Invisible again: Rwanda and representation after genocide.

"Never again became wherever again." President Paul Kagame of Rwanda

(Daily Mail and Guardian, May 1, 2000)

"Never again" Banner at Kigali commemoration of the genocide

(BBC News April 10, 2004)

The Rwandan genocide of 1994 cost at least 500,000 people their lives in the space of two months, (1) and had taken an estimated 3.8 million lives in the extended wars around Congo by the end of 2004. When Paul Kagame later claimed that "never again became wherever again," he was saying that the post-World War II settlement comprised of the United Nations and its various treaties and conventions had failed even in its basic premise that it would prevent the repetition of mass genocide. Kagame's intervention sought to make the processes of globalization and their costs visible, in opposition to the forces of globalization, who prefer to act invisibly as at the appropriately named Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Making the genocide visible was a task that seemed unapproachable to those few Western artists who have had the courage to address the subject. Their work has been driven to adopt given frameworks of Christianity, conceptual art, or documentary photography.

By contrast, Rwandan artistic practice in the first years after the genocide seemed to be striving toward a performative practice of visibility by creating a network of memorials. Nonetheless, the slogan used at the tenth anniversary commemoration was "Never Again." By rewriting Rwanda's genocide under the sign of the Holocaust, the Rwandan Popular Front (RPF) government no doubt hoped to claim some of the immunity from criticism that this sign has conferred on the Israeli state since 1948. At the same time, it suggests that the remembrance of genocide continues to resist representation and has retreated into invisibility. In discussing the problem of representing the Holocaust, Saul Friedlander has influentially argued that "there are limits to representation which should not be but can easily be transgressed" (1992:3). The paradox of this position is that it has left genocides other than the Holocaust outside representation at all. Beyond this pall of invisibility is the even wider invisibility of globalization, which is everywhere and nowhere, wreaking a devastation for which no-one can be held accountable. Achille Mbembe and Janet Roitman, referring to recent difficulties in Africa, call it the "time of crisis." Strikingly, they consider the key object of their work the "immediate present," notable for its "visibility and profanity" (Mbembe and Roitman 1995:323). The Rwandan genocide made it clear that in a global culture that prides itself on taking place in "real time," the present is in fact a disjunctured, fragmented, and often unavailable location. No wonder, then, that "contemporary" art practice, unsure even what its name might mean, has struggled with the limits of representing genocide.

The difficulties inherent in the question of visibility and invisibility in this moment of globalization have generated new forms of work, among them the work of art. Globalization is usually framed as a reorganization of work creating a new paradigm of labor superceding the model of the male, Western industrial worker as the source of value. As Gayatri Spivak has noted, "in the new international economic order after the dissolution of the Soviet Union [in 1991] ... it is the labor of the patriarchally defined subaltern woman that has been most effectively socialized" (1999:68). It is, then, no coincidence that it was precisely these women who were the symbolic targets of the Rwandan genocide, subject to both rape and violence. At the same time, the new division of labor is instituting a new "division of the senses," the ground on which media of all kinds become possible (Ranciere 2002:176-8). This division of the senses is not, of the simple effect of the global division of labor, but is in a complex, constantly changing symbiosis with it.

One instance of this problematic is precisely the visuality of memorials. Following the model established by Holocaust memorials, it has come to be axiomatic that memorials should seek to enable the viewer to "work through" the trauma rather than "act it out" (see LaCapra 1994). The formal means by which such working through is enabled are those of minimalism, now the dominant visual style for memorials around the world. Minimalism evokes Immanuel Kant's theory of the sublime, as opposed to the beautiful, and enacts his view that the aesthetic must be disinterested in its object. Any disinterested subject should not, however, really be engaged in work. Work is performed and one's performance at work is judged in accordance with criteria of interest: One should both be interested in the work and generate interest in the work, in the sense of attracting attention, which in the global economy is to generate value in the financial sense. The violent interpenetration of "economy" and what is usually called "culture" was central to the genocide itself and is now the key problem to be surmounted in constructing memorials that "work."

It should be noted from the outset that the Rwandan genocide was itself a form of mediated representation. By this I do not mean that it was not real but that it was also symbolic in form and practice. The genocide was an enactment of the logic of the (post)colonial state as a representation of ethnic superiority. It took the "imagined community" of Rwanda to be synonymous with the image of the "Hutu" and acted upon that idea. As is now well known, Western race theory of the colonial period held that Hutu and Tutsi were different peoples by nature, representatives of the larger and equally distinct "Bantu" and "Nilotic" groups (see Mamdani 2001:76-102 for a full account of the "Hamitic" theory). Certainly there was a class distinction between Tutsi and Hutu in precolonial Africa, but this distinction was made absolute and biological by the Belgian colonial authorities. In the precolonial period, a person could move from "Hutu" to "Tutsi" by gaining wealth, a process known as kwihutura; similarly, by losing wealth one became "Hutu" (see Mamdani 1996:10 and 2001:70).

After they gained control of the region as part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1918, the Belgians imposed a policy of divide-and-rule as they had done throughout the vast territories of the Congo. Acting on the racial theory of the time, the Belgians exalted the Tutsis as Caucasians who had migrated south. One colonial official was so determined to establish absolute differences amongst Rwanda's casually mixed peoples that he argued that the Tutsis had come to Rwanda from outer space (Gourevitch 1996:30). Beginning in the 1930s, all Rwandans were registered as Tutsi (15%), Hutu (84%), or Twa (1%), thereby transforming the racial classification problem into a bureaucratic one. The division of Rwandans into unequal ethnic groups was thus carried out as a direct reflection of European race science. Rendering Rwanda into a homogenous nation of one "ethnicity" was in one sense the acting out of that logic.

