Reading Genocide Memorial Sites in Rwanda: Eurocentrism, Sensory Secondary Witnessing and Shame

In this essay I explore literary and theoretical responses to memorial sites that have been established to mark the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, specifically focussing on Philip Gourevitch’s non-fictional account We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel Murambi, The Book of Bones, and Sarah Guyer’s theoretical essay ‘Rwanda’s Bones’. I argue that ‘outsider’ responses to the memorials often involve a division between the intellect and the senses. While cultural critics such as Gubar have emphasized the former, deploying tropes of Holocaust memory in order to read the sites in terms of incomprehensibility and absence, I argue that outsiders, from forensic anthropologists to so-called ‘dark tourists’, can equally read the sites by way of their materiality and affect through what I term ‘sensory secondary witnessing’. However, self-reflexive readings grounded in the senses do little to vitiate the manifold forms of shame that these memorials engender.