this experience. That said, this ontological understanding of violence also shapes how we ask questions and how we understand our data. Importantly, ‘experience and interpretation are inseparable for perpetrators, victims, and ethnographers alike’ (Nordstrom and Robben, 1995: 4). Moreover, the ways in which the survivor is positioned in the research process is very much shaped by the movements between the tangible physicality of the social landscape and the silences of the unspeakable experience (Tewksbury and Gagne, 2001: 72, cited in Liamputtong, 2007: 7). These are the dynamics and constraints we ought to bear in mind when collecting and interpreting data and reading stories that emerge from a victim-approach.

Temporalisation: Time-reversal

This section introduces the reader to the world of care-takers at a selection of Rwandan memorials. I was interested to know what care-taking means for these survivors and how we can understand this practice in the context of temporalisation (i.e. the production of time through symbolic practices). Some survivors have pledged their lives to the preservation and care of the remains of those who perished in 1994. The white lime powder must be applied to the human remains on a regular basis to prevent them from decomposing. Although it is now more than twenty years since the genocide, mass graves in which bodies were disposed of continue to be discovered. Interestingly, most of the care-takers I visited at the memorials were in the process of cleaning and preserving bones that were recently found in the area. At the small, rural memorials (e.g. Cyahinda, Kaduha and Kinazi) care-takers have often given the memorial a very personal touch, for instance, by putting up pictures of their deceased family members, displaying personal belongings and decorating the site with flower pots. The memorial is a place where they feel at home and close to their loved ones, as many survivors stressed during interviews. It is in this context that we can begin to understand their responses to questions around temporalisation through care-taking and imagination.

Jean is a care-taker at the Cyahinda memorial in Rwanda’s Southern province. I asked him during my first visit what it means to him to take care of the remains at the memorial. He explained:

I am the person in charge of cleaning the bodies. What it means to me? Cleaning bodies means that they are given back dignity, because they were not supposed to die. (Personal interview: 6 September 2011)

In their descriptions, Jean and Innocent both talk about cleaning and caring for the dead bodies as a symbolic way to return dignity to their dead loved ones and therefore to reverse their humiliation. This speaks to what Améry has described as Zeitumkehrung (time reversal) which he defines as the contradictory nature of resentment, namely the futile attempt to reverse the past. Améry writes:

It nails each of us to the cross of his/her shattered past. Absurdly, it demands to reverse the irreversible. Resentment blocks the exit into the actually human dimension, the future. I know those caught in resentment have a sense of time which is twisted, crazy, one may say, since it demands for the impossible, i.e. the return into the past and the annulment of what happened therein. (Améry, 1997: 11; translation by author)

These ‘corporeal violations’ during the genocide can be linked with culturally embedded codes that were projected and materialised on the body of the victims. Impalement, evisceration of pregnant women, the severing of victims’ Achilles tendons and breast oblation of women were common and widespread techniques of cruelty (Taylor, 2002). In interviews, this type of violence was often framed as ‘dying without dignity’ or as ‘animalistic’. In a focus group with young female survivors, Rosalinde stated: ‘people were killed without respect and dignity; so, burying them is about to give them back dignity in burial’ (Focus group discussion: 14 September 2011). Given the cruelty of the deaths and the way the bodies were treated post-mortem, the burials form a central aspect of time reversal. The highly symbolic burials during commemoration serve – similar to taking care of the dead at the memorials – the purpose of reversing the indignity suffered by the dead. Antoinette explained that ‘if there is no commemoration, it is as living without dignity, like living with animality’, whilst in the same discussion Marie emphasised that ‘exhumations and burials are a kind of healing because it brings back the dignity and respect to the dead’ (Focus group discussion: 14 September 2011).