The Rwandan genocide can also be understood as a displacement of the politics of Final Solution into the culture of globalization, for what has been endlessly described as a meaningless ethnic slaughter was rather an attempt to impose what one must call "globalized National Socialism"--accepting the paradox as part of the crisis--as a solution to the crisis of late colonial authority in a global cultural economy. (2) After being excluded from the colonial administration, the Hutu were suddenly given power by the departing Belgian authorities in 1959, not coincidentally the year of the first anti-Tutsi violence. In the thirty-five years that followed, the Hutu created a one-party state that was often sustained by attacks on the Tutsi, who had been the preferred group in the colonial era right until the last moment.

However, this long pattern of violence does not allow us to predict or explain the genocide of 1994, which far exceeded all earlier instances in its scope and longevity. In 1986, the Hutu leaders found their prosperity undermined as world coffee and tea prices collapsed (Gourevitch 1996:76). Such commodities were among the first to be affected by the emerging global market. That is to say, what came to be called the "work" of genocide was performed to foreclose the possibility that the foundational work of the nation-state in economic, cultural, and political terms was for nothing (see Mbembe 2004). As Caroline Thomas has pointed out: "Globalization erodes the authority of states differentially to set the economic and political agenda within their respective political space" (1997:7). In a cash-crop economy like that of Rwanda, the hard-won prize of the nation-state was rendered irrelevant by globalization. As a result, a sense of being the victims of "treachery" arose in the Hutu leadership, leading to a search for enemies and revenge (see Appadurai 1996:154-6).

In the context of a racialized state, a scapegoat was conveniently to hand for this loss of authority that was experienced at an individual level as a challenge to masculinity. The enemy was, as it had been since 1959, the Tutsi, but the Hutu radicals now promised radical social reform in an authoritarian fashion, just as the Nazi regime had done, chanting slogans like: "Let slavery, servitude, and discord be finished forever!" and "We condemn the exploitation and servitude of the people!" in this perspective, the simplest answer to the invisible hand of the global market was to hack off the limbs of local "enemies."

When Hutu leaders called the genocide umuganda, or "communal work," this was not a cynical euphemism but an expression of the genocide's motivating logic (Mamdani 2001:194). On the now-infamous radio station RTLM (Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines), broadcaster Valerie Bemerki incited the extremist factions of the Hutu to kill their Tutsi neighbors: "Do not kill these inyenzi (cockroaches) with a bullet, cut them to pieces with a machete" (Swain 1999). The manual labor of the genocide was not a sign of Rwanda's primitivism but a symbolic act. The killing was presented throughout as "work," and machetes and firearms were described as "tools." This "work" was organized by state officials whom Rwandans were accustomed to seeing in positions of authority. Orders from the government were handed down the administrative chain to the communes, calling for "self-defense" against "accomplices" of the enemy. Those who carried out the work of killing were paid in cash, kind, or in land taken from the victims. Wealthier killers were compensated with computers or televisions. Above the gate to Auschwitz I is an arch bearing the slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("work brings freedom"). This has often been read as a deceptive promise to the prisoners but it was also an exhortation to the guards: When the work here is finished, you will be free. The Rwandan genocide enacted this practice as communal labor rather than secret police state activity, a significant difference.

Crucially, the genocide was not limited to Tutsi but also claimed as victims moderate Hutu who refused the politics of Hutu Power as well as those whose ethnic identity was uncertain. In Rwanda, where the physical difference, if any, between the two groups was so unclear and the practice of intermarriage between groups so common, it required considerable effort to sustain the idea of an ethnic divide. On September 21, 1992, Colonel Deogratias Nsabimana, then chief of staff in the Hutu-dominated Rwandan army, sent a top-secret memorandum to his commanders identifying and defining "the enemy," two years in advance of the genocide. The "enemy" were not only the Tutsi but also the "partisans of the enemy," those who supported them or refused to support the army. The full roster of the enemy reads like a vicious parody of the Chinese encyclopedia mentioned by Jorge Luis Borges in "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins" (1984) and cited by Michel Foucault. It lists:

* Tutsi refugees

* The NRA (Ugandan army)

* Tutsi inside the country

* Hutu dissatisfied with the regime in power

* Unemployed people inside and outside the country

* Foreigners married to Tutsi wives

* The Nilo-Hamitic people of the region

* Criminals in flight

This list attempts to define those who have weakened and betrayed the nation, equated here with prosperity for Hutu extremists. On RTLM, listeners often heard Simon Bikindi's song "I Hate These Hutus," a long delineation of all the different Hutu who were held to be insufficiently loyal (Gourevitch 1996:100). Sustaining a racialized divide required even greater vigilance, in some senses, of those held to be superior than of the undifferentiated mass of the inferior. Hate is hard work, it seems. Writing on the South African situation, Achille Mbembe observes that "for racism to acquire such power, profit and delirium had to be so closely connected as to constantly trigger the vertiginous capacity of the native to be both a thing and a metonym of something else" (2004:382). Here the "enemy" takes the place of the "native," instigating a delirium of revenge when profits fell as both the cause of loss and a metonym for the global economy.

As befits the psychic dimension to this drama, the Hutu also constructed a gender politics of the "enemy." In the 1990s, Hutu radicals rejected the idea that Rwandans were a single people, charging that this concept was a Tutsi trick to divide and weaken the Hutu by destroying their sense of ethnic identity. Human Rights Watch reports that the Hutu propagandists further "equated the Hutu-Tutsi difference with the fundamental difference between male and female," with the Hutus as male of course. The spectacular display of sexual violence during the genocide, in the form of the mass rape of women and girls, was a visible demonstration of this gendered power. In raping a woman, a man identified himself as Hutu/male and his victim as Tutsi/female in a way that at once avoided complex histories of intermarriage and cohabitation and represented the logic of superiority. By asserting gender as "fundamental," ethnicity and power could be rendered in similarly unequivocal terms. Genocide performed racialized and gendered power and thereby made it visible. At the same time, it sought to make visible the Hutu majority's frustration that the new global market had rendered the prize of the nation-state worthless on the bodies of the symbol of that globalization, the subaltern woman. The only international change to have resulted from the genocide was the United Nations' designation of rape as an act of genocide in recognition of its strategic use by the Interahamwe (McGreal 1998). (3)

