Non-mourning and ecocritical ethics in Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda

Abstract

In this article I read Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana through its embedded account of ecotourism and the environmental space of Rwanda’s Parc National des Volcans. In the context of Rwandan genocide, I make a case for re-grounding mourning through environmental co-ordinates. Considering what I term an “agriculturalisation” of genocide, present both in the implementation of genocide in rural areas and in environmental hermeneutics for genocide, I connect the work of mourning to a de-naturalisation of received landscapes and land orthodoxies. I suggest that The Shadow of Imana presents us with a vernacular mourning ecology for post-genocide Rwanda, in which non-mourning enclaves — spaces where a human conception of mourning does not obtain — animate a mourning for everything else that remains.