The Words of Others: Remembering and Writing Genocide as an Indirect Witness

This dissertation examines literary representations of the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide by writers-indirect witnesses: the French writers Henri Raczymow and Patrick Modiano write from their position of descendants of Jewish survivors of the Second World War; the Chadian writer Koulsy Lamko, the Djiboutian Abdourahman A. Waberi, and the Ivorian Véronique Tadjo are African writers who took part in the project “Rwanda: Écrire par devoir de mémoire” under Fest’Africa. The ambivalent position of indirect witnesses shapes the type of memory that is created by way of literature and the authors’ representational strategies and stylistic choices. This dissertation investigates the development of complex-ified memory, an assembled web of different mnemonic processes (remembrance) and memorial positions (commemoration). The writers must accommodate the incentive to bear witness in their own indirect ways as well as through imagination. They develop a poetics of memory which represents genocide in all of its intricacies and complexities, ultimately showing how the memory of genocide needs to be read as well as interpreted, just like a work of literature. Moreover, memory is opened up: events characterized by violence are connected as a way to enlighten one another, to help create bridges. Complex-ified memory is both a complex form of many memorial threads and an active process. The writers-indirect witnesses “complex-ify” memory, writing and reading both its positive and negative outcomes. The plurality of the works examined in this dissertation calls for the deployment of numerous memoryscapes, showing how the memory of genocide is ultimately subject to fluidity and movement once it is opened up and complex-ified.Romance Languages and Literature