RTLM constantly exhorted its listeners to complete the "final war" against the Tutsi (Article 19 1996:112 gives full details of RTLM's involvement with the practice of genocide). The echo of the Holocaust in this remark in fact highlights the vital difference between the two events. The Nazis made every effort to keep their crimes secret and invisible, referring to those killed as figuren, puppets or drawings, rather than as people. In choosing this metaphor, Nazi ideology evinced a contempt for visual representation as being a subordinate or inferior form of cultural practice. The Jewish/queer/disabled or Communist body was an inferior copy of the perfect Aryan and consequently did not even deserve to exist. During the Shoah, bodies were turned to ash, which was itself dispersed. By contrast, in Rwanda, events were clearly visible to all and the dead lay where they fell. The physicality of the body was emphasized by the acts of rape, torture, and deliberately prolonged execution that characterized the genocide. In neighboring countries, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, it was even possible to watch the genocide live on television (Dongala 2004). Rather than being a secret art in which bodies were rendered into drawings, Rwandan genocide was performed as public work that had to be seen to have its proper effect. In this sense, the genocide was drawing a "world picture," or engaged in "world making," creating a world that was now visibly different because it was ethnically the same. (4)

II Despite widespread television and journalism coverage in 1994, the Rwandan genocide did not become the subject of an extensive body of visual representation in the West until its tenth anniversary in 2004, even though there was a growing body of important scholarship on this most important of topics (see Mamdani 1996, Ranck 2000, and above all Gourevitch 1996). Here the contrast with the extensive, almost obsessive, commemoration of the Holocaust is unavoidable. In a wide range of popular representations, the Holocaust serves as the limit case of a clear moral distinction between good and evil, a paradigm for absolute moral choice, where there is no room for equivocation. This formula ignores the complexities of what Primo Levi called the "gray zone" of the camps, in which such simple distinctions could not be drawn. The Holocaust towers over the contemporary, which seems morally insignificant by comparison and becomes invisible. Consequently, the Rwandan genocide was represented as a natural disaster. For example, the Egyptian Bhoutros Bhoutros-Ghali, then Secretary-General of the United Nations, depicted Rwandans as a people "fallen into calamitous circumstances," as if it were all a terrible accident. For one Belgian history professor quoted in the New York Times, there was no moral lesson to be drawn: "This is not a story of good guys and bad guys but a story of bad guys. Period" (Strauss 1998). Rwanda's own complexities were rendered invisible by unspoken comparison with the Holocaust and became mere misfortune.

For the Chilean conceptual artist Alfredo Jaar and the French photographer Gilles Peress, the Rwandan genocide demanded an immediate response. Both courageously traveled to the region in August 1994, immediately after the Hutu extremists had been driven out. Both made extensive photographic records of what they saw, using the camera to try and capture what seems to be unsayable. They then put the photographs to very different uses. While Peress presents his work as classic photojournalism, Jaar made equally paradigmatic use of his photographs as conceptual art. These very different formats interestingly end up meeting at the same vanishing point: silence. While there are points to critique in their work, it should be said first that these projects are enormously important in taking the initiative to begin a discussion in the West about the genocide that goes beyond the usual platitudes.

In what became his Rwanda Project of 1994-98 (Figs. 1a-1b), Jaar repeatedly returned to the trauma of Rwanda, trying different representational strategies to make some sense of what he had seen and what had happened. His first response was one of his most effective. He purchased a job lot of postcards at a Rwandan post office showing typical wildlife scenes and the tourist slogan "Discover a thousand marvels in the land of a thousand hills." He sent these postcards to friends in the West each bearing the name of a survivor: "Caritas Namazuru is still alive!" This tactic emphasized a connected series of Western cliches about Africa. On the picture side of the card are animals that are entirely familiar to Westerners who could not locate Rwanda on a map; on the other, a written refutation of the notion that the entire country should be written off, by the naming of a person, countering the anonymous images of suffering that represent "Rwanda." The colonial postcard has had a long history of such mappings of Africa and Jaar's Signs of Life series countered them effectively, using the familiar postmodern tactic of appropriation. (5) By turning the postcard on its head to identify specific individuals rather than generic stereotypes, Jaar surprises Western viewers into confronting their own stereotypes.

On returning from Africa, Jaar was initially unable to look at the photographs he had taken. As if uncertain how to display such powerful images, Jaar next created a conceptual, minimalist installation piece titled Real Pictures. Selecting some sixty of the thousands of exposures he had made in Rwanda, Jaar then--to use his term--"buried" them in black linen boxes. Laid on the floor, these boxes clearly resembled minimalist sculptures like those of Carl Andre. On the top of the boxes, text described the image within. Jaar created this "cemetery of images" because he felt that "the tragedy [was] unrepresentable." Referring to Kant's theory of the sublime, Jaar asserts that what took place is beyond the power of images and indeed would be in some way sullied by visual representation.

This logic enacts the visual politics of Holocaust memorials, which have enshrined the formerly controversial sculptural practice of minimalism as the hegemonic mode of memorialization, replacing the Classical style that is now seen as having been compromised by its Nazi variant. That is to say, minimalist sculpture sets out to help viewers "see more," in the apposite phrase of Susan Sontag, implying a visual image that could do more. In the opinion of the American artist Robert Morris, for example, the minimalist work of art acts as a gestalt, generating a new sense of vision (see Joselit 2003:106-108).

