memorialization and the formation of collective memory

 Paper presented June 17-19, 2022, Oxford “The Place of Memory and the Memory of Place” International Conference organized by the London Centre of Interdisciplinary Research

"If one controls people's memory, one controls their dynamism. And one also controls their experience, their knowledge of previous struggles."    Michel Foucault  

 ABSTRACT:   On the first of May in 2015, Alfredo Jaar, a Chilean artist, and Thierry Cruvellier, a French Journalist, met for the first time on the campus of the University of Wisconsin, Madison to participate in a conversation addressing the task of "presenting the unpresentable" in their respective work related to genocide in Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Bosnia and Cambodia. Their discussion extended to the resultant criminal trials in Rwanda, which took place in two distinct forums, the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), a venue for high-level leaders of the genocide and eleven thousand local community courts sanctioned by the Rwandan government to process more than 120,000 defendants. During the question and answer portion of the talk a commenter lamented the community court's lack of archival documentation, holding up the ICTR as a standard for preservation of the historical record and by extension, its archival record as the preferred form of collective memory and as a preventative against future acts of genocide. 

            While the commenter was incorrect regarding community court recordkeeping, insofar as it related to genocide trials, her point nonetheless raised questions regarding the comparative value of written records from a distant and formal court proceeding - witnessed by few persons - might have over a localized, communal procedure that some have critiqued as a less than legitimate judicial process. Using this framework of contrasting modes of performativity, one that engages in the "universalizing rationality" of Western formalism (Feldman 1994, p.89) and another that provides an embodied affective material experience for participants, I examine Rwandan "Sites of Memory"(Nora 1989, p. 7) after the 1994 genocide and echoing the question "How do you present the unpresentable," review Rwandan post-genocide memorialization, commemoration and interrogation.  

          There is evidence that memorial practices following Western norms of representation engage in a sanitization of national trauma by using passive gestures and inserting a Western technical formalism that erases the body, replaying colonialism's displacement of the individual. Conversely, evidence suggests that active, affective material confrontations with loss in Rwanda provide opportunities for personal meaning that are rooted in an embodied reception and thus are more effective as a path to collective memory of - and as a future preventative against - genocide.