It is useful, at the outset, to clarify the import of the term ‘aesthetic’ as it is deployed in this essay. The aesthetic, notes Jerrold Levinson in his introduction to the volume Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, is ‘human-sensibility-indexed’.^[13] Thus, it connotes more than just beauty or form, more than art that merely mystifies/beautifies/orders the raw and grim chaos of human existence. Rather, the aesthetic in art, literature and film supplements and enhances aspects of human experience in ways that more ‘real’ experience simply cannot. To extend this slightly, the aesthetic is a category that captures the density of phenomena irreducible to abstract reason, the realm of the affective and the somatic; it is also something that captures our finitude, something that orients us to the stark elemental truths of our ‘species being’ on this planet. To that extent it carries within it a powerful ethical charge and a commensurate responsibility to explore the ‘human’ in all its complexity, including gratuitous violence and evil. It is in this spirit that I invoke Wittgenstein in the epigraph to the essay — ‘ethics and aesthetics are one’. Such a reading distances itself from notions of ‘disinterestedness’ in art and invests in an ethic of aesthetic engagement with multiple lifeworlds. At the same time it resists reducing such engagement to an instrumentalist/functionalist notion of art’s role in radically transforming society.

To turn now to the concept of a ‘trauma aesthetic’; in its most literal sense it connotes a creative uptake on human pain and suffering of extreme magnitude. Intertwined with this is the responsibility such an aesthetic carries of conveying both the immediacy and the truth of such suffering — to make some sense of senseless suffering — to diverse audiences that do not necessarily invest in a shared infrastructure of aesthetic values. What then are the parameters of its expressiveness and responsibility? I wish first to take this question up in the context of recent debates about the reception of creative works on the Rwandan mass killings and then go on to address it through a close reading of Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali and Terry George’s Hotel Rwanda.

Commenting on the proliferation of creative works in the decade since the Rwanda killings, a journalist from The Observer, Jason Cowley, called such quick creative reproductions ‘indecent’, for they promoted ‘atrocity tourism’, especially when Rwanda had far from healed:

Cowley goes on to weave into this ethical conundrum of a trauma aesthetic (the obscenity of art feeding off macabre killings) two contrasting scenarios that capture evocatively the dilemma of creative re-enactments attempting to simulate ‘real’ violence of horrific proportions. They both have to do with the subsequent filming of the genocide for a global audience. In the first, Terry George recounts why he chose to shoot Hotel Rwanda in Johannesburg rather than in Kigali: ‘I was afraid of recreating those scenes of murder on the streets of Kigali.’^[15] George’s stance of shying away from a graphic recreation is, as we discuss later, reflected in the aesthetic choices he makes in framing his film. Contrasted with this is the decision of filmmakers Michael Caton-Jones and David Belton to film their Shooting Dogs on the streets of Kigali. While this commitment to a ‘real’ location is understandable, considering that the film is a documentary, a bystander and a resident of Kigali who occasionally witnessed the filming thought ‘there was something indulgent and wrong about the circus of activity created by a western film crew in the midst of such dire poverty’. He added, ‘Some of us felt upset about the filming of the scenes of violence and mayhem. Perhaps Hotel Rwanda’s approach of having the violence in the background is the right one.’^[16] This contrast between subtle and graphic representations of the evil of genocide in art will be discussed in more detail later when I undertake a comparative analysis of the works of Courtemanche and Terry George. Such comparison will address both media and genre-related variations in representation of trauma.

I first wish to ask the following: do creative representations of the Rwandan massacre put non-Rwandan viewers in a position to stare, to look without consequences at sights from which, in practical life, we might turn away in horror? In other words, are these representations in turn both anaesthetising and voyeuristic? At the same time, can we not also argue that they bring home the importance of narrating and, hence, naming the evil from which the world had once turned away its face? That creativity after catastrophe can also be cathartic and redemptive? Rwanda’s Minister for Culture, Joseph Habineza, when asked if these creative depictions troubled ordinary Rwandans, replied movingly:

I do not think it is possible to resolve the ethical conundrum by settling for either the voyeurism argument or the redemption/catharsis argument. As Michael Ignatieff puts it in his discussion of the televisual and digital media’s traffic in instant images of human suffering, such traffic can be seen as both ‘promiscuous voyeurism’ and ‘internationalization of conscience’.^[18] But it also points to a truth that transcends both: a move towards an actualisation of a moral universal built on ‘crime against humanity’, where the interlocutor of the victim is a ‘stranger’ and not her/his kith and kin. Judith Butler in her Levinasian reading in her recent book, Precarious Life: The Power of Mourning and Violence, calls this the ‘impingement by the Other’s address … a comportment towards the Other only after the Other has made a demand upon me, accused me of a failing, or asked me to assume a responsibility’.^[19]

In other words, at the cusp of what has been a horrific century of wars and ethnic carnage and a new millennium that does not augur much better, a trauma aesthetic — media and artistic representations of extreme suffering — cannot but be intimately entwined with a new kind of humanist ethic, a new kind of internationalism built on a shared dread of human capacity for evil coupled with a deep awareness of the ambiguities of sharing grief and loss across large swathes of devastated humanscapes. This is a sharing marked more by distance than propinquity, more by difference — racial, ethnic, national — than by sameness. At the same time it is also an acknowledgement of the globalisation of the impact of large-scale human suffering, no longer restricted, especially since 9/11, to the backwaters of the world — sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and impoverished parts of Asia. To recognize the global immanence of human insecurity and dread amidst imminent terror is to recognise an important aspect of what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call ‘life in common’ — the coming together of ‘singularities’ that are not ‘incommunicable localities’ in this era of relentless conflict.^[20] It is to acknowledge that trauma aesthetics in late modernity does more than simply feed off the misery of the less fortunate residing in distant parts of the world. Rather, such aesthetics seek to highlight the notion that the rights-bearing human has faced its most severe test ever in the latter half of the twentieth century and into the new millennium — when human beings have had to live through catastrophes that have destroyed entire social networks that define our moral universe. ‘The way stations on the road to this new internationalism’, writes Ignatieff, ‘are Armenia, Verdun, the Russian front, Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Vietnam, Cambodia, Lebanon, Rwanda and Bosnia.’^[21] Genocide, as Arthur Klinghoffer puts it in his book on Rwanda, is ‘the ultimate expression of absolute rightlessness’.^[22] Genocidal acts create victims who are bereft of kinship and social networks — refugees in particular. They thus make ‘an ethic of universal moral obligation among strangers a necessity for future life on the planet’.^[23] The poignant words of the Rwandan Minister for Culture we heard earlier point precisely to the possibility of such an emergence of a new global ethic from the rubble of catastrophe wrought by the evil of Rwanda’s freefall into the insanity of ethnic carnage. For all this, though, it is important to be mindful that a trauma aesthetic embodying such a global ethic is not uniformly translatable across all creative media and genres. This is the burden of the explication of texts that follow.