To make sense of the practice of time reversal in light of the literature on temporality, a useful point of departure is the sociological work on time, which helps to better contextualise the idea of Zeitumkehrung. Time is usually thought of, and experienced in, a linear fashion: what is referred to as linear or chronological time is fixed by a beginning and an end, such as birth and death (Greenhouse, 1989; Koselleck, 2002; Sorokin and Merton, 1937). As mentioned above, after mass violence and genocide this linearity and sequence of time seems broken. It is subject to a caesura, resulting in dialectic of time: between the past and the present there lies a seemingly insurmountable abyss, a vacuum (Koselleck, 2002). The frequent mentioning of the lost dignity of the dead relates to such a historical caesura because it is experienced as incisive and ‘unusual’. Indeed, all survivors stressed the humiliating and cruel way of dying during the genocide and described witnessing this as a significant unsettling experience. Aline, a survivor of Ntarama, observed that ‘death is normal, because it is normal to die. But this was an extreme death that was more than a normal death, because nobody cared like one would take care of sick people. Death was animalistic’ (Personal interview: 8 September 2011).

The linearity of time in the natural flow of birth, life and death is broken through the brutality of the death. Nordstrom connects this experience to discontinuity. She argues that ‘between the world as it was, the world as it should be, and the now of a world destroyed lies an abyss, a discontinuity, a need to define the one by the other, and the impossibility of doing so’ (Nordstrom, 1997: 190). The brutality of the genocide has broken the chronological sequence of past, present and future, so that there is a vacuum between these temporal dimensions expressed in the interviews by using words such as ‘back’ and ‘re-’. Care-taking and ritualised burials are thus an attempt to transform discontinuity into continuity. Furthermore, these attempts to reverse time not only aim at returning the dead but also giving them a place amongst the community of the living, to re-member them. Through the process of returning, the presence of the dead is secured ‘in the passage of time’ and thus discontinuity is transformed into continuity, at least symbolically.

Another significant aspect of temporalisation that emerged in interviews was that of imagination. Time reversal as a process of temporalisation is deeply entangled with the corporeality of the dead and their present absence. Williams (2004) argues that the presence of the dead affects the experiences, actions and practices of mourners and evokes powerful memories of the past. He reminds us that the bodily remnants of the dead have an affective, binding force rather than being mere substances that are ‘manipulated and disposed of by the mourners’ (Williams, 2004: 265). This ‘agency’ of bones suggests an affective force of both presence and absence (Filippucci et al., 2013). Care-takers were convinced that amongst the bones were those of their families. Martin, a survivor who worked at Nyarabuye, stated that some of the new graves were made possible through gacaca and that people just knew in which of those the remains of their loved ones were resting (Personal interview: 18 January 2012). Although the individuality of the human remains at Rwanda’s memorials is transformed into a collective mass by the disentangled bodies, the ‘agency’ of the bones ‘inspires the imaginative and material work of gathering-in and binding individuated dead to a particular set of remains’ (Major, 2015: 176).

This imaginative force was most striking at the memorials exhibiting entirely preserved dead bodies in the South of Rwanda, including Murambi, Kibeho, Kaduha and Cyahinda. When I returned to Cyahinda memorial in 2014, I asked Jean, the care-taker, about the dead body that was, as he and other survivors frame it, ‘sleeping’ on one of the shelves. It was a woman with long hair, who was still wearing a colourfully striped jumper. Jean explained that her name is Daphrose, that she was his neighbour and a teacher in his village; her entire family was killed in 1994. He continued: ‘before they killed her they took her baby from her, cut off its head and brought it back to her. She rests in peace here, now’. The absent presence of the dead is tangible at the memorials: their absence is transcended by traces such as photographs, clothes or their bodily remnants (Trigg, 2009; Young, 1993).

When I met Jean during my first visit to the memorial in 2011, he explained what the practice of care-taking meant to him: ‘I can imagine how they looked like; when I am here [in the crypt], they are with me all the time and I feel at home’ (Personal interview: 6 September 2011). His imagination of the living through the remnants of the dead speaks to what Booth, drawing on ancient Greek mythology, has described as the presence of the absence, the eikōn (Booth, 2006: 89). This power of imagination was further expressed by Angelique, a woman I visited at her home, and who had survived the massacre at the Ntarama church, but lost her husband and child:

I don’t see skulls and bones as such, but I see them as real people. When praying [in the Ntarama church], I think of them making noise and playing. I also see how badly they were killed. (Personal interview: 8 September 2011)

