Bodies in Shame: Writing Trauma and Affective Unsettlement in Post-Genocide Rwanda Fiction

This thesis analyzes Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi, le livre des ossements and Véronique Tadjo’s L’Ombre d’Imana: voyages jusqu’au bout du Rwanda. I argue that both authors write trauma by employing both a dominant realist style and the trauma aesthetic with attention to the embodied experiences of genocide victims and survivors in both styles. In doing so, each author contributes to impeding indifference surrounding the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Furthermore, I assert that one effect of writing trauma is that of affective unsettlement or affective travel, or the registering of psychic and physical shame and other related affective responses in the reader, which is posited as a more responsive form of reading and witnessing