Abstract
This book analyses Rwandan women’s collaborative testimony written in the wake of the Genocide against the Tutsi of 1994. Gilbert’s work examines the complex responsibility felt by those survivor-witnesses of traumatic events, and how they work through a series of cultural and political constraints in writing testimony, as they work through experiences of trauma. The author demonstrates the usefulness and the limitations of trauma theory and situates her corpus of testimonies within their specific context of production, all the while drawing on comparisons with other bodies of survivor narratives such as Latin American testimonio and Holocaust survivor stories. Gilbert demonstrates the particular contribution these narratives make to memory work concerning the genocide in Rwanda, but equally how they draw attention to the inaction of international actors and raise awareness of the ongoing plight of Rwandan survivors.
From the beginning, Gilbert’s approach to testimony questions assumptions about its transparency and its uniformity. The book is rigorously researched and clearly presented, with an excellent introductory chapter that situates these questions in a genealogy of complex debates surrounding trauma theory and Rwanda’s history. Mirroring the accessibility of the narrative genre she analyses, Gilbert clarifies her careful definition of “survivor-witness” and contextualizes her chosen authors in their individual experiences of the genocide. These come within the fraught space of competing narratives and the politicization of victimhood (Burnet, 2009). Each of the five main chapters contribute to the book’s breadth of focus, as Gilbert builds a picture of the social, cultural and political forces driving the act of (not) giving testimony. She cites diverging motivations from her corpus, such as a sense of duty, validating experience, working through trauma, countering indifference, and inscribing the memory of dead in the memory of living. The pertinence of trauma theory is clear, particularly for the representational impossibilities and disjointed experiences of time that Gilbert’s chosen authors describe. Its limitations also emerge though, as Gilbert illustrates the complexities of memory work that will be familiar to many scholars of memory studies, and also examines at length the specific conditions of such work in the context of post-genocide Rwanda.
Twenty-five years after the genocide, Gilbert’s book sheds fresh light on life for survivors of the genocide. For example, in chapter 5 she sensitively outlines the complexities and struggles of life post-genocide in Rwanda. Where many survivors still live in fear and isolation and Hutu returnees fear revenge attacks, mutual distrust leads to ongoing tension (p. 244). Reading testimonies through the lens of trauma theory, Gilbert analyses the recurring emergence of past in present—much discussed in scholarship on Rwanda’s official commemorative practices, where truth about the genocide continues to be contested. Yet the key defining moments she cites foreground individual and regional specificity over any universal or common experience of the horrors of the genocide. Crucially, the testimonies speak of the ongoing struggles these women face, including the continued impact of trauma on survivors’ lives and the particularity of that pain (Norridge, 2013). Gilbert presents testimonial writing as an act of solidarity with all genocide survivors whose diverse and often difficult (ongoing) experiences are not accounted for in the government’s official narrative. The insights these authors provide into ongoing denial, the search for loved ones’ bodies, and the politicized structure of mourning and reconciliation build a fuller picture of the ongoing impact of the genocide. This is where the testimonies call for an engaged, empathic listening that moves not only to acknowledge past horror, but to respond to present struggle.
Gilbert shifts our attention to the specific experiences of individuals by foregrounding the authors’ voices with extensive quotations. Language is at the heart of notions of identification and positionality (p. 67), as well as the challenges of translating and domesticating for a Western readership (p. 103). Here the reader’s understanding is doubly enriched thanks to Gilbert’s command of both French and English. Her critical apparatus draws on a vast body of Francophone and Anglophone scholarship, and her own excellent translations are part of an attention to linguistic detail that pervades the work. Gilbert is sensitive to the struggle against the inadequacy of language to convey traumatic experience and simultaneously attentive to its potential impact through the strategic use of representational tactics such as sensory description and epiplexis (pp. 103–109).
