Of other times: Temporality, memory and trauma in post-genocide Rwanda
| Date | 01 September 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0269758019833281 |
| Author | Julia Viebach |
| Published date | 01 September 2019 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Of other times: Temporality,
memory and trauma
in post-genocide Rwanda
Julia Viebach
University of Oxford, UK
Abstract
This article explores how survivors’ experiences of extreme violence change their relationship with
time. It draws on extensive fieldwork undertaken with survivors of the 1994 Genocide against the
Tutsi and participatory observation of Rwanda’s annual commemoration ceremonies. It focuses on
the practice of ‘care-taking’ that survivors engage in at genocide memorials that display human
remains and deadbodies. This article identifiesthe different temporal practicesthat survivors use to
help remake their worlds after the 1994 Genocide. In doing so, it asks: how do survivors construct
time through informal mnemonic practices? How do they experience time during the com-
memoration? Andwhat mode of temporality is inscribed in the materialityof memorials? The article
demonstrates that care-taking and imagination produce a symbolic time-reversal, whereas the
materiality of the memorial sites preserves the past in the present. Thecommemoration constructs
different temporal logics, such as time homogenisation and a traumatic cyclicalisation, something I
describe through the notion of ‘trauma-time’. The article concludes that multiple temporalities are
produced and reproduced in variousattempts to remake lives after genocide that counter simplistic
‘before and after’ accounts of time dominant in the transitional justice discourse.
Keywords
Genocide, temporality, memory, trauma, Rwanda, victims
Introduction
This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a
chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it
Corresponding author:
Julia Viebach, African Studies Centre, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies, University of Oxford, 13 Bevington Road,
Oxford OX26HL, UK.
Email: julia.viebach@africa.ox.ac.uk
International Review of Victimology
2019, Vol. 25(3) 277–301
ªThe Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/0269758019833281
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in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been
smashed. (Benjamin, 1969 [1940]: 257–258)
Time has always puzzled people. Time is constitutive of the human experience, through our
memories it provides links to past, present and future. But so too does memory problematise our
relationship with time because its working is by no means fixed or stable, but fragmented and in
constant flux (Misztal, 2003: 108). Memory’s non-linear temporality makes the very notion of ‘the
past’ problematic because ‘the time line becomes tangled and folds back on itself. The complex of
practices and means by which the past invests the present is memory: memory is the present past’
(Terdiman, 1993: 8, cited in Misztal, 2003: 108). Yet how does time, being constitutive of human
experience, change when, as described in the epigraph, the past is catastrophic, painful and
inherently violent? That is to say, how does our relationship with time change through the inhuman
experience of extreme violence such as mass atrocity or genocide?
This article carves out different temporal practices and experiences within survivors’ attempts
to remake worlds after the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. At its heart is the practice
of ‘care-taking’ (Viebach, 2014) at selected genocide memorials. Some Tutsi survivors have
chosen to pledge their everyday-lives to the preservation and care of human remains, even entirely
preserved dead bodies, which are often displayed at Rwanda’s genocide memorials. They wash,
clean and put lime-powder on these remains to protect them from weather and decay through the
passage of time. In their accounts, survivors describe neither joy nor satisfaction in this work;
rather, they feel a moral obligation towards the dead. They clean with a heavy heart because as
Innocent, a care-taker, stressed, ‘I clean with grief, but I do it because there was loss. I have a bad
feeling, but I am patient enough not to resign. I cannot make them come back. I work here because I
could have died also. I asked to work here because I feel responsible for my family who died here.
This is the only thing I can do for them in the present (Personal interview: 20 January 2012).
1
Innocent indicates how something happens to time and how something has happened to his
relationship with time.
Taking this observation as its starting point, this article asks: how do survivors construct time
through informal mnemonic practices at selected memorials? How do they experience time during
the commemoration? And what mode of temporality is inscribed in the materiality of memorials
and, in particular, is construed and performed through the working of the corporeality of human
remains? The analysis of these various dimensions of time, memory and trauma is informed by the
experiences and mnemonic practices of care-takers working at memorials and their relationship
with time. It includes observations of the annual commemoration of the Genocide against the Tutsi
and draws on further contextual data from survivors who do not work at the memorials, but have
survived the massacres that took place at those sites in 1994.
The exploration of time and memory is developed across three sections. The first reflects on
scholarship on time, whilst the second contextualises memorialisation in Rwanda in light of the
politics of memory and the interplay between collective and individual memory. It shows how we
can understand individual practices of coming to terms with a violent past in a context of heavily
contested and politicised remembrance. This section is followed by a brief reflec tion on, and
description of, research methodology and epistemology. The third and primary section presents
the empirical data which analyses temporalisation, such as time reversal, time synchronisation and
preservation; and finally the nexus between time, memory and the body within the notion of
‘trauma-time’. It argues that temporal practices and dimensions are deeply anchored in the cor-
poreality of human remains and dead bodies. Caring for the remnants of the dead is a way of
278 International Review of Victimology 25(3)
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