The ability of bones and dead bodies to reaffirm the ‘present absence’ and evoke remembrance of the past is further illustrated in François’ account. In his testimony, François, who survived the massacre at Nyange parish, emphasised: ‘I remember what happened here [at Nyange church] and I imagine how they [his two children and his wife] were killed’ (Personal interview: 2 October 2014). Here, remembrance has multiple meanings: departing from the word re-member, remembrance is directly related to the absence of the dead. Remembrance signifies bringing back objects or persons. This effort ‘to reattach the limbs of the body’ (Becker and Knudson, 2003: 694) implies that forgetting, in itself, would be an act of violence inflicted upon the dead. In the Rwandan context, this is communicated through a proverb, as explained to me by Cherilyn, an elderly woman who survived Nyamata: ‘the family that doesn’t remember will fade away’ (Personal interview: 2 September 2014). Remembrance serves to restore the dead’s membership (literally to re-member) into the community or family of the living (Becker and Knudson, 2003: 694). Remembrance, with respect to absence, reflects a specific fear: to lose those who are absent forever (Booth, 2006). It is precisely here that temporalisation is at work through care-taking and the force of imagination. Both construe a symbolical ‘time reversal’ that seeks to integrate the loss of loved ones in a meaningful way into the everyday and into the workings of everyday’s ‘ordinary time’.

This temporal logic, anchored in the remains of those who perished and the work on them, is related to, but different from the temporality that is evoked by the materiality of the memorial sites, as we will see in the next section.

Preservation of ‘zero-time’

A crucial element of temporality to emerge from the accounts retold to me, but which was also apparent from the materiality of the sites themselves, was the preservation of ‘zero-time’. Memorial sites stop time, loop back into the past, to ‘zero-time’ as described in the beginning of this article and, in turn, prevent forgetting. The traces from the past are evoked at and preserved through the materiality of the sites; they keep what would otherwise be forgotten. This role of memorials was echoed in the words of a CNLG staff member who emphasised that ‘the sites are used to keep memory’ (Personal interview: 13 September 2011). Similarly, Jeanette (Nyamata) stated:

We would like to have everything preserved. So that memory is always preserved. It is also for people like you to know, to understand because otherwise you simply wouldn’t believe…. We need to preserve memory so it doesn’t happen again, never again. (Personal interview: 2 September 2014)

Time preservation or, more accurately, the preservation of the past through its corporeal and material traces, is a core component of the Rwandan memorials. In her survivor testimony, Vestine, a female survivor of Kinazi, wished that ‘they would take more care of the site and that there would be more products to help preserve their bodies’ (Personal interview: 30 September 2014). Kinazi is a memorial (unknown to most people) in the South of Rwanda. It houses the remains of around 60,000 victims, some of which are displayed.

Many survivors working at the memorial sites expressed a deep concern about how to make the sites more sustainable, especially how to protect and preserve the dead bodies and human remains for future generations. The physiology of preservation was described as difficult because of micro-organisms and fungi that damage the bodies (Personal interview Kigali: 22 September 2014), while the mass graves must be protected from the country’s wet climate during the rainy seasons. In Nyarabuye, for example, the mass graves (as of 2014) that house the remains of around 50,000 people were still not protected by a roof, although the plans for a refurbishment of the site were under way at the time of my visit (Personal interview: 9 September 2014). At Murambi, where around 800 lime powdered dead bodies ‘sleep’ in the classrooms of the poly-technical school that became the site of horrible massacres, the decision was made to preserve the bodies by new technology. A mobile laboratory is in use to remove the lime powder and micro-organisms on the bodies before putting them to rest in coffins that are temperature controlled and sealed to protect against environmental decay (Personal interview: 22 November 2016).