Thus, in order to "see" the genocide, Jaar constructed a minimalist mode of display for the many photographs he had taken, restricting biological vision with the aim of generating a more profound intellectual insight. In this judgment, Jaar contradicted some of his own photographic subjects, such as Benjamin Musisi, who was photographed standing amidst the many bodies lying at Ntarama Church in Nyamata, Rwanda. Here some 400 Tutsi were massacred in what they considered a place of refuge, part of a slaughter of more than 5000 in Ntarama. Jaar's caption continues: "Benjamin looks directly into the camera, as if recording what the camera saw. He asked to be photographed amongst the dead. He wanted to prove to his friends in Kampala, Uganda, that the atrocities were real and that he had seen the aftermath." Jaar translates this proof into text rather than image, a text addressed to a Western audience--few Africans would need telling that Kampala is in Uganda.

Here, despite his unquestionably good intentions and outstanding work in trying to think through the representation of genocide, Jaar becomes entangled in the difficulties of using Western-based art practice to represent subaltern culture. It is no criticism of Jaar to explore these difficulties because it is precisely his work that makes them visible. Jaar has placed the question of Africa's oscillation between visibility and invisibility at the heart of works such as his piece Emergency, in which a sculpted map of the continent rises and falls beneath the surface of a dark pool of water. So if such a skilled and aware artist as Jaar finds himself in conceptual difficulties, it is reasonable to suspect that these are greater than the failings of any one individual.

In being suspicious of the kitsch and emotive power of the representational image, Jaar is at odds with Musisi, who demanded visual evidence. This clash is in many ways foundational of modern art in the Western context. In his famous 1939 essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Clement Greenberg distinguished between the reaction caused by a Picasso painting in a "civilized" person and a peasant. The peasant cannot get beyond the first impression, while the civilized person looks again with additional understanding (Greenberg 1985:21-33). The view from the South, the subaltern view, is always already not modern. This dichotomy suggests that the persistence of the categories "Western" and "non-Western" in art historical practice is not accidental but foundational.

In the Rwandan context, this discourse of modernity means that it was inevitable that Jaar would feel unable to display his photographs of Rwanda, for to do so would place his work outside the parameters of art and into journalism. His subject wanted something that art discourse is very uncomfortable in supplying, namely, the use of photographs as incontrovertible evidence. Although Walter Benjamin described modern photography like that of Eugene Atget as being like crime-scene photographs, the awareness of how easily photography can be manipulated mitigates against using it as actual evidence. Yet even this debate that is apparent to the thoughtful viewer of Jaar's project is not the whole story. For Jaar does not tell his readers that the bones are visible in Ntarama today as part of a deliberate policy of the RPF-Ied Rwandan government, which created a series of museums in former churches that were massacre sites. At these sites, the unburied or exhumed bones of the dead were left visible to make the genocide unavoidable. We shall return to these bones but let us note here that Jaar's caption falls short of providing a full context in which to read his invisible photograph.

This comment evokes a now-familiar debate about text and context in the place of the gallery or museum (see Greenberg 1996). Despite repeated discoveries of the lack of such contextual material, display practice in the West tends to return to an apparently neutral space with as little extraneous information supplied as possible. It begins to appear as if the (Western) museum as such must deploy such abstraction as the ground on which it creates a politics of the sensible. Rather than endlessly discuss the place of wall text and written material in a museum context, it may be necessary to change the terms of the argument. Thinking about the problem of representing the peasantry in India, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has called for a provincializing of Europe that can allow the subaltern to move beyond "a field of possibilities that is already structured from the very beginning in favor of certain outcomes" (2000:273).

In this context, that means that Musisi cannot win his argument within the field of the visual display space that is "structured from the very beginning" not to accommodate the subaltern point of view. Nonetheless, by giving his call a textual presence, Jaar opens up the possibility of what Jacques Ranciere called a "dissensus: putting two worlds in one and the same world" (2004:304). What emerges from the dissensus is not a disinterested aesthetic but a political claim to rights, a right that Musisi does not yet have over the visual image or, more broadly, a right to live within Rwanda without fear of genocide. What is yet to come, but is implied by Musisi's claim, is a visual culture that in itself refuses the possibility of genocide by upholding his rights.

As if in response to Benjamin Musisi, Alfredo Jaar began to show his photographs in his installation The Eyes of Gutete Emerita. In the 1996 version exhibited in Raleigh, North Carolina, two light boxes mounted side by side showed a textual description of the experiences of Gutete Emerita in the genocide. Attacked in church by the Interahamwe (the Hutu militia), she narrowly escaped death in a massacre that cost more than 400 lives, including those of her husband and two sons. Jaar then described how "her eyes look lost and incredulous." In a final text panel, we read: "I remember her eyes. The eyes of Gutete Emerita." Then a brief intense close up of Gutete Emerita's eyes fills the screens. The critic David Levi Strauss has written that: "the first time I saw this piece, I became physically ill at the sight of Gutete Emerita's eyes. I felt dizzy and almost retched" (Strauss 1998:np).

The physical reaction of the viewer that Strauss describes is seemingly intended. Jaar has in effect dramatized his first postcards from Rwanda, making the experience of one survivor real to a remote audience. Rather than the claim to rights implied in Real Pictures, the face-to-face encounter is the scene of an ethics, described by Emmanuel Levinas as a "look [that] calls me into question" (Derrida 1999:3). But Strauss emphasizes that his reaction was on first viewing. In a visual culture saturated by shock, the piece was bound to lose its power over time so that never again becomes wherever again. In his re-installation of The Eyes of Gutete Emerita in Berlin and Madrid in 1997, Jaar recast the project in terms of a look that culminates in silence. The piece highlighted the plight of children, naming several orphans, only one of whom would look at his camera: "And I will never forget his silence. The silence of Nduwayezu." Perhaps for a Western audience complicit in the inaction of our governments and international organizations, silence may have seemed for a time the best and only option.

