Introduction
Existing scholarship on Rwandan genocide literature has foregrounded testimony, trauma, and postmemory but has paid comparatively little attention to disability as both representational strategy and social consequence. By bringing literary disability studies into dialogue with genocide narratives, this article demonstrates how disability functions not only metaphorically but structurally in the narration of violence and its aftermath.
The 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi has been represented through various historical, political, and legal lenses. This article turns to literary representations to explore two profound and interrelated themes: the rationality of genocidal violence and the disabling nature of its traumatic aftermath. Through an analysis of Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel Murambi, The Book of Bones and Véronique Tadjo’s testimonial work The Shadow of Imana, we argue that fiction and creative non-fiction provide unique avenues for understanding how genocide is orchestrated and experienced. Diop’s work challenges the “madness” narrative by exposing the cold logic of perpetrators, while Tadjo’s employs disability as a metaphor for the enduring trauma that cripples memory and inhibits recovery. This article employs disability models as heuristic reading strategies. Methodologically, the article relies on close reading as its primary analytical method. Disability theory is not applied as a diagnostic claim about literary subjects but as a critical lens through which narrative form, metaphor, and ethical stakes are examined in literary representations of genocide.
Theoretical Framework: Genocide, Disability, and Narrative Witnessing
The relationship between genocide and disability was starkly revealed during the Holocaust, where individuals with disabilities were systematically targeted, reflecting an ideology that sought an imagined ‘perfection’ by exterminating those who did not conform to its constructed worldview (Mostert 2002, 163f). Genocide frequently follows a dual logic: mass extermination and, as articulated by Yousef Aljamal (2024) regarding the outbreak of war in Gaza, the creation of “a mass disabling event” that undermines communities. Although the 1948 Genocide Convention does not explicitly include people with disabilities, historical and contemporary evidence demonstrates that they have been subjected to exclusion, persecution, and violence in ways that parallel the experiences of protected groups (Bro 2021, 126; cf. Pons, Lord and Stein 2023).
However, it is necessary to first elucidate the concept of disability, which is complex in nature. For this, we turn to disability theorists Lennard Davis and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. In the chapter titled ‘The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism’, Davis (2002) reconceptualizes disability as a foundational condition of modern subjectivity rather than a marginal identity category. He critiques traditional identity politics for reinforcing fixed, essentialized categories that inadvertently replicate exclusionary norms. Instead, Davis introduces the concept of ‘dismodernism’, a theoretical framework that positions disability as the universal condition of dependency and incompleteness inherent to all human beings. Drawing on postmodern and poststructuralist thought, he argues that the ideal of the autonomous, self-sufficient individual, central to liberal humanism, is a myth sustained by the ideology of normalcy.
Disability, in this framework, exposes the instability of the ‘normate’ subject and reveals that interdependence, contingency, and bodily limitations are shared human realities. Rather than seeking inclusion within existing normative structures, Davis (2002) proposes dismantling the hegemony of normalcy itself. Disability thus becomes epistemologically productive: it challenges dominant constructions of the body, citizenship, and agency. For a theoretical framework, Davis’ argument shifts disability studies from minority-based identity claims toward a universalizing critique of modernity, redefining disability as a critical lens through which the construction of the human subject can be interrogated.
In another chapter, ‘The Rule of Normalcy: Politics and Disability in the U.S.A.’, Davis (2002) examines how the cultural and political enforcement of ‘normalcy’ structures social exclusion and violence toward disabled people. He traces the historical emergence of normalcy as a statistical and ideological construct that distinguishes acceptable bodies from deviant ones. Disability becomes marked as abnormal, thereby legitimizing segregation, institutionalization, and social marginalization.
Within this framework, hate crimes against disabled individuals are not aberrations but extreme manifestations of a broader cultural logic that devalues bodily difference. Davis argues that the norm functions as a regulatory mechanism embedded in law, medicine, education, and media, producing disabled people as inferior or burdensome. Violence is thus linked to systemic representations that portray disability as deficiency. The lack of consistent recognition of disability-based hate crimes in legal and political discourse further reflects this hierarchy of valued identities.
