Body as Battlefield: Genocide, and the Family in Goretti Kyomuhendo's Secrets No More

Abstract

SummaryIn Goretti Kyomuhendo's Secrets No More, the faces of the individual characters often come through vividly, and the events and situations can be precisely located in time and place in the Rwandan genocide as corroborated by the historical evidence. However, despite its accessibility and the relationship between the real and the fictive, there is little or no reference to Secrets No More in the major studies about the fictional narratives on the Rwandan genocide. In most of the narratives on the genocide, the historicity of the carnage is explored by means of the stark images of human bestiality and the debility of the victims. Kyomuhendo specifically deals with the same experience and issues, but through the different vignettes that make up the narrative. She makes eloquent the devastating blow that the genocide wreaked on the family as a unit and, by extension, the relationship between the woman's body and the nation in moments of crisis. The narrative captures the gory images of total and unmitigated disaster, tinged with anger and disappointment over the violent destruction of lives and property, and the human folly in attempting to completely wipe out a group of people who were just as human as their murderers were. Although the subject of this article is one of violence, I examine the situational violence inflicted upon a specific group of people during moments of crisis (specifically the Rwandan genocide) in order to articulate how the battlefield has been extended beyond the physical space of engagement to the bodies and psyche of vulnerable groups. This in turn will demonstrate how the relationship between gender and national identity is reconstructed during ethnic clashes.