PDF Telling Our Own Stories: Poems by Rwandan Youth 20 Years After the Genocide

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Inspired by the history of the Genocide against the Tutsi, this collection contains 20 poems by Rwandan youth between the ages of 14 and The poems.
Table of contents

If so, what is the difference and what do they prefer? Are they tired of being represented as genocide survivor? Would they want to represent their experience themselves? If so, in what form? This was a huge agenda pertaining to the ethics and politics of representation and, of course, our chapter did not address all of them. During the writing process, we abandoned the idea of trying to give definite answers to any of these questions.

For example, the initial idea that young people, by taking photographs, might exert agency and explore future perspectives is not developed in the chapter that progressed from a discussion of visual representations of genocide survivors to a discussion of photographs of material objects symbolizing social interactions terminated by genocide. In connection with the reproduction of some of his photographs in the chapter, Rafiki explained in an email of 10 January I am not looking for new knowledge, I am refusing the depiction of the genocide through aligned skulls that do not tell us more than "these are remains of dead bodies", but an attempt to establish "me-and-the-victim" instead of "me-and-the-past".

Very simple, unless one is heartless, then if you visit that memorial and come across the picture with a wedding ring, then [you] almost always connect with the one ring on [your own] ring-finger. I think this makes sense and [is] provocative above all. Summarizing the experience of our first cooperation, Rafiki wrote to me on 25 October It really feels damn good to work with you, not just because you said yes to the pictures [i.

Laura Apol: The Power of Writing in Rwanda

You meant it, the placement in the text comes to confirm what you mean. But most importantly you've got a smooth style. It feels peace to work with you and that is invaluable. I was very happy about this email. As I had written to Rafiki half a year earlier,. There is a difference between reading about these issues [i. On a personal note, I might add that it felt to me like a big — and potentially difficult — step to move from scholarly analysis, from the safe space of my Northern office, of texts and pictures produced in the aftermath of the genocide to collaboration with a person who had actually survived the very genocide I was dealing with theoretically, academically and from a long distance, without personal connections as I had not known anybody from Rwanda before I met Rafiki.

I suspected that a wrong sentence or a flippant word, a thoughtless remark or another insensitivity might easily end our collaboration before it had really started. Thus, I was pleased to read in the above email that It feels peace to work with you — what more could I possibly hope for? Months passed with lots of emails traveling between Knivsta and Tampere, mostly about project ideas that, for one reason or another, never left the stage of ideas. Then, on 29 July , I received the following text from Rafiki, a draft letter he intended to send to selected people as part of a new book project:.

Have you ever visited this website of my photographs www. Please do and let me know what you think.

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Usually people say fantastic, terrific, and so on. I am happy of such positive appraisals of course but most of the time one does not do much with them, in my case at least! The point is that I am entering the second phase of this project and I am looking for people who could pick one picture, study it, and develop a short paper around it no more than 10 thousand characters , once I have all the papers for whatever [chosen] pictures, I will get a book published.

Your text would not be about photography as a technique or a medium, but about what you see in the picture, the information you gather from the picture, confronting that information to issues of memorial conservation, teaching about genocide, and many other issues. The general goal would be to see whether photographs such as these and the texts developed based on these pictures could be useful teaching material in a classroom.

If such would be the case, what then in the pictures allows these class interactions to happen? Are these pictures easy to work with compared to those depicting horrors? If I would ever be engaged in publishing such a book then it has to be for upper-secondary, senior high students and their teachers. Thus, contributors to the book would have to write texts that are not very complicated for students to understand and teachers to work with.

Over time, this project morphed into the present one — Rwanda' Beyond Time and Space. In August , Rafiki asked me if I would consider curating an online project of essays about his photos in the context of the 25th commemoration of the genocide in Rwanda and, of course, I agreed without hesitation. If we manage that [participants] do comment on different photographs, how to avoid that they ultimately say the same things? As you know, there is a certain standard within photographic discourses when it comes to engagements with photographs of memorials, memory and trauma. I see basically three frequent approaches: 1.

None of these approaches is wrong, far from it, but how can we achieve that our contributors go beyond these standard approaches? One possible way would be to mention the above approaches in the introduction and to ask our contributors explicitly to go beyond.

