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, racism and islamophobia’ which also live in the North of the world. 22 The characters of The Virgin of Flames confirm such a reading of Los Angeles, a city that in Abani’s rendition loses any glam of Western whiteness and richness. The novel’s characters are indeed a heterogeneous group who share non-belonging and marginality because of their condition as illegal migrants (as in the case of Bomboy, from Rwanda) or religious minority (as Iggy, the only white character in the book but also a Jewish tattooed woman), on account
never permanently fixed and constantly alternate. That is why, writing about the first Hakizimana-Hayes co-authored project, Postcolonial Identities: Constructing the ‘New Irish’ (2006), Helen Phelan argues: ‘The collaborative voices of Jean and Michael weave in and out of a creative dialogue, surrounding Jean’s paintings with history, story, and shaman-like journeying. … [T]his many-voiced story offers Irish, Burundian/ Rwandan reflections, with shared threads of history and a shared human story in Jean’s journey’ (2008: xv–xvi). Furthermore, Phelan elaborates that
as a chorus commenting on the TRC. The project was conceptualised as multifaceted, with the South African narratives in dialogue with back-projections in spaces of memorial significance within the context in which the play was being performed. It premiered at the Amahoro Stadium in Rwanda (5/08/06), where some 12,000 people took refuge during the 1994 genocide, and the Bosnian performance took place at the Mostar Bridge (20/09/08). These interactions between performers, memories and spaces are important: Schramm argues that ‘the memory of violence is not only
occur in other times and places, Sulter explains: ‘In the light of the current and increasing racial attacks and the horror of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and Rwanda, I felt compelled to look back to Germany’s hidden history – the “ethnic cleansing” of the Holocaust.’33 Sulter refers to ‘Blood Money’ as a poem; but it is really a poetic micro-fiction, a narrative, which she cannot make rhyme, as if the genre falters when humanity ceases to be humane.34 August Sander’s pre-war German circus of mixed performers becomes Sulter’s focus, where the ‘clown’ is the tragic
Brussels ‘with the idea that all the Africans in the city were from the Congo. I knew the colonial relationship, I had a basic understanding of the history of the slave state there, and that had dislodged any other idea from my head’ (138). He is therefore surprised to enter a club, the dance floor full with people he assumes are Congolese, and be told that ‘everyone was Rwandan’, contemplating that most of those dancing ‘would have been teenagers during the genocide’ (139). Julius soon begins to understand that the ‘European reality’ of ‘flexible borders’ means that
. She had read somewhere that there was more than one mobile per adult in sub-Saharan Africa. It was a statistic she doubted, even though she knew that her friend Adela, who had fled to Britain from Rwanda after the genocide and spent long years trying to avoid being sent back, had two mobiles with which she kept in touch with survivors back home. The personal 143 Displacements letter, like so many of Adela’s family and friends, was dead. All Rachel’s dead had been letter-writers, and she herself had written hundreds – no! thousands – of them over the years. She
. (1992). L’Illusion de la fin ou la grève des événements, Paris: Galilée. Bey, M. (2002). Entendez-vous dans les montagnes . . ., La Tour d’Aigues: L’Aube/ Barzakh. Brozgal, L. (2014). ‘In the Absence of the Archive (Paris, October 17, 1961),’ South Central Review, 31(1), 34–54. Brunet, J.-P. (1999). Police contre FLN: Le Drame d’octobre 1961, Paris: Flammarion. Certeau, M. de (1975). L’Ecriture de l’histoire, Paris: Gallimard. Daeninckx, D. (1984). Meurtres pour mémoire, Paris: Gallimard. Dauge-Roth, A. (2010). Writing and Filming the Genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda
nightmare and lament: her nation invaded’. Of the passage Heaney remarks in his introduction, The Geat woman who cries out in dread as the flames consume the body of her dead lord could come straight from a late-twentieth-century news report, from Rwanda or Kosovo; her keen is a nightmare glimpse into the minds of people who have survived traumatic, monstrous events and who are now being exposed to a comfortless future. 74
-time Hebrew shoah . (CXXIII) The failures are dyed into our language with its ‘technical advance’, ‘Millennium-overviews’ and treatment of such events as Rwanda as a chopping preoccupation with better/worse, same/different from the ‘existing record’ or ‘standard’. It is in language, specifically the currency of public discourse, that Hill has the greatest task in his ‘embattling’ of virtue and vice. But to use poetry as rhetoric in the
it, and asking how memory is narratively organised, and the ways in which narrative is related to other cultural forms of remembering. The Economist of 11 May 2000 led with a story entitled ‘Hopeless Africa’, and tapped into the global media focus upon evolving African politics in the last two decades – South Africa and the end of apartheid, genocide in Rwanda and famine after famine in the Horn of