From surviving to living: Voice, trauma and witness in Rwandan women’s writing

How do genocide survivors communicate their experiences of loss? Who are the audiences for these testimonies? These are the central questions animating Catherine Gilbert’s book exploring Rwandan women’s written testimonies of the 1994 genocide. Examining a mainly French-language corpus – ranging from the earliest published testimony, Yolande Mukagasana’s La mort ne veut pas de moi (1997) to Élise Rida Musomandera’s more recent Le livre d’Élise (2014) – Gilbert explores the ways in which these women write about the genocide from their subject positions as Tutsi genocide survivors based in the West (for the most part) and writing for Western audiences. Drawing heavily on trauma theory, Gilbert argues that these women work through their trauma by bearing witness to the atrocities they endured; writing allows them the possibility of moving from ‘surviving’ to ‘living’. Importantly, Gilbert stresses how tenuous and difficult such a process is. In the first chapter, Gilbert explores the figure of the witness, highlighting the multiple ways in which Rwandan women experienced the genocide. Here Gilbert proposes the categories of ‘survivor-witness’ (direct witness); ‘secondary’ witness (indirect witness or outside observer); and ‘reader-witness’ (‘the engaged receiver of testimony’) (p. 54). Not only do these categories capture the range of positions survivors occupied during the genocide – some women directly witnessed violence while others witnessed it in exile – they also point to the necessity of an audience if the trauma is to be successfully communicated.