Memory/History, Violence, and Reconciliation: Introduction

Maureen N. Eke Marie Kruger Mildred Mortimer

Research in African Literatures, Volume 43, Number 1, Spring 2012, pp. 65-69 (Article) Published by Indiana University Press DOI: 10.1353/ral.2012.0020

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M EMORY/ HISTORY, V IOLENCE , A ND R ECONCILI ATION

Introduction
MAUREEN N. EKE, MARIE KRUGER, AND MILDRED MORTIMER, GUEST EDITORS

number of African nations have been born out of, or find themselves emerging from, a history of violent conflict. In their attempt to redefine the interactions of national, regional, and local communities, these nationsSouth Africa, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone are outstanding examples in this regardhave worked towards achieving significant cultural and political self-transformations through institutional mediations that range from nationally televised Truth and Reconciliation Commissions to local negotiations of restorative justice (as in Rwandas gacaca tribunals). Yet the reconciliation of highly stratified societies appears impossible without examining fundamental questions of identity, history, and power and the institutional contexts in which they are enacted. All too often, colonial fictions of race and ethnicity left Africans with troubling and problematic categories of identification that have proven opportune vehicles for political manipulation. And if the African postcolonial era ushers in intranational struggles over access to and allocation of resources, we see these struggles acquiring a new intensity and ferocity in not a few places on the continent as new corporate or privatized forms of sovereignty and violence have emerged. These new developmentsas the agents behind them have fostered a reinvention of African identities by deft manipulation of indigenousness and ancestral descent (Mbembe 86)have been responsible for the dissolution of existing territorial, institutional, and moral frameworks. In this complex cultural and historical landscape, we ask how African writers have

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engaged with processes of restorative justice, imagined new discourses on rights and responsibilities and, in general, acknowledged the humanity of the other. This collection of essays for Research in African Literatures emerged from a panel organized and chaired by Maureen N. Eke at the African Studies Association Meeting in Chicago in 2008. We three editors of this cluster of papers first presented papers at the panel and subsequently decided to propose them to RAL as a study of the themes of memory, history, violence, and reconciliation. We invited submissions that explore African writers engagement with the historical, political, and institutional contexts that enable and/or disable attempts at reconciliation. We called for articles that address the following questions: To what extent do institutions of national and colonial modernity, and in particular discourses of race and ethnicity, impact contemporary political relations? How are public spaces and legal institutions, such as TRCs and local tribunals, involved in the investigation of individual and collective responsibilities? As territorial borders and institutional structures shift towards new configurations, what are the new relations of servitude and coercion, but also of collaboration and support, in postcolonial African societies? What is the role of memory and history, individual and collective, in the construction of new national communities? To what extent does the discovery of the truth about the past reveal hidden and forgotten histories? How do the dynamics of gender intersect with efforts at social restoration and collaboration? In spite of national, cultural, and geopolitical differences among the nations (real and fictitious) portrayed in the works our essays address, the experiences of genocidal violence have a commonalitythe obliteration of human life and dignity. If, as Martha Minow suggests, [a] most appalling goal of the genocides, the massacres, systematic rapes, and tortures has been the destruction of the remembrance of individuals as well as of their lives and dignity . . . (1), the works our essays explore resist such annihilation by giving voice to memory, thus, recuperating the dignity of those who have been wounded. The articles that follow focus on the search for and negotiation of truth through the process of reconciliation in a variety of African nationsfrom Algeria and Liberia in northern and western Africa to South Africa and the eastern African countries of Kenya and Tanzania. These articles include studies of prominent African writers and directors such as Assia Djebar, Euphrase Kezilahabi, and Ramadan Suleman, as well as those of emerging voices: Leonora Miano, Gilbert Gatore, Boima Fahnbulleh. The works we examine in this collection of essays suggest that the process of reconciliation serves as a conduit for gaining access to experiences of trauma, past wounds, (un)recovered histories, memories, and truths. The essays in this volume, therefore, interrogate the ways in which the writers, individuals, and nations (real or fictitious) that have experienced genocidal violence arrive at some way of making sense of their experiences. In examining these texts, the essays also problematize the nature of justice and truth, as well as the relationship between memory and history. Three articles focus on francophone works. Within this group, Elizabeth Applegate examines a narrative that centers on the Rwandan genocide. Applegates article, a study of Gilbert Gatores novel Le pass devant soi [The Past before Us], discusses the issues of identity and reconciliation posed by a text that questions the power of writing as a means to reflect reality and as a practice that allows Rwandan survivors to reconcile with their traumatic pasts. What are the different