In similar fashion, the Magnum photographer Gilles Peress titled his book of photographs taken in Rwanda and the Great Lakes region in the period immediately following the genocide The Silence (1996). The black-and-white photos are printed just short of the page's edge, providing a black border as a sign of mourning. The prints are matte, usually with a shallow depth of field. This format, together with Peress's standard photojournalistic practice of framing his subject close to the edge, makes any contextual reading impossible. In the opening photograph, taken at Kabuga, Rwanda, on May 27, 1994, an unnamed "killer," whom one presumes to be a genocidaire, looks away from the camera. The caption described this as a "moment to himself"; although there are other men in very close proximity, whether they are guards or other prisoners cannot be determined from the close-up photograph. In the closing image, timed at three minutes later, Peress notes "As I look at him, he looks at me" (Fig. 2). The man's look is unsettled and unsettling but there is no dissensus here. The look of the camera presumes itself to have moral right on its side, accusing and judging. Needless to say, there is no place for a sympathetic view of this person as such, but as someone as yet only accused and not convicted, he nonetheless has rights. As we shall see, respecting or implementing those rights has proved to be an entanglement that cannot easily be resolved. In Peress's book, the result of the presumed absence of rights is a silence across which Peress projects his images in three sections titled "The Sin," "Purgatory," and "The Judgment."

In the opening section, "The Sin," we see the remains of genocide in the form of abandoned machetes, corpses, and buildings. However, it is again not made clear that Peress is photographing sites specifically kept as memorials, such as Nyamata and Nyarubuye. A particularly chilling pile of machetes with an empty beer bottle casually discarded on top (Fig. 3) was in fact taken at a refugee camp in Zaire. Seen as the third image of this section, the implication is clearly that these were the weapons used in the genocide. As these tools are also used in farming and for daily tasks in Rwanda, their precise use by the refugees, whether genocidaires or innocents, cannot be known.

This imprecision haunts the book. There is no dividing line between photographs of the memorials, those of survivors, those of perpetrators, those with open wounds, and those of refugees. The Western viewer skilled in reading the photo essay forms the impression that the dead, the living, and the wounded are intermingled in utter chaos. It is as if Jerusalem's Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, was presented alongside shots of everyday life in the city. Of course, that would express a certain truth about Israel, just as Peress's photographs give us a certain view of Rwanda. The difficulty is that this view is precisely that which most Westerners would expect to see: one of a pre-political formless chaos. Indeed, a number of photojournalists, including Peress, who worked in Rwanda and hoped that their work would lead to political change, have found that the experience of failure in this regard reduced their confidence in the medium to such an extent that some have left the field altogether (Hughes 2004). Here the photojournalists themselves have come to share some of the artists' suspicions of visual journalism, without yet being able to offer an alternative.

In Peress's photographs of the refugee camps in Tanzania and Zaire, shown in the second and third sections, the identities of his subjects are unknown to the viewer, blending into a general view of evil. The overt Christian eschatology of the book's format hinders rather than helps the reader to understand what is being seen. In the sections titled "Purgatory" and "The Judgment," the viewer has to assume that the people depicted in the refugee camps were guilty of genocide. Many, of course, were, but others were Tutsi and moderate Hutu fleeing the atrocities who became human shields for the remaining Interahamwe. Looking at a line of figures confronting the camera in the "Purgatory" section, the viewer cannot help but make summary judgment, based on how they look to us. The dominant group of men in the photograph wears hood and hats, as if to conceal themselves. They seem powerful because the camera is placed very low. A child covers her head with a woman's sweater as if to avoid the camera's judgment. In the background, a gleaming white truck from a relief organization is the only referent to the global political context that grounds the photograph. Far from being neutral spaces, the refugee camps soon became bases from which the Hutu radicals were able to continue their warfare. The controversial role of the relief agencies in maintaining these camps is hinted at only by the presence of sacks of grain, medical identification tags, and a bulldozer. Throughout the book no obviously white person is seen, reinforcing the idea that the genocide was a disaster inflicted on Africans by Africans (which it was), devoid of European influence (which it was not).

In the final section, "The Judgment," pictures of death and devastation in the refugee camps imply a divine verdict rendered long before any human justice might be able to intervene. Only by opening the sealed brochure containing a chronology of events provided by Human Rights Watch could the viewer begin to place the silence into some context. Where Jaar saw the image as needing to be contained in order that words could speak the unpresentable, Peress seals the words in the belief that the documentary photograph can still present what the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson called the "decisive moment." Both seek a universal form, whether word or image, in the tradition of Western aesthetics and both reveal the shortcomings of that aesthetic approach. Both also ended in a certain silence. While Peress silences the word, Jaar silences the image. While Jaar's work might be judged preferable on aesthetic grounds, it is precisely the application of those criteria to this subject that needs to be examined. Far from being a call to refuse representation, this is a recognition that the extremity of the genocide has made visible the incommensurability of Western visual practice, on one hand, and subaltern life, on the other, within the frames currently offered.

Nowhere is this inadequacy clearer than in what has become perhaps the best-known representation of the genocide. Like Jaar and Peress, the Australian artist George Gittoes visited Rwanda during the immediate aftermath of the genocide. Displaying remarkable personal courage, he joined Australian aid groups going to Rwanda and found himself in the Kibeho refugee camp, where he took numerous 35mm photographs. This camp mostly contained Hutus and was attacked, while Gittoes was there, by the RPF, leading to atrocities and mass murder. Gittoes later worked up several of his photographs into paintings, of which The Preacher (1995) is perhaps best known (Fry 1998:78-9). (6) It shows an African man from the waist up, holding a bible, with his arms extended and raised. His gesture is somewhere between surrender and supplication. The original photograph was tight in on its subject and with a shallow depth of field but the painting elides even this detail into an agonized mass of expressionist color. Without a caption, the picture would be unintelligible.

Now the vexed question of the photograph as evidence has become fully aestheticized, even if framed as protest. Critics praise Gittoes for exactly this quality of having been a witness, as if his painting was able to take over the now-discredited authenticity once attributed to photography. The tension between the rights of the represented and the right to depict has been literally painted over. What emerges is a familiar image of African suffering, framed by Gittoes within a sanguinary discourse of Christianity, especially martyrdom and crucifixion. The figure of the martyr raises a complicated series of allusions. For if the preacher is analogous to Christ, as the visual iconography suggests, does that then make the RPF the Romans? Or, in this era of revived anti-Semitism recently visualized in the film The Passion of the Christ (2004), the Jews? Who are the Hutu? Are they the Christians in this scenario, giving them the place of moral value?