Through these dead bodies, the violent event itself is preserved in the present, and the place (of the massacre) and its violent history, as well as its ‘victims’, inscribed into a collective memory, both nationally and globally. Assman (2007) and Connerton (1989) have described this as a ‘synchronisation’ of time in which it is through the remains and the authenticity of the sites that the temporal dimensions of past and present merge into one. This aim of memorials is similar to the manipulation of time as identified by Munn (1992) and as observed by Shaw (2013) for formalised transitional justice processes. It seeks to anchor a specific temporality in the routines and everyday lives of people. The temporal merging is directed to the future, the ‘never again’ of violence and is thus intrinsically linked to the aforementioned past–present–future relation. This relation was captured well by Rosemarie, Aline and Agathe during our focus group: ‘the memory and its preservation is important because it protects and preserves the testimonies…. The memorial sites will still be in existence when survivors have died’ (Focus group discussion: 14 September 2011). Vincent, another survivor who lives near the Bisesero memorial, similarly acknowledged:

Memorials are there to not forget. The way you find victims, you cannot forget. The site is used to keep memory. Commemoration is abstract, but at site, you can see the material of genocide, of remembering. This is to always preserve memory. (Personal interview: 15 September 2011)

Enacting trauma time

During the 1994 Genocide, most people witnessed the death of family members, friends and neighbours or were attacked themselves. Twenty years after the Genocide, many survivors (and perpetrators) continue to struggle with the physical and mental legacies of these traumatic experiences (e.g. Richters et al., 2008; Totten and Ubaldo, 2011). Trauma perversely shapes the everyday lives of survivors and remains a major problem for reconciliation and for future generations due to generational transmission (Brounéus, 2008; Staub et al., 2003).

Trauma is often referred to as a ‘wound’ to the psyche, entailing the experience of great emotional anguish related to a specific event (Eyerman, 2001; Herman, 1997; Leys, 2000). In clinical terms, trauma is described as post-traumatic stress disorder that affects both body and mind. Rwandan survivors often talk about their ‘trauma’ as sadness or severe grief (guhahamuka, literally ‘to speak with trembling voice’ or ‘to be physically overcome by fear’) and recount their physical problems such as headaches, stomach issues, fatigue, insomnia or intrusive nightmares (Totten and Ubaldo, 2011).

One characteristic of psychic trauma is its medical latency, which is integrated into explanations of traumatic memory. It means that survivors of a violent event banish it from their consciousness (Herman, 1997), known as ‘dissociation’, because it is too horrible to recount and relive in the direct aftermath of the event (Laub, 1992a, 1992b; Van der Kolk and van der Hart, 1991). Van der Kolk and van der Hart (1991) explain that the frightening experience is stored differently from a ‘normal’ one and can neither be retrieved under normal circumstances nor placed under voluntary control or conscious awareness. However, this traumatic memory may come back as an involuntary intrusion or re-enactment of the event without it being transformed into a meaningful experience. The re-enactment is then relived in the exact timeframe of its occurrence and is therefore not part of narrative memory.

This process has been described by Lyotard (1990: 16) as ‘double blow’ (Nachträglichkeit) and led other scholars, such as Laub (1991, 57; see also Caruth, 1991), to define trauma as ‘the record that has yet to be made’. Derrida has described traumatic memory as a crypt, a closed off place, hidden deep within oneself that is formed by violence but kept in silence (Derrida, 1976 cited in Argenti and Schramm, 2009: 11). This hidden crypt becomes a place of incorporation rather than of introjection which is at the root of a somatic embodiment of memory, such that ‘traumatic memories are doomed to return only as experiences, and not as discursive memories – they can never be representations, but only presence’ (Argenti and Schramm, 2009: 12).

Latent traumatic memory can be reawakened from hiding through certain triggers. The commemoration time in Rwanda from April to July is particularly difficult for survivors because this is a natural trigger for painful memories to remerge. It is no surprise that trauma is a major characteristic of the annual commemoration ceremonies (Ibreck, 2012). At the largest ceremony in the Amahoro Stadium in Kigali, ‘hunting cries’ echo during survivor testimonies; people collapse and are carried out of the stadium. During the 2012 opening ceremony at the Amahoro stadium, for example, around 377 people experienced traumatic flashbacks, something which is referred to as trauma cases. The Rwandan Ministry of Statistics reported a total of 3,094 trauma cases throughout the country in 2014; in addition, the same article stressed that trauma cases in Rwanda increased significantly over recent years (Ngoboka, 2015).

