Responding to the Shadows: Reimagining Subjectivity in Tadjo's L'Ombre d'Imana

Abstract

Véronique Tadjo wrote L'Ombre d'Imana (2000) in response to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, for which social narratives that divide an us from a them were partly responsible. Tadjo's text appears to mirror the social fragmentation: the narration is divided between an autobiographical narrator, witnesses' testimonials, and a third-person omniscient narrator recounting fable-like stories. The combined presence of these three narrative voices seems to undermine the conventional authority of each. However, read through the lens of Kelly Oliver's model of subjectivity based on witnessing, the text illustrates a new method of listening to others without reducing their narratives to fit in pre-existing categories. On one level, the narrator demonstrates the practice of hearing witness testimony beyond recognition; on another level, the text calls on the reader to repeat the practice in order to hear the author's account of her experience, communicated by all three narrative voices.