These analogies again place the actual violence out of its proper context and provide a religious veneer that won Gittoes a prize. But the Organization of African Unity named the Catholic and Anglican churches in Rwanda at the head of their list of organizations held culpable for the genocide (IRIN 2000b). At the church in Nyarubuye, "even the little terracotta votive statues in the sacristy had been methodically decapitated. 'They were associated with Tutsis,' Sergeant Francis explained" (Gourevitch 1996:24). In that light, what had the (presumably) Hutu preacher depicted by Gittoes been doing during the genocide? It might be objected that such questions should not be directed at a work of art. But the genocide was precisely visual, visible, visualized work, often situated within a discourse of Christianity. To ignore these connotations would be to fail to undertake the work that is entailed in constructing a visual culture that cannot sustain genocide.

III

In Rwanda itself, the initial approach was to create a performative national reconciliation. After the RPF ended the genocide, mass graves were exhumed and the bodies reburied as a form of "reconciliation through accountability" (Gourevitch 1996:250). The notion of accountability refers to the perpetrators, who are still the majority in Rwanda. Accountability results from the evidence of slaughter being made visible and then buried once more. This reburial used both Jaar's strategy of concealment and Peress's of revelation. It was a dialogic process rather than a monologue, binocular rather than monocular. The funeral relied for its power on the fact that both victims and perpetrators witnessed the reburial. In this moment, that which Toni Morrison described as "re-memory" in her novel Beloved (1988) takes on a new, performative form.

There is a staggering amount of such work to do. In the run-up to the sixth genocide anniversary commemorations in 2000, a mass grave containing the remains of at least 32,000 people was opened for reburial in Nyamirambo, near the capital Kigali (Daily Mail and Guardian April 6, 2000). Those corpses that were intact or could be identified were given public and private reburials. Fragments of unidentified victims' bodies were set aside for a memorial at Gisozi, in the Kigali district. Marc Kabandana, the chief medical officer in the area, argued, "Building a museum for the memory of the victims is essential since we must prove to those that deny the genocide that the people are dead" (ibid.). Representing the Rwandan genocide is a question of asserting the possibility of representation between the visibility of genocide and the invisibility of Western-led globalization. In an era of falsification, in which a simple declarative "truth" is no longer available--if indeed it ever was--that task is by no means simple.

The Rwandan government did not build a single museum but rather created a national network of museums and memorials in an effort to make genocide denial impossible even in remote areas. Beginning in July 1997, the bodies of many victims were preserved, sometimes by mummification, in order to provide permanent evidence of the genocide. At Gikongoro, 170 km (106 miles) southwest of Kigali, where more than 50,000 people were killed, the former Murambi school has been converted into a genocide memorial site. In seventy-two unadorned concrete rooms, the remains of more than 27,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu victims are on display, having been chemically treated with both traditional and modern preservatives (Daily Mail and Guardian May 1, 2000). The government created such bone memorials in more than fifty churches, a serial monument that the Catholic Church--more than 65% of Rwandans were Catholic in 1994--resisted, wanting instead to return the churches to liturgical functions. The Church hierarchy was finally forced to accept the museums in early 2000.

In these "cities of the dead," the departed remain in all senses, for they are not segregated from the living, in the manner of the cemetery (Roach 1996:47-55), but have taken over key venues of civil society such as churches and schools. They are not gone in order not to be forgotten. (7) The stronger sense is of a healing that will come only if that which has returned in the past, namely racialized genocide, no longer returns. While the West stood by as the genocide was carried out, it was quick to rush in counselors to help with presumed post-traumatic stress disorders in the aftermath of the actual killing. But, as Jody Ranck has pointed out, it makes no sense to refer to Rwanda as being post-traumatic (2000:200-201). Post-traumatic stress is diagnosed as a normal reaction to abnormal events. The goal of the therapist is to "reintegrate" the sufferer into normality. In Rwanda, everyday experience constantly offers the possibility of the recurrence of genocide.

Philip Gourevitch remarks that he found the memorial site at Nyarubuye "beautiful" (1996:19). Any good postmodernist would have said "sublime." But perhaps the affect of the "postmodern" is itself no more than a ghost now. When the Ugandan historian and political theorist Mahmood Mamdani saw the memorial at Ntarama, he noted that: "[a] veteran of sites in the Luwero Triangle in Uganda like me felt a sense of deja vu, even if the numbers of skulls and sacks were greater in quantity than I had ever seen at any one site" (1996:18). Mamdani's thought amplifies Kagame's rewriting of "never again" into "wherever again" by recalling that post-World War II genocides in the formerly colonized regions of the world have frequently been ignored. Rwanda's memorials offered a tremulous beginning to the rewiring of the postcolonial network.

Oscillating between visibility and invisibility, the presence of the dead creates a memento mori for this era of globalization. In Hans Holbein's 1533 painting The Ambassadors, a skull in anamorphotic perspective cuts across a double portrait of the Dinteville brothers, French ambassadors to the court of Henry VIII (see Foister et al. 1997:25-39). The brothers stand amongst their worldly possessions but the skull reminds them and the viewer of the inevitability of death and the vanity of wealth. On one of the shelves behind them stands a globe with the visible side clearly showing a map of Africa, with major rivers such as the Congo accurately depicted. Here Holbein depicted not just the fact of wealth but its source in European expansion, colonialism, and the Atlantic slave trade, a reminder that has long been forgotten in art historical textbooks.