By situating hate crimes within the ‘rule of normalcy’, Davis (2002) highlights how violence is structurally enabled by ideologies that naturalize exclusion. Disability becomes a site where the politics of belonging and citizenship are contested. For theoretical inquiry, his work underscores that combating hate crimes requires challenging the normative frameworks that construct disability as deviant in the first place.
In Extraordinary Bodies, Garland-Thomson (2017) conceptualizes disability as a culturally produced system of meaning rather than a purely biomedical condition. She argues that disability functions as a representational category through which bodies are ‘figured’ in literature and visual culture. Central to her analysis is the notion that disabled bodies are constructed as ‘extraordinary’ in contrast to the unmarked normate body, a culturally dominant figure embodying whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, and able-bodiedness. Disability identity thus emerges relationally: it is not inherent in the body but produced through social practices of staring, spectacle, narrative framing, and institutional regulation.
Garland-Thomson (2017) emphasizes that disability operates as a master trope for difference, often used metaphorically to signify moral, racial, or national deviance. Literary and cultural texts both reinforce and contest these meanings. By foregrounding embodiment and representation, she shows how disability identity can become a site of resistance, reclaiming stigmatized bodily difference as a political and epistemic resource. Disability, in her framework, exposes the instability of bodily norms and the ideological labor required to sustain them.
Mitchell and Snyder’s (2000) concept of ‘narrative prosthesis’ further illuminates how disability often functions as a narrative crutch or symbolic shorthand in literary texts. This framework is particularly relevant to Tadjo’s recurrent use of blindness and muteness, raising the question of whether disability is represented as lived embodiment or metaphorical deficiency.
Garland-Thomson’s work complements Davis’s argument about the instability of disability and the rule of normalcy. While Davis (2002) foregrounds the statistical, political, and biopolitical production of the ‘normal’ body, Garland-Thomson (2017) examines how that norm is culturally visualized and narratively reproduced through the figure of the normate. Both reject essentialist definitions of disability and emphasize its social construction, yet Davis moves toward a universalizing ‘dismodernism’ grounded in shared vulnerability, whereas Garland-Thomson retains a stronger focus on identity formation and representational politics.
Together, their frameworks illuminate how disability is simultaneously a structural effect of modern nomocracy (Davis 2002) and a cultural site where meanings of embodiment, deviance, and citizenship are negotiated (Garland-Thomson 2017). Whereas Davis’s critique of normalcy illuminates how genocidal ideologies construct deviant bodies, Garland-Thomson’s concept of narrative prosthesis explains how disability functions metaphorically within narrative structures.
Mitchell and Snyder’s concept of ‘narrative prosthesis’ further illuminates how disability functions within literary texts as a representational and structural device. They argue that disability frequently operates as a narrative mechanism through which stories organize deviance, disruption, or explanatory closure (Mitchell and Snyder 2000). Disability is therefore often mobilized symbolically rather than represented as lived embodiment. This framework is particularly relevant to Tadjo’s recurrent deployment of blindness and muteness in The Shadow of Imana, raising the question of whether disability is represented as embodied experience, metaphorical shorthand for trauma, or a productive tension between the two.
In addition to the approaches of Davis and Garland-Thomson, the theoretical models of disability articulated by Gilson and DePoy (2002) are essential for analyzing the literary representation of this dynamic. The diagnostic model, which ‘places the locus of disability internally, within an individual’ (ibid., 153), creates a hierarchy of human value by framing disabled individuals as ‘defective’ (ibid., 154). This logic was co-opted by genocidal ideologies, such as the Nazi Aktion T4 program, which framed disabled people as ‘life unworthy of life’ (cf. Silvestri 2019). In literature, describing a nation, for instance, as ‘sick’ employs this model to alienate a target group and frame eradication as a therapeutic necessity.
In opposition, the social model posits that disability is ‘a phenomenon constructed by factors and forces in the external environment’ (Gilson and DePoy 2002, 155). This model shifts the critical focus from the individual to the societal barriers that create disablement. Applying this model to literary analysis exposes how metaphors are not neutral but active participants in a system of meaning that devalues disabled lives.
For a nuanced analysis, Gilson and DePoy’s (2002) interactive model provides a crucial synthesis, defining disability as ‘the interplay of diverse human conditions with environmental barriers to full community inclusion’ (ibid., 1). This framework allows an examination of whether a metaphor critiques the genocidal environment that “disables” a population or simply uses disability as a shorthand for brokenness, thereby perpetuating the diagnostic model, albeit figuratively.
