Bearing Witness to Horror: The Ethics in Révérien Rurangwa’s and Yolande Mukagasana’s Literary Testimonies of the Tutsi Genocide

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Following the Tutsi genocide in 1994, various types of literary work sprang up around the horror surrounding this event. Literary testimonies are one of these forms of literature. Révérien Rurangwa’s and Yolande Mukagasana’s texts are autobiographical accounts of the harrowing images, the pain, and the sorrow that both authors experienced in very different ways. These pieces and these authors must be seen in order to rehumanize us and them. We have to start looking into their words, into their eyes, as Emmanuel Lévinas would say, to find ethics. Ethics cradles these two works that bear witness to agony and fear. It spreads through the description of the narrators as ends in themselves (Nkrumah) for the reader to see, here the act of bearing witness is an ethical act itself. But can we find the same kind of ethics in these two quite diverse ways of living the genocide? How can these two texts create an ethical dialogue with their readers? Furthermore, how is this dialogue relevant outside of the Rwandan reality in contexts of other geographical spaces?