Andrea Dooley

Andrea Dooley
Implicated Geographies: Public Memorials and the Topographies of Genocide
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During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, over a half million people were killed in 100 days. Ten years later, memorials are being constructed that attempt to document and commemorate this catastrophic event. On a recent trip to Rwanda, I heard stories wherever I traveled–I sought them out in order to understand the history of the genocide and the suppositions behind the memorials. When I talked to survivors I was struck with the individual nature of each story; the details that bound their unique lives to the massive killing that had taken place around them.

A tension exists between the strange intimacy, everyday rhythm, and community-based organization of the actual killings, and the larger political project behind the genocide that was rooted in a faulty ethnic history established during Rwanda’s colonial period. The individual stories, recorded collective memories, and attempts at public memorials are set in relief against the far-reaching narratives about racial division and political power. These stories take as their settings churches and other community buildings that served as sites of murder. Many of these same sites were transformed after the genocide into memorial sites. The multivalency of these places as locations of violence, as working religious sites, and as sites of commemoration points to the significance of both physical (hills, rivers, and marshes) and institutional geographies (state, school, and church) in the history of the genocide. As part of my investigation, I am interested in how Rwandans have been able to intervene in this process of memorialization by negotiating the tensions between site, history, and personal and political narratives.