Trauma is placed at the intersection of memory, embodiment and time and thus linked to the temporal experience during commemoration. It is therefore important to integrate the embodiment of trauma into an analysis of time experience since we can assume that the event of violence fundamentally changes the perception and experience of time. This contention is well captured in Holocaust survivor Charlotte Delbo’s memoirs (2014), in which she recounts how Auschwitz exists in a perpetual present that produces a ‘counter-time’ that interferes in her normal progress through ‘ordinary time’. In an interview with Laub, she further attests that ‘I live beside it. Auschwitz is there, fixed and unchangeable, but wrapped in the impervious skin of memory that segregates itself from the present me’ (cited in Langer, 1991: 5).

Developing this further, Langer (1997) argues that there is an important distinction between ‘durational’ time and ‘chronological’ time. Durational time is, as Delbo describes above, always a part of her as if she lives in two different temporalities, the one of Auschwitz and the present now. Durational time remains therefore stuck in the body and, according to Langer, defines survivors’ selves (1997: 57–58). Améry has also described this phenomenon, reminding us that ‘he who succumbs to torture, can no longer be native to this world. That a fellow human being was experienced as a counter-human being (Gegenmensch), remains as a retained terror’ (Améry, 1997: 111; author’s translation). This ‘retained terror’ forms a part of the durational time and remains neither unforgotten nor possible to forget, but stays in the survivor’s body: ‘it is not part of…historical past, but of [the] durational present’ (Langer, 1997: 59). For survivors, then, time is both durational and chronological, but the durational time is continuous in that it is not experienced sequentially as a memory ‘from which one can be liberated’ (Langer, 1997: 58). Durational time thus assails the memory of a witness and prevents her or him from integrating the event into a narrative memory.

The co-existence of durational time and chronological time in survivors’ bodies clarifies how trauma is triggered during Rwandan commemoration: the performance of commemorative rituals reactivates the durational time because two different temporal orders exist and overlap during commemoration. This is the day on which the event in the past happened and the calendric day on which the remembrance of this event is commemorated (Connerton, 1989). A homogenisation of time takes place as these temporal modes are qualitatively equated, which in turn leads to a dominance of the past in the present (Assmann, 2007) and finally to a collapse of temporal frames. Simultaneously, the homogenisation of time refers to its repeatability, for chronological similarities allow the exact same repetition of ritual practices. For example, commemoration in Rwanda between approximately 1997 and 2013 followed the same patterns of ritual practices, at the beginning of which we find the ignition of the ‘eternal flame’ in Gisozi, followed by the ceremonies at the Rebero memorial at the end of the mourning week.

Through these rituals of commemoration, the past returns, is homogenised and made tangible to the body, and is therefore embodied. This time, however, bears a different quality because the past is not merely returned to the present, but experienced somatically, since, in contrast to chronological time, it has always (starting with the act of violence) existed in the body. When I asked Emanuel, a survivor of Murambi, about trauma and commemoration, he chose a very powerful analogy to explain what happens during commemoration:

It is a dream. It means a person, who goes back and finds himself in the bad situation again. He or she is faced during the past. This situation can be compared to a river that is moving. When you watch that river, inside there is mud, which is stable, but when you step inside the water there is a mixture; it becomes dirty, unclear. Everything mixes up; you drown in the muddy water, because it becomes all the same, past and present. You can’t see and you drown. (Personal interview: 2 September 2011)

From a medical perspective, so-called ‘flashbacks’ lead to the present being experienced during the flashback as the past, breaking out of the boundaries of temporal imagination and thus negating a future. Stolorow (2011) has described this traumatic experience as follows: ‘In the region of trauma, all duration or stretching-along collapses, past becomes present and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition. Trauma, in other words, is timeless’.