There is no guarantee of course that they will actually do so. We addressed these initial reservations in the invitations sent to potential participants in the autumn of when we invited them to either write academically neutral or personal-interpretive reflections. Again, there is nothing wrong with such approaches but, after initially providing a much-needed critique of some deplorable features of photojournalism and outlining a convincing alternative to it, commentary on aftermath photography has become slightly predictable.

Hoping with our project to add something new to the discussion we invited the contributors to select one photograph which subsequently became unavailable to others , and to reflect upon that photograph as such or in connection with other images, other memories, or other commemorations.

Reflections on the Genocide in Rwanda

We also asked them to discuss the selected image in the context of the genocide, or in connection with other subjects of importance in their own professional or private life. Contributors could choose between academic language or a more individual or innovative writing style when either commenting on a given photograph, or submitting a comment that is inspired by that particular photograph.

We specified what we deemed the dominant approaches to representations of the aftermath of mass violence — against forgetting; recognizing and acknowledging victims; stressing the legacy of the past and its continuation in the present; and emphasizing what can be learned about the genocide when looking at photographs of its commemoration. We encouraged our contributors explicitly to go beyond these approaches, engaging with them critically or relating them to their own lived experience. We did not expect the contributors to engage precisely with these questions.

Rather, we hoped that the questions would trigger unusual and unexpected and perhaps even controversial reactions. I am neither a Rwanda expert nor a genocide scholar. I am conducting and teaching visual peace research. As such, I am interested in the function and operation of visual images in violent conflicts and wars but also, and importantly, in such post-war settings as peace processes, peace building and reconciliation. In my own work, I try to develop the notion and practice of post-conflict or aftermath photography further towards peace photography.

I am interested in a visual non-linear trajectory from representations of violence to representations of the aftermath of violence, subdivided into the event-as-aftermath John Roberts , referring back to and re-negotiating the original violent event, and the aftermath-as-event , referring forward beyond the original event to peace or to peace as a potentiality.

Rwanda' Beyond Time and Space illustrates clearly and unmistakably the immensity of the step from aftermath to peace in a post-genocide society.

On what point on the trajectory between the two poles — genocide and peace — is Rwanda in April , 25 years after the genocide? In what direction is the country moving currently?

Claude Gatebuke on surviving the Rwandan genocide | The World Weekly

And is there any reason to believe that they suggest the same things to different viewers? There is an unbridgeable gap between those who possess such knowledge and those who do not — a gap that no representation can fill. Those who possess first-hand knowledge do not need representations of genocide to know what it feels like to be a target of genocidal violence; they know that from own experience.

Those who do not possess such knowledge will not obtain it by engaging with representations of genocide but they will gain something else. Hence, no generalizations, no hierarchies, no academic theorizations. Bisschoff, Lizelle and Stefanie van de Peer eds. Tauris, What I can see, is the homeland of testimony of our time - a photo- graph - pronouncing war interrupting time telling of how in the face of bloodbath the alphabet letters cannot but fly away.

La lourde Loi qui nous lie aux Actes Des Souffles qui se meurent". I want to write of the genocide of things and the things of genocide. This is not an exercise in moral equivalence. A kettle is not a human, but a human may be more so because of their interaction with and through a kettle. The destruction of the things in between us humans can sever strands in our relations. The genocide of things can make us less human. I spoke recently with a friend who is a Survivor of the Canadian Indian Residential School system — a government and church-sponsored experiment that lasted nearly years and sought to eliminate Indigenous cultures.

He mentioned how a birthday cake can trigger in him emotions of loss, loneliness, and abandonment. He spent each birthday of his childhood at the residential school, without family to help him celebrate the day. His parents died soon after he was released from the school. They were almost strangers to him. The birthday cake is more than just a cake. In genocide humans are often likened to things. Our animal kin find themselves caught up in these practices of dehumanization.

Both were viewed as an obstacle to white settlement and both had to be eliminated Hubbard Likewise, the ankole cattle have long observed relations between their Tutsi and Hutu neighbours.

Rwanda: Learning to forgive

They have been umuheto and ubuhake , gift and obligation, in these relations Ezeanya ; Mamdani They both became a symbol of power and subjects of genocide. But it is not just a matter of other living things. The things belonging to people are also caught up in genocide. They are not destroyed for being things , so much; it is for what they represent.


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Water flows into the kettle, from kettle to teapot, from teapot to cups. People gather around the kettle, around the teapot. Conversation flows.