This theoretical foundation intersects with the constraints of narrating genocide, a process Dori Laub describes as an ‘event without a witness’ (Laub 1992, 79). Building on this, Irene Kacandes identifies three levels of narrative witnessing: the story, the text, and the production and reception of the text (Kacandes 1999, 56). Such ‘surrogate’ witnessing raises questions about adequacy, legitimacy, and responsibility, as ‘no one is fully prepared to witness genocide or trauma’ (cf. Baer 2000, 17; Felman 2000, 173). The narration of genocide is shaped by a fundamental paradox: it is both imperative and, due to the inadequacy of language and the limits of testimony, often impossible (Adorno 2003; Caruth 1991, 181; Van Alphen 1999).
The ‘Rationality’ of Evil in Diop’s Murambi
Boubacar Boris Diop’s Murambi deconstructs Western perceptions of the genocide through its polyvocal structure. The novel interweaves two narrative strands: a third-person account following Cornelius Uvimana, a history teacher returning from exile in 1998, and a series of first-person eyewitness accounts from victims, perpetrators, and bystanders narrated as the events unfold. This structure avoids a single, authoritative perspective, instead presenting a fragmented, multi-faceted testimony that mirrors the seemingly disjointed reality of the genocide itself.
Central to Diop’s project is the character of Dr. Joseph Karekezi, the fictional mastermind of the Murambi massacre.4 His defense of his actions as ‘duty’ (Murambi, 100) evokes Hannah Arendt’s (1963) concept of the ‘banality of evil’. Karekezi is not portrayed as a frenzied killer but as a cold, rational, and intelligent man who subordinated emotions to his ideological cause. He embodies the diagnostic model’s logic applied to genocide: he frames the Tutsi as a pathological element to be excised from the national body for its health. His rationality is what makes him monstrous; as his brother Siméon ponders, ‘Joseph, who was so intelligent, was he also completely insane? Is it possible?’ (Murambi, 154). This medicalized framing resonates powerfully with Lennard J. Davis’s critique of the ‘rule of normalcy’. If modern societies construct the norm as a statistical and ideological benchmark against which bodies are measured, then Karekezi’s logic represents an extreme biopolitical enforcement of that norm. The Tutsi are not merely political opponents; they are cast as deviant bodies within the imagined national organism. Genocide, in this sense, becomes the violent correction of deviation—an attempt to restore normative order through eradication. Diop’s portrayal thus exposes how the enforcement of ‘normality’ can slide into exterminatory logic when difference is construed as pathological threat.
Karekezi’s genocidal reasoning does not merely pathologize the Tutsi as political enemies; it reproduces what Davis (2002) identifies as the ideological production of deviance through normativity. The Tutsi body becomes narratively figured as an obstacle to national coherence, rendering extermination thinkable as ‘correction’. In this sense, Diop exposes how genocidal discourse mirrors ableist logics of purification and exclusion.
Diop also uses Karekezi to ‘de-Africanize’ the genocide, countering the international narrative that dismissed it as spontaneous African ‘tribalism’. Through Karekezi, the novel demonstrates that the genocide was not a descent into madness but a rationally conceptualized and systematically executed project (Lemarchand 1995, 8). Here Diop’s fictional architecture converges with Mahmood Mamdani’s historical analysis. Mamdani demonstrates that colonial rule in Rwanda racialized social identities, transforming flexible socio-economic distinctions into rigid political categories of ‘native’ and ‘settler’. Diop dramatizes this genealogy at the level of character and discourse. Karekezi’s ideological coherence is not spontaneous fanaticism but the narrative embodiment of a historically produced logic of exclusion. In rendering this logic visible, the novel makes genocide narratively thinkable without legitimizing it, exposing how colonial constructions of belonging become the precondition for exterminatory politics. The recurring motif of “madness” in the novel is thus critically examined and ultimately relativized. The genocide created, as the character Jessica says, an ‘abnormal order of things’, and the struggle was to restore ‘normality’ to make Rwanda ‘normal’ again, ‘a country like any other’ (Murambi, 110f).
