Usurping the Story: Travels in Rwanda

Article

by Laura McMahon

Travel tales come in many forms. If asked to define the genre, one might first think of guidebooks. Or Jack Kerouac. Archaeologists and anthropologists out in the field. Pico Iyer jetsetting between airports. Emancipated Victorian ladies. Dusty stories of roads and romance; voyages into the unknown; brave adventurers returning home triumphant.

Or one might imagine strange food and strange diseases. Flora and fauna that defy the imagination. Missionaries. Probing at primitive peoples. Heart of Darkness. The blank spaces on the map. A flat earth. Scrambles and land claims. Savages and murder.

The latter is outdated, we might think. Gone with colonialism, with the passing of dark and racist centuries into times if not more emancipated than more politically correct. A time where intrusions into lands of the Other occur via government bank accounts and air raids, strategic invasions and tongue in cheek diplomatic negotiations.

One might now think of peacekeeping. Of journalism. Of the United Nations and NATO. Sanctioned recording and sanctioned intervention. Development. Volunteering. Humanitarianism. Failure and frustration. One might think of the white man’s guilt, of the white man’s burden.
Such is at least one story that we have all become familiar with.

Rwanda: a narrative of genocide; a narrative of the failure of the West. A narrative of travel and aid, approached in good faith, gone awry. Our story.

Rwanda is confusing. It is beyond our imagination. Neighbours tortured, raped, and killed neighbours by hand and laboriously. An estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus murdered by the Hutu militia in three long months. It is a story from a land far away, a central Africa of madness and AIDS, of barbarity and disintegration.

What is confusing needs form. Rape and killing are not form. Bearing witness is not form. Travel is not form.

What is confusing needs a name. We do not have enough names.

We have one name: genocide. And we have one form: the story.

Genocide is becoming dead language. Popular stories are conventional.

A novel word’s waning power

The word “genocide” has been on the tip of many tongues of late. Debated, denied, shouted: the term that has become synonymous with a call to political action on the part of Western powers. It is a call to be there, to see it and to stop it.

Some cry it as a call of humanitarian righteousness. Others – powerful politicians – scrupulously avoid it to skirt their legally inscribed duty to intervene. The word “genocide” both suggests the largest catastrophe of the 20th century and paradoxically works to dilute its own evocative power.

“Genocide” as a descriptive term was invented in response to an event of such catastrophic and traumatic proportions as to seem to resist being captured in language. In his work on the Holocaust – or the Shoah, if we want to be committed to attention to words – Raphael Lemkin invented the word out of the Greek genos (“family”) and the Latin ossido (“to massacre”). A massive and unprecedented event called for a powerful and novel word.

The term appears to have lost its initial shocking value as it was absorbed into common parlance. Lemkin coined the term to signify something radically unprecedented. Now the word “genocide” has become an umbrella concept. Rather than approaching recent or ongoing humanitarian disasters as complex singularities worthy of their own terminology, we seem to need to measure each case against the yardstick of the Shoah. 

In losing or avoiding singularity, we not only forfeit clear political vision – “genocide” signifies the death of innocents against an incomprehensible and all-powerful force of evil – but we at once lose the power of originality and real imagination in our stories. We become formulaic.

Narrating Rwanda

In Canada at least, the story we cling to can be read as almost an old fashioned travel narrative, with a twist. Instead of triumph there is defeat. The defeated hero returns home to tell his tale. It is a story of bravery, a story of goodness, a story of impenetrable and overpowering forces.

A white man has gone into the heart of Africa. He has gone with optimism and respect, perhaps a romanticized respect. He has come home half mad with the recollection of the horrifying scenes he has witnessed.

He has usurped the story.

Two particular narratives come to mind: one that has inspired rehashing, numerous media presentations and speaking tours; and a second that is more low-profile but more insidious. The memoir of Canadian General Roméo Dallaire and the fictionalized account of the Québécois journalist Gil Courtemanche enact in their own way traditionally-formed, disturbingly-palatable stories.

Each of these stories pits a morally-grounded (anti)hero against a sickeningly violent adversary. Each of these stories shifts the focus from what happened in Rwanda’s drawn-out civil war and its wake to an admiration for and identification with a single (white) heroic figure. 



