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Forum for Modern Language Studies Advance Access originally published online on August 27, 2009
Forum for Modern Language Studies 2009 45(4):427-440; doi:10.1093/fmls/cqp112
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© The Author (2009). Published by Oxford University Press for the Court of the University of St Andrews. All rights reserved. The University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland: No. SC013532.

This article appears in the following Forum for Modern Language Studies issue: SPECIAL ISSUE: Perspectives on Africa [View the issue table of contents]

Monstrous Fictions: Testifying to the Rwandan Genocide in Tierno Monénembo's L'aîné des orphelins

Michael Syrotinski

Department of French
University of Aberdeen
Aberdeen AB24 3NU
United Kingdom

m.syro{at}abdn.ac.uk

  Abstract

Fiction, in its obliqueness, provides the space to say what history can only say in the mode of a pathos obscuring the ‘truth’ of the event. Trauma narratives feature performative language, which can have good and bad consequences, and maybe ultimately transformative psychotherapeutic ones. Monénembo shows us a profoundly traumatised child, whose symptoms match those of children suffering from attachment disorder. His text may not match the sobriety and directness of other texts of the devoir de mémoire project, but rather than stand in for direct testimony, it stands alongside the events. Faustin's narrative acts out the irreducible ambivalence of all traumatic memorialisation, which can only ever accede indirectly to the event, such that the event proper comes into being only as a kind of originary supplement (cf. Derrida on testimony). Our own devoir de mémoire is to remember that sharing in the work of remembering and mourning is an ongoing collective responsibility.

Key Words: Rwanda • genocide • trauma • memory • "devoir de mémoire" • testimony • Monénembo, Tierno


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