Abstract
M.A. (French)
This thesis investigates the collective literary Project entitled Rwanda: écrire par devoir
de mémoire, written by nine Francophone, African intellectuals in response to the
genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. Six of them are fictional novels or travel diaries by non-
Rwandans, based on the stories and adaptations of the stories of survivors. There is one
poetry anthology and two texts by Rwandans: a survivor’s testimony and an essay by a
Tutsi who was in exile during the genocide.
A comparison of the literary strategies, used by the authors to respond both
individually and collectively to the difficulty of writing the ‘inexpressible’, forms the basis
of this analysis. It explores trauma theory and its application to literature and fiction,
focusing on how signs of traumatic memory are made visible in the texts. Based on
Ricoeur’s notion of triple mimesis, it considers the interaction between victim, writer/text
and reader/listener which re-establishes the communication interrupted by the trauma of
genocide.
The thesis considers the initiation, aims and challenges of the Project. It provides
an overview of the origins and consequences of the genocide as observed by the writers.
A literary analysis of each of the nine texts separately allows the reader to appreciate the
variety of approaches: collective/individual; witness-survivor/indirect witness; fact/fiction,
and the blending of these opposites. A synthesis of the recurring motifs, lieux de
mémoire and emblematic characters foregrounds tensions that emerge in the postgenocide
society between memory and forgetting, identity and alterity, survivors and
exiles, forgiveness and justice, survival and the death experience. These elements create
an intertextual, fictional world that is nevertheless anchored in the reality of genocide, a
polyphonic narrative which contributes to a deeper understanding of the collective
horror of the genocide.