Roméo Dallaire’s 2003 memoir “Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda,” has been presented as a documentary and recently as a feature film of the same title. The General, recently appointed to the Canadian Senate, has become a household name, and one synonymous with courage, morality, guilt, and great grief. 



“Shake Hands with the Devil” is Dallaire’s detailed account of his role in the events immediately leading up to the three months of barbarity in Rwanda in the spring of 2004. Dallaire began as an optimist, confident in the positive role of the international peacekeeping forces under his command in a precariously stabilized country. 



His story recounts Rwanda’s fall into deep, pervasive, and targeted violence under a Hutu takeover, in tandem with his own personal fall of conscience. As tens and then hundreds of thousands were killed around him, Dallaire tirelessly petitioned for more forces and for humanitarian aid from the international community. It was consistently refused, as countries pulled their scanty troops from the disintegrating situation.

Bravely, Dallaire disobeyed orders to peacefully effect a ceasefire – an impossible task at this stage – or to withdraw completely. Disobeying a military order meant facing dismissal and court martial; Dallaire listened to his own loud and shouting conscience instead of following the soldier’s code. Eventually, however, suffering from severe psychological damage after witnessing the horrors around him, Dallaire asked to be removed from his post. 



Today, Dallaire is a celebrity. His speaking tours sell out, he is widely honoured, and his story is told and retold. The figure of the general seems to have tapped into a certain sense of collective guilt, a certain deep identification and fascination with the figure of the good but ineffectual man, a very specific and recognizable form of the anti-hero.



The second narrative is also from Quebec, and one that overlaps with that of Dallaire’s. Gil Courtemanche’s 2000 novel “Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali” (“A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali”), which inspired the 2006 feature film “Un dimanche à Kigali,” tells the story of an outraged, hapless, and helpless Québécois journalist in Rwanda to film a documentary on AIDS.


It could easily be called “Love in the Time of Genocide.” Bernard Valcourt, the protagonist, enters into a sexual relationship with a young, beautiful, Hutu-Tutsi waitress at the Milles Collines Hotel (of “Hotel Rwanda” fame). The narrative covers the couple’s story as well as a far grittier account of the AIDS, murdering, raping, and pillaging taking place around them.



Leaving aside probably well-deserved charges of pornography or dark colonialist erotica, the story places Valcourt – who bears any number of resemblances to his author – in a role very similar to that carved out in Dallaire’s narrative.



Notches down in power and status, Valcourt even eclipses the Dallaire figure – who appears in the novel – as the symbol of (anti)heroic virtue. The United Nations’ presence is all but slandered in Courtemanche’s account; now it is the good but flawed expatriate civilian, thrust into an incomprehensible situation, that fills the role of protagonist and voice of morality.

The same old story 



One might argue that here in the West we need our own stories to comprehend tragedy from afar, as a window into the devastating pain and suffering of the Other. We comprehend from, and only from, our own subject position. Our only effective stories will interpolate precisely these subject positions. 



“Now everyone wants to forget about Rwanda,” Dallaire says in the film version of “Shake Hands with the Devil.” It is his job and his duty, he goes on, to make sure that they don’t. 



In reality, we don’t want to forget about Rwanda. It has become a cause célèbre, something safely over and done with that allows us to explore the weight of our inaction, to feel again and again, with each narrative rehashing, a certain complacent guilt. But it does not lead to rejuvenated awareness of new catastrophes – Darfur is now on the tip of everybody’s tongues – so much as an insistence on comparing emerging situations to Rwanda, to a past in which we failed to act.



It makes each new story the same story, yet again, and it does not inspire new endings. It is as if our Western guilt is pre-written into each new situation; failure is inherent to the story. And so is self-absorption, a certain co-opting tendency that keeps us from seeing outside of our own selves, our own privileged but flawed Western status, our own forms and our own plots. It obscures and reduces; it denies urgent real world occurrences their own histories, their own plots, their own voices. It is a refusal to see, and a refusal to listen.

A version of this article was originally published in the McGill daily in October 2007.