Rwanda: A Time

Abstract

Sasha Longford’s untitled animated film..., released to mark the twentieth anniversary of the genocide in Rwanda, was produced by Snapdragon Studios, and released by the Catholic Agency For Overseas Development (CAFOD) via YouTube. The palette of the film, with its hues of yellow, red, brown, and black, condenses the genocide and its lingering traumas into its almost four minutes. Narrated by an anonymous Tutsi woman, the film offers an account of how the hatred and division that would culminate in genocide began, and how it continues to sear Rwandan society, which finds itself still in the infancy of the period that the film calls peace.... Longford’s film animates not only a “Rwanda” that cannot be thought outside of 1994, but also a problematic discourse of anthropology. It does so by situating Rwanda and the genocide in a time different to that in which it was produced, denying it coevalness. However, to think Rwanda as a time is to place the Rwanda of 1994 precisely within the paradox of an indefinite period; a space in which Rwanda becomes a call, the letter, the signifier Rwanda, into which the longue duree of the genocide, its violences, and its traumas are condensed. It is...a call within a network of significations, and as such cannot be sounded without it invoking the signifier genocide, the juncture at which Rwanda, the Holocaust, the reservation schools of North America, and far too many more intersect.