“Lilies in the Mires”: Contesting Eurocentric Paradigms and Rhetoric of Civilization in Scolastique Mukasonga’s War Narratives

• Authors: Richard Oko Ajah
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

The Rwandan writer, Scholastique Mukasonga chronicles her eye-witness account of Rwandan civil war and genocide; her two novels are part of literary attempts to historicize ethnic collective trauma and memory, but they end up traumatizing national history itself and deconstructing Eurocentric representations. Her works are popularly read as autobiographies and could be mapped under trauma studies. However, this study intends to read these works as autoethnographical texts which this hyphenated writer uses to dismantle conventional boundaries of linguistic morpho-syntax of French, to deconstruct European historical constructions and to contest Eurocentric epistemologies that gave rise to the literary cartography of the Other world. This Eurocentrism produces markers of post/colonial idioms such as “civilized/primitive” and “modern/traditional” as means of justifying the essence of empires. Mukasonga’s account opens our eyes to Rwandan indigenous art, science, medicine and society; therefore, it contests the ontology of European civilization. Although her novels are predominantly written in French, Mukasonga uses her native dialect of Kinyarwanda to unveil age-long Rwandan [African] civilization, thus forcing her European readership to see the “lilies in the mires”.

Keywords

EN

War narratives; African civilization; Authoethnography; Rwandan genocide; Scholastique Mukasonga

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human and Social Studies
• Year: 2015
• Volume: 4
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 45-58

Dates

published

2015-03-01

online

2015-04-10

Contributors

author

Richard Oko Ajah

• Department of Foreign Languages, PMB 1017, University of Uyo, 5, Ekong Street, Nigeria

References

• Anderson, Benedict. Imagined communities. Revised Edition, London & New York: Verso, 1991.
• Anderson, Leon. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 5.4 (2006): 373-395[Crossref]
• Ajah, Richard Oko. “Strategies d’Appropriation textuelles dans La Femme aux pieds nus de Scholastique Mukasonga” Eds. Emmanuel N. Kwofie and Babatunde Ayeleru, Language, Literature & Criticism. Ibadan: Zenith BookHouse, 2010:367-378.
• ___________. “Writers as Historians of War in African Literature of Francophone Expression.” The Humanities Journal 1.1 (2010): 73-89.
• ___________. “Migrants Songs for Mothers: Between Motherism and Autoethnography in Leopold Sedar Senghor’s “Femme noire” and Prince Nico Mbarga’s “Sweet Mother”. Language, Literature and Cultural Studies 5.1 (2012):7-21.
• Arowolo, B. “Black Literature, White Archetype: A Fresh Reading of Aimé Césaire’s Plays”, Festus A. Soyeye et al (Ed.) Foreign Languages Studes in West Africa: Nigeria and Benin, Cotonou: Presses Scolaires et Universitaire du Bénin, 2004. 54-66.
• Ashcroft, Bill et al. The Empire Writes Back. London and New York: Routledge, 2nd Edition, 2002.
• Bonnet, Veronique et Sevrain, Emilie. “Temoignages de rescapees rwandaises: Modalites et intentions” IMPOTESI - REVISTA DE ESTUDOS LITERÁRIOS 105-113, n.d.
• Besio, K. “Chutes and ladders: negotiating gender and privilege in a village in Northern Parkistan.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 5.2 (2006): 258-278.
• Brantlinger, Patrick. “Victorians and Africans: The Myth of the Dark Continent” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985):166-203.
• Gehrmann, S. “La Traversée du moi dans l’ecriture autobiographique francophone.”
• Revue de l’Université de Moncton 37. 1(2006): 67-92.
• Grewal, Inderpal. Home and Harem, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996..
• Jacobi, Kara Elizabeth. ““They Will Invent What They Need to Survive”: Narrating Trauma Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction” Unpublished PhD Thesis, University of Miami, 2009, Open Access Dissertations, Paper 229.
• McAuliffe, Samantha I. “Autoethnography and Gracia’s Dreaming in Cuba.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.4 (2011)
• Mukasonga, Scholastique. “Inyenzi ou les cafards. Paris: Gallimard, 2006.
• ___________. La Femme aux pieds nus. Paris: Gallimard, 2008.
• Noy, C. The poetics of tourist experience: an autoethnography of family trip to Eilat. Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 5.3 (2007): 141-157.
• Pawliková-Vilhanová, Viera. “The African Personality or the Dilemma of the Other and the Self in the Philosophy of Edward W. Blyden, 1832-1912”Asian and African Studies 7.2 (1998):162-175.
• Pratt, Louise Mary. Imperial Eyes. 2nd Edition, London: Routledge, 2008
• Rodrigues, Angela Lamas. ““The Trauma of a Diminished Existence”: Chinua Achebe Revisited.” Postcolonial Text 3.4 (2007):1-23.
• Said, W. Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books, 1994.
• Van de Merwe, Chris N and Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela. Narrating our Healing. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Wall, S. “Easier said than done: writing an autoethnography.” International Journal of Quantitative Methods 7.1 (2008): 38-53.
• Wood, Denis. The power of maps. New York: Guilford Press, 1992

Identifiers

DOI

10.1515/hssr-2015-0004