Commemoration and the embodiment of trauma is a very difficult time for survivors. In focus group discussions, Louise and Delfine take Stolorow’s point a step further by explaining that ‘commemoration is a time of grief, where people can get sick of what they remember and of death. The calendric day of death is the day of tears’ (Personal interview: 14 September 2011). The cyclical endless repetition of the horror is, as Emanuel said, a ‘bad dream’ from which awakening is impossible; this is why it is so difficult for survivors. Anette, the elderly lady who had lost her son during the genocide, reflected further on that point:

People have not yet accepted in themselves what happened to them. By remembering what happened, the event, they get traumatized because in their heads they relive everything, the horrible events, again. Commemoration is a difficult time. (Personal interview: 15 September 2011)

But it is not only commemoration that is a difficult time for survivors. Similar to Delbo’s and many other Holocaust survivors’ experiences of time, Rwandan survivors live with the genocide, ‘fixed and unchangeable’. In Rwanda, however, survivors implicitly refer to Delbo’s ‘counter-time’ or Langer’s ‘durational time’ with analogies to the heart or perhaps more precisely, different shades of a ‘broken’ heart (umutima). The heart in Rwandan cosmology indicates the humanness of someone and is key to understanding the notion of Rwandan personhood (Ingelaere, 2016). For instance, in our focus group discussion (14 September 2011), Rosalinde stated that ‘genocide and death stays in our heart’, whilst Rose Marie (cited in Totten and Umbaldo, 2011: 34) admitted that ‘in my heart there is a huge number of coffins, as many as the number who were killed’. The latter statement reflects what Derrida described in his analogy of traumatic memory as a crypt. Drawing on this analogy, Argenti and Schramm write that the memory of dead loved ones may take residence inside this crypt so that they remain safe dead in ‘me’: ‘By means of incorporation, the dead thus become the living-dead inside oneself’ (Argenti and Schramm, 2009: 12). Other survivors referred to their loved ones residing in the crypt as a ‘saddened heart’ (Personal interview: 20 August 2014) or a ‘deep sorrow in my heart’ (Totten and Umbaldo, 2011: 155) or ‘it is not safe in my heart’ (Personal interview: 2 September 2014). And Donatia, a female survivor interviewed by Burnet asserted, ‘yes that is how it is for us. The genocide lives in us’ (in Burnet, 2012: 10). The broken umutima therefore indicates that the dead residing in the crypt of traumatic memories form part of survivors’ personhood for they ultimately reside in their heart, in their humanness.

This section has highlighted the complex connectivities between time, memory and body through the prism of trauma. Capturing this complexity in the term ‘trauma time’ points to a fragmented and cyclical temporality that is dialectic in nature. On the one hand, the ‘other time’ of the intrusive event exists in continuous duality next to ordinary time. On the other hand, the traumatic event comes back cyclically, with a force that breaks temporal frames and in turn leads the past, present and future to collapse into timelessness. The notion of trauma time also illustrates how survivors are caught in the web of the re-enactment of zero-time, the temporal break that stands at the beginning of formalised linear goals of healing and redemption. However, it also highlights that there is no clear break and no real ‘peace time’ in which people move on from the events of zero-time. The plight of survivors demonstrates that the clock of genocide time continues ticking, going back and forth, without ever reaching a future time for the ‘genocide stays in the heart’.

Of other times

This article has explored the intersection between memory, time and practices of dealing with the past in the context of the Genocide in Rwanda, based on first-hand accounts of survivors. By critically engaging with the notion of temporality, it has revealed how different temporal practices and experiences animate Rwandan memorials and that the annual commemoration ceremonies evoke different temporal modes for survivors. Time reversal is a fundamental form of temporalisation, anchored in the corporeality of human remains and dead bodies. Through care-taking of the remnants of the dead, as well as their burials, the irreversible death itself, and the dead’s dignity, aim to be restored and, most importantly, the absence of the dead transformed into a presence. The care-takers project their own cognitions, sentiments and emotions onto the bodily remains of the dead. These projections, strengthened by the material traces of the dead, evoke imagination and memory of the dead in the present. We can understand this form of temporalisation as a crucial moment in an attempt to transform discontinuity into continuity and to connect the past and those who perished to the present.

