. 100 Days in Rwanda, 1994

When the New York resident and Australian theatre director Alison Summers was asked what she thought of two recently released Hollywood blockbusters on the 9/11 catastrophe, she replied: ‘I would not see either film because I would be afraid of residual grief and distress being triggered. I believe I have achieved what is termed closure, but maybe it’s old-fashioned blocking. I don’t want to test myself in the middle of a cinema.’^[1]

The media also reported a very poor turnout for the release of United 93 about the hijacked flight that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. Responses of New Yorkers to Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center were hostile and heated, with one viewer adding: ‘What is untenable is the filmmaker’s prerogative to selectively edit and frame reality.’^[2] These facts critically signal issues of responsibility that artists and filmmakers bear towards victims of trauma in their creative representations of catastrophes. With the global immanence of terror and warfare in the post-Cold War period, trauma induced by gratuitous human violence has assumed world proportions and has intensified debates about artistic responsibility. As Susannah Radstone notes in her opening essay of the special debate on ‘Trauma and Screen Studies’ in the journal Screen, trauma has become a ‘popular cultural script’ much in need of ‘contextualization’ and ‘analysis’.^[3] The complex relationship between extreme violence and assumption of responsibility by creative artists to represent such violence to the world is the key focus of this essay. It seeks to unravel this relationship through an exploration and analysis of creative works on the Rwanda genocide of 1994.

Debates about creative and artistic representations of gratuitous violence and evil are, of course, not new. They took on special urgency during and after the Holocaust, beginning with Adorno’s somber uptake on the impossibility of writing poetry after Auschwitz. The debates have since ranged from exploring the power of singularising and mythologising the Holocaust through the creation of the exemplary victim of an unfathomable evil, to marking such exemplarity as loss of historical connectivity with other acts of genocide, especially those in relation to Cambodia in the 1970s and Rwanda in the 1990s. In other words they have traversed the gamut between the exceptional, the universal and the particular in human history, a gamut that also informs art and creativity. In recent years, graphic visual and textual representations of 9/11 and other human-induced global catastrophes have also raised deep ethical questions about artistic responsibility. Many of these are seen as akin to art that both ‘entrances’ one through the ‘sublimity of destruction’^[4] and iconicises terror-inducing devastation as a sign of our precarious times.

This essay is a meditation on the ethics of creatively representing the Rwandan genocidal horror of 1994 in multiple media and the aesthetic and interpretive truths that mediate the political in each instance. I take as my case studies two creative depictions of the genocide — Gil Courtemanche’s docu-fictional novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (2000) and Terry George’s much-acclaimed feature film Hotel Rwanda (2004). The issues I propose to confront in my analysis of these works are the following: What constitutes a trauma aesthetic? How does it mediate between a rhetoric of voyeurism and violation on the one hand and a rhetoric of vocalisation and cathartic redemption on the other? How do different media and genres negotiate it? I also wish to explore the aesthetic and ethical dilemma of reading the Rwandan genocide as a human act rather than a specific case of ethno-political massacre within a colonial/postcolonial context in Central Africa. The dilemma arises from our retrospective knowledge of the way the Nazis deployed mystical and metaphysical rhetoric in talking about their version of ‘man’ and the ‘human’ that laid waste to all other ways of imagining the human.^[5] Further, I wish to converse with recent articulations on the ‘common human’ against the force of totalitarian and xenophobic representations in the writings of cultural theorists and philosophers such as Judith Butler, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.^[6] Do these enable us, I ask, to arrive at a middle point between mythologising the human out of the vicissitudes of worldly attachments and an extreme localising of the human to the detriment of global connectivity? Issues and questions such as these will inform my analysis of creative writing and film on the Rwandan genocide.