Alternative Patterns of Literary Progress: Writing about Rwanda in the Wake of Trauma

Abstract

This article discusses three books about the 1994 genocide against Rwandan Tutsis, all of which belong to the “Writing as a Duty to Memory” project: two novels by Boubacar Boris Diop and Abdourahman Waberi respectively, and a travel journal by Véronique Tadjo. It looks at the performance of a new sense of community after a traumatic event which invalidated traditional notions of ethnicity, national unity and historical continuity, contrasting the social and ethical function assigned to storytelling in the wake of genocide with the description of politically engaged, marginal literatures in the work of Pascale Casanova, as well as Franco Moretti’s distinction between premodern and modern literature. More precisely, the Rwandan case presents an alternative to the teleological patterns of literary evolution drawn by some World Literature scholars, as this moment in literary history was shaped by collective trauma and ethical imperatives rather than Rwanda’s peripheral status in the literary world-system or its so-called “delay” in terms of written culture.