Temporalisation also features prominently as part of survivors’ repertoires to honour those who died from unjust deaths and to repair their own fragmented lives. The temporal logics discussed remind us that commemorations and memorials are practices performed to mourn and honour the dead even though these might be (mis)used to create national identity or political legitimacy (Edkins, 2003; Winter, 1995). Even though the temporal practices and experiences undertaken and felt by survivors might not be resistant to state-enforced public memory, they nevertheless prevail alongside and underneath its surface. Indeed, time reversal is at odds with the temporal dimensions of time preservation (synchronisation) at the memorials and time homogenisation during commemoration. Both time preservation and homogenisation keep the abyss between past, present and future open. It is precisely the aim of commemoration, by reactivating the past to trigger a homogenisation of time, that is a realisation of the past for a better future and its manifestation in the present. However, for survivors, it is difficult to anticipate and control a future that seems to be homogenised in a single temporal dimension, the trauma time during commemoration. The temporal experiences of timelessness and durational or counter-time discussed in this article illustrate that a healing or redemption appears impossible, since, in the words of genocide survivors, ‘genocide and death stay in our hearts’.

This temporal perspective on survivors’ practices of remaking the past at Rwanda’s memorials stands in contrast to a focus on societal remembrance in Rwanda, especially the politicisation of commemoration and memorials (i.e. the politics of memory) (see, e.g. Brandstetter, 2010; Buckley-Zistel, 2006; De Lame, 2003; Longman, 2017; Vidal, 2001). The particular way of memorialising the dead in Rwanda has been heavily criticised for being at odds with Rwandan culture and for the danger of re-traumatisation (Cook, 2006; Guyer, 2009; Lemarchand, 2009). ⁸ However, mnemonic practices of care-takers at memorial sites, as well as the meaning of commemoration for them and other survivors, remain largely unexplored (for exceptions, see, e.g. Burnet, 2012; Ibreck, 2010, 2012). A central contribution of this article is, therefore, to bring this insight into sharper relief and to offer a nuanced understanding of temporal practices of the individual, as people who have experienced pain and loss. This experience produces different temporalities and mars the relation to time itself.

What are the implications of this research for transitional justice more generally? This article shows that different, and at times ambivalent, forms of temporality co-exist in the Rwandan memory-making process. It adds to the emerging work in critical transitional justice studies that integrates temporality in their analysis of post-conflict and post-genocide endeavours for peace and justice, with a special focus on how time is constructed within and alongside transitional justice mechanisms (see, e.g. Abramowitz, 2014; Doughty, 2017; Igreja, 2012). This article departs from the linear ‘before and after time’ that is generally found within the field of transitional justice research (Igreja, 2012) in significant ways. It demonstrates that memory is contingent and, in terms of temporality, serves multiple purposes that at times work to preserve discontinuity and at other times aim to overcome the abyss between temporalities. Trauma time at the intersection of body, memory and trauma as well as the different forms of temporalisation, such as time reversal and time synchronisation, all follow different temporal logics and are appropriated in different and multiple ways. Therefore, memory and time can be conflicting rationales in the pursuit of justice and peace.

These findings link to what Jelin has found with regard to memory and transitional justice in many Latin American countries, namely that the ‘temporality of memories is not linear, chronological, or rational’ (Jelin, 2003: 55); rather, memory often refuses to be confined, and defined, by formalised and institutionalised transitional justice measures, based as they are in chronological time. In other words, memory is not something that can be deployed or institutionalised by transitional justice actors, but is something deeply rooted in the experience of violence that shapes both individual mnemonic practices and the broader memory-making process. The inclusion of temporality in transitional justice can further a comprehensive understanding of how traumatic events are understood and interpreted outside of institutionalised settings such as courts or truth and reconciliation commissions. It calls for acknowledgement of the diversity of notions of human life, human suffering and justice that survivors actively sustain and create in order to come to terms with genocide. Ultimately, the notions of closure, redemption or healing do not reflect temporal ‘realities’, at least for those survivors who participated in this research; rather, remembrance remains an act of the present: it knows no ending.