Embodying Burundi after War: Roland Rugero’s Baho!

Abstract

Roland Rugero’s 2012 novel, Baho!, introduces its mute protagonist from the perspective of a one-eyed old woman, raising questions of embodied trauma in relation to narrative issues of voice and point of view. Critical discussion of Baho! has focused on its mute protagonist, exploring issues of voicelessness, post-colonial subalternity and scapegoating in relation to political violence, an emphasis that tends to reduce Rugero’s complex novel to a victim narrative. This article examines how Rugero embodies trauma in his narrative, both to acknowledge a wounded and wounding body politic and to explore literary strategies for imagining a future beyond the impasse of recurrent national violence. Drawing on Burundian humanism, which understands humanity as both weak and strong, arousing simultaneous and inseparable responses of pity and admiration, it discusses how the embodied trauma of Baho!’s point-of-view characters informs perspective and shapes its narrative. It also considers how these characters represent national spaces and stories as they redirect a post-conflict narrative of violence toward a vision of life that integrates trauma without being disabled by it. This vision represents a political choice to reject a victim identity, affirming instead survival and resilience, as in the lines Rugero quotes from the Burundian anthem as his epigraph, which boasts that the nation, however crushed by histories of violence, yet survives. Ending with a generative femininity that transfigures the abjectly feminised setting of the novel’s opening, Baho! embraces life, arousing compassionate admiration for Burundi and Burundians as they journey beyond war.