At the same time, Holbein's painting is everywhere taught as an illustration of Jacques Lacan's theory of the gaze (1985). Lacan took the skull to represent a visualization of the intrusion of sexuality into the visual field, noting its resemblance to a phallus, it is noticeable in this context that Lacan derived from this doubled visual meaning a theory of the gaze which is outside the subject, dominating it to the point of annihilation. Lacan described this process as the sensation that "I am photo-graphed." As we have seen, the photograph has proved deceptive in the context of the Rwandan genocide, leading to a sense that new modes of representation are needed. The Rwandan memorials call for one such new form of looking for this moment of globalization, one in which the viewer is not obliterated by the gaze but has the "right to look," as Jacques Derrida has put it (1985:xxxxvi).

The need for such rights remains paramount, for Rwanda is both liberated and not. It is a carceral society whose prisons overflowed with an estimated 120,000 people awaiting trial on charges of genocide in the 1990s. These jails were an appropriate representation of a country in which the majority are in some sense guilty and yet cannot be held accountable. In early 2000, the Rwandan government decided that a formal Western-style justice system could never cope with the caseload. By way of supporting evidence, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda has spent over $200 million in five years to secure a few convictions--some of them major players--and thirty-eight accused suspects in custody.

Rwanda has consequently reinstituted a "traditional dispute resolution mechanism" known as gacaca in a law passed in 2001. By allowing communities to resolve the fate of those accused of lesser offenses--on a scale of relativity otherwise unimaginable--it is hoped that reconciliation will be promoted by involving the mass of the population in the process. At the same time, however, the Catholic Church is seeking to undermine the gacaca by creating its own gacaca Christu in which the genocidaires would confess their crimes in church and be forgiven (Prendergast and Smock 1999). Despite this dubious diversion, gacaca has succeeded in catching the global imagination. In Raoul Peck's 2004 film for HBO depicting the genocide, Sometimes in April, the concluding scene shows a woman finding the courage to speak at a gacaca proceeding. After a long depiction of violence, this moment is one of hope for the future.

It is indeed the case that women have formed one of the most effective post-genocidal organizations, Mbwira Ndumva (Speak, I'm Listening). The organization provides "a space where women can tell their stories," helps to provide housing and micro-credit, and does so without regard to ethnicity (Ranck 2000:209). Yet the gacaca system in practice has proved less effective than hoped, as Alison des Forges of Human Rights Watch commented in April 2004: "It's not working and people are not participating because life is still so miserable. We're talking about a nation where 95% of the people are farmers, where it's hard to take a whole week off without pay to participate in the gacaca." (8) It is still possible that this innovative structure will succeed, but the recent refusals to allow alleged RPF criminal activities be tried by gacaca courts does not bode well.

In such times, appearances are both critical and deceptive. A performative justice depends on the performance being found convincing, which may or may not bear on whether the person speaking is telling the truth. In Kinyarwanda, the word for the social practice of masquerade is ikinamucho. Philip Gourevitch reports that ikinamucho is rendered as mesquin in French, which he translates as "petty," but also signifies "mean, cheap, or mean-spirited" (1996:260-61). The example Dr. Joseph Karema, now Rwanda's Health Minister, gave him was anything but petty: "If you want to do something you are deceitful and not straight. For example, you can come to kill me ... and your mission is successful but then you cry. That is ikinamucho." The term is also translated as what Westerners might call theater but its meaning seems closer to what theorists like Judith Butler would call performativity: "Performativity is ... not a singular 'act,' for it is always a reiteration of a norm or set of norms, and to the extent that it acquires an act-like status in the present, it conceals or dissimulates the conventions of which it is a repetition" (1993:12).

That dissimulation may in turn become apparent in a situation like that of post-genocide Rwanda, in which the norm itself has been dispersed. Under such circumstances, a culture needs to engage in rather deliberate reiterations of performative norms. In May 2000, the Rwandan National Ballet toured the United States with Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa performers in a display of national unity. Their performance was in this sense ikinamucho. It was at once a spectacle and a performative creation of an otherwise elusive national unity, for members of the ballet had been both victims and perpetrators in the genocide (Briggs 2004). This dance is also performed within Rwanda, as the South African journalist John Matshikiza described in 1999:

   In the university town of Butare, I
   watch a group of twenty young
   women in traditional dress float in
   formation to the center of the floor,
   their arms raised like the delicate
   wings of birds, or the awesome
   curved horns of Acholi cattle. They
   are performing the Rwandan national
   dance.... I ask [my friend]
   Japhary if this dance is exclusive
   to the Tutsi. Not at all, he replies.
   It belongs to everybody
   (Matshikiza 1999).

These are no doubt fragile strands upon which to create a network that does not seek to reduce difference while also attempting to construct a national unity. Dance was similarly part of Tanzania's attempt to create a political community in Julius Nyerere's theory of ujamaa (self-reliance) from 1962-85, in a network of "sports, dance, marching, farming, and national service" (Joseph 1999:52). It may be the only place from which to start to make Rwanda work again.

IV

Yet by 2004, South Africa's Mail and Guardian in effect accused the Rwandan government of ikinamucho in its discussion of the skull memorials: "Keeping the skulls enables Rwanda to deflect criticism of its own failures ... to ensure that the genocide issue remains a cornerstone of the government policy to hold the world hostage with these images and memory of the mass killings" (BBC News 2004). Such criticism would have been unthinkable in the early years of the RPF government, which has created a model of Rwandan reconciliation that depends on the nation being a place within which difference can be interred. The question is now whether that policy was well intentioned or merely a means to sustain another of Africa's one-party states.

Key to the process is the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission established in April 2000 under the leadership of Aloisea Inyumba, a former cabinet member and perhaps the leading woman cadre in the RPF. Only too mindful that Tutsi in Rwanda have suffered Hutu violence since 1959, especially in 1959, 1973, and 1990, the Commission is not so much looking back to genocide but trying to prevent its repetition by seeking to have Rwandans accept diversity (IRIN 2000a). A key area of work is to remove the stigma from people of mixed ethnicity and from mixed marriages by creating a common history for all Rwandans. In the past, Human Rights Watch reminds us, "those who married across group lines produced 'hybrids' for children and people from one group who tried to pass for members of another were said to be like 'beings with two heads'." Many of the killers turned out to have such mixed backgrounds. The Commission's brief allows it to oversee all government policy with a view to promoting reconciliation.