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ways of recuperating the reality of a horrific event? Le pass devant soi, as the critic notes, uses several different iterations of a folktale depicting a swallow and a toad to suggest that identity and personal history can be reinvented. In keeping with the themes of this issue, her essay explores the ways in which literary texts negotiate the issues of violence and of remembering as a reconciliatory process. In contrast to studies of texts specific to Rwanda, Janice Spleths article takes us to a fictitious community in an unspecified African country. Although Lonora Mianos LIntrieur de la nuit (Dark Heart of the Night) is set in an African country not clearly associated with any real nation and carries a completely fictitious name, the nature of the civil war depicted there shares military and political characteristics with insurrections resembling those in Liberia or Sierra Leone. There are details that might recall conflicts throughout Central Africa as well. Spleths analysis of Mianos novel focuses on her depiction of womens place in this imaginary community: how it is defined at the beginning of the novel, how it is appropriated by the insurgents to force the cooperation of the villagers, and how its traditional dimensions are eventually challenged by the trauma engendered by the experiences. In other words, the concept of home, normally a place of tranquility and security, is redefined by terrorism, with womens spaces and womens minds becoming battlefields in Africas civil conflicts. In Spleths view, Mianos fictional exploration of war and its consequences suggests that as divided nations strive for reconciliation, solutions will not be limited to a mere return to previous social structures, but that processes of reconstruction can also provide opportunities for new visions. Mildred Mortimer puts the focus on the Algerian War, examining the historic role of women within the North African nations liberation struggle. Mortimer draws upon three sourcesAssia Djebars fiction, Louisette Ighilarizs memoir, and Danile Djamila Amrane-Minnes historical studiesto address two interrelated questions posed by the theme of this volume: To what extent does the search for the truth about the past reveal hidden and forgotten histories? How do the dynamics of gender intersect with efforts at social restoration and collaboration? The three texts are forms of testimonial literature that attest to the extreme physical and psychological demands of intense political engagement: the activist risks losing her life at any time. In their discussions of individual and collective memories of violence in Kenya and Tanzania, South Africa and Liberia, the articles by Aaron Rosenberg, Marie Kruger, and David Mastey as well as the review essay by Catherine Muhoma further expand the geographical purview of this special issue. Aaron Rosenberg translates the search for new discourses on rights and responsibilities into the Tanzanian context when he discusses how artists such as Euphrase Kezilahabi and Saida Karoli challenge official narratives of power. Kezilahabis wellknown Swahili novel, Rosa Mistika, and Karolis multilingual song performances in Swahili, Luhya, and English are intended to expose patriarchal institutions that shape gender identities within ethnic and national communities. Rosenberg maintains that even if official cultural scripts subject women to violent and traumatic experiences, the creative interventions of both artists demonstrate that cultural memory is always open to social revision and change. His arguments thus engage with two central questions examined in this volume: How have African artists imagined new ethnic and national societies in their creative works, and how do

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the dynamics of gender intersect with their efforts to envision alternative communities? His essay also allows this volume to transition beyond Anglophone and Francophone texts and to consider creative media and languages often sidelined in postcolonial scholarship. Marie Krugers article on the South African film Zulu Love Letter extends the focus of this volume by considering cinematic representations of politically motivated violence and the profoundly disabling ramifications of such violence for individual and social bodies. Specifically, Kruger examines the devastating effects of traumatic memory on the films protagonist, Thandeka Khumalo, a political activist, mother, and journalist who risked her life in the fight against the apartheid regime. Kruger argues that the main characters painful journey recognizes the moral ambivalence of a victim who has to learn to forgive herself for a past for which she holds herself responsible. With its frequent temporal shifts, highly subjective point of view, and self-conscious narration, the film employs a representational style that intends to represent the trauma of the past and its posttraumatic resonance in the present. Thus, the film not only reflects the limitations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an official space of reconciliation and forgiveness, but also demonstrates the aesthetic and ethical challenges of rendering personal pain accessible to an audience often far removed from the experience of the victim. While the South African TRC provides a prominent institutional model for restorative justice and the transition to democracy, David Masteys examination of contemporary Liberian literature reminds us that various other truth and reconciliation commissions have taken place on the African continent in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. His comparative analysis of two Liberian authors shows the extent to which their coming-of-age narratives reflect the mandate of Liberias Truth and Reconciliation Commission to identify the complex origins of the fourteen-year civil war that devastated the West African state from 1989 to 2003, [to] determine its perpetrators, and [to] recommend measures to prevent future conflicts. He argues that, even though the narratives feature protagonists who advocate for an inclusive national identity, it is ultimately the Liberian reader, situated in the contemporary present, who has to engage with the fictional events and accept fellow citizens of different ethnic affiliations if the objectives of the TRCnational reconciliation and unityare to be successfully implemented. Indeed, the role of the audience as an active witness to the traumatic memory of politically motivated violence, the revelation of forgotten and hidden histories, and the challenges of translating such memories into different artistic media emerge as recurrent themes in the articles collected in this special issue. Catherine Muhomas focus in her review essay is the work of memorializing done in the pages of Kwani? 5, an innovative and internationally successful Kenyan journal of creative and noncreative writing. Select testimonials about the 2007 postelection violence in Kenya have been reproduced in the journal; and, in Muhomas assessment, Kwani? 5 courageously stands out in having brought to light the hidden and forgotten memories of the politically motivated troubles. The eyewitness accounts of the Kenyan violence offer the reader rare insights into its causes, revealing truths long ignored or even deliberately denied in official government reports. The common themes reappearing in these testimonials (economic deprivation, struggles over land ownership and ethnic marginalization)

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subvert the governments politically opportune amnesia and instead demonstrate the manipulation of ethnic identity in the struggle for access to essential resources. Muhoma concludes that for institutions such as the Kenyan Truth, Justice and Reconciliation Commission to succeed in establishing a democratic and accountable form of governance, it will be necessary that the narratives of pain, loss, suspicion, hatred and anger find their place in the congregation of remembrance. In conclusion, we would like to note that the logistics of bringing this volume to fruition were somewhat complicated. We three editors, the three Ms, were in different geographical locations: Maureen in Michigan, Marie in Iowa, Mimi going back and forth between Colorado and France. Yet, with the cooperation of our contributors, we managed to adhere to the deadlines imposed for abstracts, papers, and the final revised copy. We offer these essays as works that are engaged in a conversation with one another on the themes of the collection. We hope that our readers will find this group of essays informative and cause for reflection as they explore the themes of memory, history, violence, and reconciliation. We are very pleased that the essays represented in this collection bring together scholars from academic institutions in Mexico, the United States, and Kenya in an effort to contribute to current debates that are agitating both African studies and postcolonial studies. WORKS CITED

Mbembe, Achille. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Print. Minow, Martha. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness. Boston: Beacon, 1998. Print.