A Psychological Discourse of Genocide in Veronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda

Abstract

This essay is a psychological discourse of genocide and its traumatic effects on the author, fictional characters and readers in Veronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the heart of Rwanda. Memory is the essential aspect of the psychological discourse that Tadjo employs as a tunnel connecting the past to the present. The fiction exposes how the genocide causes personal turmoil that creates psychological and emotional breakdown among the victims. The objectives of the study were to examine how the lives of the victims of the war and even survivors had been beaten horribly out of shape by the constant blow of inhumanity. It also examined the application of memory as cathartic in the process of bringing healing to a chaotic and traumatic past and as the individual’s means of coming to term with personal, family, social and political experiences that have refused to be harmonized into an acceptable past. The paper specifically deployed the Charles Mauron’s pschocriticism, a variant of Sigmud’s psychoanalysis, to unravel the mimetic and cathartic representation of dreams and tortures as revealed by metaphors and symbols in the memoir. These metaphorical networks are significant for latent inner realities. The study concluded that the cruelty and human brutality of the genocide in Rwanda exceeded worst expectations. The author aroused the psychological emotions of the fictional characters and transfers same to the readers by creating a cinematographic account of the horrible situation. It also reveals how memory and imaginative fiction are interwoven to provide a connection between the past and present.