Solidarity camps have been established to promote this reconciliation. However, human rights groups have been alarmed because the camps also provide weapons training, which has been televised. The symbolic work here is clear: While the genocide was carried out with knives because the victims were not worth wasting bullets on, reconciliation will come through a modern, national army. The danger here is that, as the Hutu knew very well, the nation is a vehicle better for domination than reconciliation, as examples from Ireland to the United States and Australia clearly prove (Shapiro 1999). The RPF may have fallen into this trap. The RPF has been accused by Amnesty International and other human rights groups of dissolving the main opposition party before elections in 2003 on the grounds that they supported the genocide. In 2004, the RPF-dominated parliament sought to dissolve the League for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights (usually known by its French-language acronym, Liprodhor), claiming that Liprodhor "supports genocidal ideas" (Klippenberg 2004). Perhaps most distressingly of all, there has been little progress in assisting rape survivors, let alone convicting those responsible. (9) Yet one must remember that these undoubtedly problematic developments take place against a backdrop of unabated violence by Hutu extremists in Eastern Congo. In an increasingly polarized and racialized world, it may be that Rwanda's crisis is far more than a local problem.

Far from confronting these harbingers of a local and global crisis of democracy, the international community has been keen to assist Rwanda's government in presenting a simplified and moralized view of the genocide as a replay of the Holocaust. At the tenth anniversary commemorations of the genocide in April 2004, a national memorial in Kigali was opened that plans to display photographs of the estimated 300,000 children who were killed in the genocide, while other memorial sites will also make use of photographs. The memorial is architecturally undistinguished, resembling one of the giant new suburban houses common in the United States (Carroll 2004).

The Aegis Trust decided to tell story of the genocide in visual form, following the peculiar assertion that most Rwandans are illiterate (Dougherty 2004), although the United Nations Development Program estimates that 70% of Rwandans over the age of fifteen are functionally literate. The memorial thus incarnates an assumption of African primitivism that suggests that the intended audience is in fact Western tourists. Its visual narrative is subtle and symbolic, using stained glass windows made by a Holocaust survivor and a single photograph to allude to the Tutsi role under the Belgians. The specificity of the Rwandan events is further displaced by a narrative of global genocides, from Armenia to the Balkans and of course the Holocaust. The physical remains central to the original massacre site memorials are mostly being removed and interred, while those that remain are placed behind dark glass.

Here then the bodies are literally made invisible in favor of the presumed clarity of the photographic record, which photographers themselves have acknowledged offers no such thing. A preview of the new photographic memorial was shown under the banner "Never Again." This simple and emotive representation, using a slogan from another time and another place, makes Jaar's initial caution about using his photographs seem well justified. The new photographic memorials are modeled on the United States' Holocaust Museum and its metonymic use of photographs to convey loss. The Rwandan genocide is now being, as it were, dragged over the Holocaust in order to persuade Western audiences of its importance, even though it is itself evidence of the failure of memorialization inspired by the Holocaust. In so doing, the visible engagement with genocide becomes elided into the refusal of representation that surrounds the Holocaust. The victims cease to be a presence and become figuren. Strikingly, the new memorial is funded by the by the Belgian Government ($1,060,000), the Swedish Government ($400,000), and the Clinton-Wasserman Foundation, USA ($250,000), and is being constructed by a British NGO (www.aegistrust.org). Now that the Rwandan genocide can be understood in terms dictated by the Holocaust, a number of Western films have been made of the events, including Hotel Rwanda (2004), starring Don Cheadle, and Sometimes in April (2004).

While all this activity is taken as evidence that the global powers are now engaged with Rwanda, it might also be seen as another performance of ikinamucho in its original sense of deception. The pretense of grief is a failure of representation that attempts to cover up the wider failure to engage with the questions of colonization, decolonization, and globalization that led not only to Rwanda's genocide but to a world newly engaged in old divides but with no new solutions. There really is much work to do.

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2005.]

My thanks to Henry Drewal, Barbara Frank, Shannen Hill, Kim Miller, Moyo Okediji, Liese van der Watt, and all those others who have educated me in African visual culture.

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(1.) The figure of 800,000 commonly cited has been revised by Human Rights Watch to 500,000 direct victims of genocide and 300,000 other deaths during the same period that were indirect results of the genocide. See Human Rights Watch 1999 for a detailed report. All facts relating to the events in Rwanda are taken from this definitive report unless otherwise referenced.

(2.) After the RPF drove out the Hutu extremists, a video of Mein Kampf was found in the ruins of the presidential palace, while the Interahamwe were encouraged to read the text (Sanogo 2005).

(3.) It is troubling that Mamdani's otherwise important study When Natives Become Killers (2001) makes no reference at all to rape, leading to a rather reductive view of the genocide that opposes "culture" to "economics" and "politics," when all three were involved in a volatile mix.

(4.) The terms are those of Heidegger and Nelson Goodman respectively, as cited by Mitchell 2005:93.

(5.) See Alloula 1990 and Derrida 1990 for ways to investigate the postcard (carte in French, Rwanda's official language, means both map and postcard, an ambiguity exploited by Derrida).

(6.) The piece is not illustrated here because I did not feel comfortable seeking the artist's permission or paying the now customary fees for the privilege, given the position I take.

(7.) I am referencing Roach's brilliant insight that the dead in Western culture are "forgotten but not gone."

(8.) "Rwanda: Reflecting on the Genocide Ten Years later," interview with Alison des Forges, http://www.hrw.org/update/ 2004/03/#4, accessed 5/20/2005.

(9.) See the Human Rights Watch Report for 2004, http://hrw.org/ reports/rwanda0904/5htm#_TOC82319916.