Commitment and Genocide literature: Boubacar Diop's Murambi, The Book of Bones

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. One could easily read this encounter between the writer (who is also, in Murambi, on the side of violence) and victim as the symmetrically inverse version of the “messe noire” between torturer and victim in Sartre's “Situation of the writer in 1947.” In that text, shared violence forces both individuals to “commune in the destruction of the human.” In Diop's encounter, it is dialog which prevents communion.