The “Terrible Gift” Of The Murambi Memorial Site

Ashley DeMartini, York University

Description

Inspired by the documentary film, Triage (2009), my paper considers how the Rwandan Murambi Memorial Site, tended by genocide survivor, Emmanuel Murangira, defies the conventional commemorative logic often at work in memorial sites indexing a past atrocity. After the genocide, Murangira began digging up and preserving with lyme the bodies of his fellow villagers murdered by the genocidaires. Murangira’s actions attest not only to the need to remember and recover the singularity of the nameless victims, but also, as a survivor and witness his actions provide a testimony to his obligation to those murdered. Murangira inherits the terrible burden of remembering. His actions represent the meaning of human beings in relation to atrocity, yet language seems unable to articulate this profundity. However, my paper begins precisely with the need to grapple with the absence and non-representable aspects of the traumatic.

Drawing on the work of Roger Simon, I argue that the unsettled remains of the past can press us to consider history’s bearing on the present and future. Simon argues that by facing these traces one witnesses a “terrible gift”. Such a gift bestows an inheritance and obligation upon the witness the memory of another’s trauma. The profundity of Murangira’s memorial practice carries with it an overwhelming silence. Nonetheless, it is this silence where one may work through these historical traces to, “determine our ethical commitments and build interrelated futures (p. 189)”. Simon’s concept provides a pedagogy for thinking beyond the limits of language imposed by the consternating content of Murangira’s memorial. Examining why one may be silenced before such memorials, begets the question, why do we lack language for deeds that are so human? Theodore Adorno discusses this limit as a “new categorical imperative”. Adorno’s discussion contextualizes this paper’s suggestion that thinking of Murangira’s memorial as a “terrible gift” returns the witness back to a place of language, a place of possibility, to contemplate how the past bears upon one’s present location.

 
Jan 11th, 9:30 AM Jan 11th, 11:00 AM

The “Terrible Gift” Of The Murambi Memorial Site

Inspired by the documentary film, Triage (2009), my paper considers how the Rwandan Murambi Memorial Site, tended by genocide survivor, Emmanuel Murangira, defies the conventional commemorative logic often at work in memorial sites indexing a past atrocity. After the genocide, Murangira began digging up and preserving with lyme the bodies of his fellow villagers murdered by the genocidaires. Murangira’s actions attest not only to the need to remember and recover the singularity of the nameless victims, but also, as a survivor and witness his actions provide a testimony to his obligation to those murdered. Murangira inherits the terrible burden of remembering. His actions represent the meaning of human beings in relation to atrocity, yet language seems unable to articulate this profundity. However, my paper begins precisely with the need to grapple with the absence and non-representable aspects of the traumatic.

Drawing on the work of Roger Simon, I argue that the unsettled remains of the past can press us to consider history’s bearing on the present and future. Simon argues that by facing these traces one witnesses a “terrible gift”. Such a gift bestows an inheritance and obligation upon the witness the memory of another’s trauma. The profundity of Murangira’s memorial practice carries with it an overwhelming silence. Nonetheless, it is this silence where one may work through these historical traces to, “determine our ethical commitments and build interrelated futures (p. 189)”. Simon’s concept provides a pedagogy for thinking beyond the limits of language imposed by the consternating content of Murangira’s memorial. Examining why one may be silenced before such memorials, begets the question, why do we lack language for deeds that are so human? Theodore Adorno discusses this limit as a “new categorical imperative”. Adorno’s discussion contextualizes this paper’s suggestion that thinking of Murangira’s memorial as a “terrible gift” returns the witness back to a place of language, a place of possibility, to contemplate how the past bears upon one’s present location.