Gilbert brings refreshing nuance and clarity in her analysis of silence, underlining its particular significance when contested by those Rwandans who were destined for eradication. In Chapter 4 she identifies several internal and external aspects that constrain the sharing of testimony, resisting an encounter with the “ob-scene”, a notion Dauge-Roth uses for that which is beyond the realm of what is commonly accepted as legitimate (2010). For example, where the stigma of sexual violence means that psychological and physical trauma is compounded by social isolation (p. 193). Numerous moral and legal devoirs de mémoire struggle within the amplified silence generated by state-sponsored practices of memory. As Gilbert describes, “while the memory of the genocide is omnipresent [in Rwanda] . . .certain aspects of the genocide are being erased or excluded from collective memory” (p. 181). Certain memories are permitted (namely in gacaca proceedings and official commemoration ceremonies (p. 28)), but others are muted out of necessity for safe local coexistence with former perpetrators. An additional challenge comes when there is no shared frame of reference or meaning between the survivor-witness and her targeted audience. To contest the “license for ignorance” that can follow the inexpressibility of trauma (p. 170), Gilbert’s discussion moves beyond the unsayable to demonstrate the double function of writing testimonies (p. 166). While navigating their range of motivations for writing, Rwandan women not only contest these layers of silencing in the act of writing, but present silence back to those audiences whose silences/silencing has failed them, by writing silence explicitly into the narration (p. 195). Through deliberate narrative strategies, this commitment lifts pain into the visible world (Scarry, 1985) and at the same time puts silence back in the face of an international audience rightly criticized for its ignorance (p. 250).
The title From Surviving to Living maps onto LaCapra’s notions of acting out and working through, and regaining a sense of stability and security (p. 40). Gilbert situates the act of testimony somewhere within that shift from surviving to living, reflecting Herman’s model where recovery is facilitated by a reconstruction of “undigested fragments” into an organized verbal account (p. 114). The originality of her work comes in discussing the ethically fraught collaborative processes behind her chosen corpus. Gilbert’s critical discussion of theoretical framing—namely the dangers of oversimplification inherent in viewing the genocide through a Holocaust frame (p. 47)—is matched in her analysis of how these partnerships are framed within the texts. She cites varying degrees of transparency regarding collaborators’ roles in validating, structuring, and editing the text. Beyond names on covers, Gilbert demonstrates that some authors make the dialogic process more visible in the text than others, and her own interviews with authors inform the tensions and underlying struggles that prevail in the collaborative writing process. Rwandan women publishing testimonies while living in Europe and North America are in a relatively privileged position. They stand as mediators (Coquio’s passeurs) between a Western audience and community of Rwandan survivors, yet are at the same time dependent on collaborators who mediate their stories in numerous ways. Gilbert argues that this “conflictive creative process” (Sanders, 1994) relies on the sympathetic power of the imagination of the collaborator. Here Gilbert’s mention of patronage, freedom, and division of labor undoubtedly points to such power being embedded in politics of gender, color and class that demand further interrogation.
For Gilbert it is the act of shared witnessing, or parole partagée (Bornand, 2004), of testimony in community that enables the transition from surviving to living. First, Rwandan women’s testimonies challenge the model of trauma theory’s insistence on the unsayable. Following Novak (2008), Gilbert shifts the focus here to the “unhearable” and the onus of the listener to create conditions in which a story can be heard (though not fully understood). What has come to be known as the impossibility of testimony “derives as much from the audience’s inability to hear the story as from the survivor’s inability to express the trauma” (p. 38). Where by sharing testimony the survivor-witness exposes herself to judgment, including disbelief and lack of understanding, Gilbert argues that the engaged receiver has a duty to listen and to be disturbed by the narrative of the survivor-witness within that dialogic space (p. 81, pp. 83–84). Yet engagement and empathy on the part of the listener are insufficient when there is an additional need to “translate” pain to another culture (Hron, 2009). Anxiety around this translation is evident in the testimonies Gilbert cites, as survivor-witnesses anticipate silence or misunderstanding in the reception of their narratives. Generating a “social space” (Dauge-Roth, 2010) or a “dialogic space” (Weine, 2006), Gilbert argues, requires giving attention to the specific experiences of marginalized female survivors, such as survivors of sexual violence (p. 191) and isolated widows (p. 221). But the reception of such specific experiences will vary according to context, for example when affected by the cultural taboo surrounding rape that persists in Rwanda today (p. 122), where huge numbers of women survivors were victims of sexual violence during the genocide. In this way the “safe space of reciprocity and dialog” (p. 256) that is possible among communities of survivors cannot be exactly matched by other “receivers”, either in Rwanda or the Western audience many of the testimonies seek to engage. It thus becomes vital to acknowledge that the “community of testimony” proposed by Gilbert will look different when made up solely of survivor-witnesses (as in AVEGA) and when (as with the readers of this corpus) it includes “secondary witnesses” (LaCapra, 2001). Questions remain as to how these experiences of reception differ, as well as how the possibilities for parole partagée in those communities will vary accordingly.
Awarded The SAGE Memory Studies Journal and MSA Outstanding First Book Annual Award, From Surviving to Living is a timely and incisive contribution to the field of memory studies. Students, scholars, and general readers alike will benefit from Gilbert’s wide-ranging and dynamic analysis of Rwandan women’s collaborative testimony.