Diop further complicates the perpetrator portrait beyond Karekezi. Faustin Gasana, another prototypical perpetrator in the novel, is motivated by a manipulated interpretation of history, convinced that Tutsis and Hutus ‘could never live together. Never’ (Murambi, 19). Unlike Karekezi, Faustin is, however, unsettled by his conscience. He is coerced into killing to protect his family, believing he is hastening the end of a ‘war’ (Murambi, 88). Others, like Rose Karemera’s neighbor Valérie Rumiya, use the genocide to settle personal vendettas (Murambi, 98), while some young men participate for the opportunity to rape (Murambi, 22). This spectrum contrasts sharply with Karekezi’s ideological, uncoerced, and unremorseful stance, illustrating that the machinery of genocide requires both the rational architect and the multitude acting from fear, hatred, greed, or coercion.
It is important to note that the foregrounding of the genocidaire Karekezi does not attempt to rationalize genocide per se but draws on Mahmood Mamdani’s distinction between rationality and thinkability. Rather than presenting genocidal violence as rational, the analysis examines how literature renders genocide narratively thinkable by exposing its bureaucratic, ideological, and sometimes, medicalized logics. In A Brief History of Genocide and more fully in When Victims Become Killers, Mamdani (2001) challenges the conventional depiction of the Rwandan genocide as an eruption of ‘irrational tribal hatred’. Instead, he argues that the violence followed a distinct political logic rooted in colonial state formation. By demonstrating how Belgian colonialism racialized and rigidified Hutu and Tutsi identities, transforming relatively fluid social categories into politicized racial identities, Mamdani shows that genocide emerged from a historically constructed framework of citizenship, belonging, and exclusion. As he explains, the colonialists’ racial ideology—the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis’—was ‘ingenious’:
[E]very sign of “progress” on the Dark Continent was taken as proof of the civilizing influence of an alien [European] race […] the children of Ham – Noah’s son, in the Hebrew Bible. The Hamites were taken to be black-skinned Caucasians; they wandered across the African Continent and ruled over their racial inferiors, the dark-skinned blacks (Mamdani 2001, pp. 42–43).
This racial myth institutionalized a political distinction between rulers and subjects, ultimately recoding the Tutsi as an alien or ‘settler’ population rather than as co-nationals. The decisive shift, therefore, was not ancient ethnic antagonism but the colonial transformation of social difference into a racialized political hierarchy. Within this framework, extermination could be framed as a form of political self-defense. Genocide thus becomes intelligible—not morally rational, but politically rational within a distorted logic of state sovereignty and counterinsurgency.
Mamdani’s approach parallels Hannah Arendt’s (1976) insistence in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1976) that mass violence must be understood as structurally and politically organized rather than as an eruption of mob irrationality. However, where Arendt emphasizes ideological coherence and bureaucratic modernity, most famously in her formulation of the ‘banality of evil’ (Arendt 2002, p. 109), Mamdani foregrounds the colonial production of racialized political identities and the bifurcated state as the enabling conditions for genocidal reasoning. Whereas Arendt highlights the routinization of violence within totalitarian systems, Mamdani demonstrates how the colonial distinction between ‘native’ and ‘settler’ transformed a civil war into a project of elimination. Together, both thinkers resist moralizing explanations that reduce genocide to ‘madness’; instead, they compel us to confront the more unsettling possibility that genocide is embedded in modern political rationalities themselves.
Disability as Metaphor and Social Condition in Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana
Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana (2002) is a hybrid work of creative non-fiction, a testimonial travelogue that blends first-hand observation, interviews with survivors and perpetrators, historical reflection, and poetic meditation. Its generic instability mirrors the fragmented and unsettled post-genocidal landscape of Rwanda. Rather than offering a linear or comprehensive account of the genocide—referred to variously as ‘that time of endless night’ (Imana, 9), ‘death distorted by cruelty’ (Imana, 10), ‘death distorted by hatred’ (Imana, 15), ‘the war’ (Imana, 29, 35), or euphemistically ‘the events’ (Imana, 71) and ‘the troubles’ (Imana, 106)—Tadjo presents a series of vignettes and encounters that collectively bear witness to the enduring trauma permeating Rwandan society. Within this fractured narrative structure, disability emerges as a central metaphor through which trauma, memory, and social rupture are articulated.
Garland-Thomson (2017) warns that disability frequently functions as a representational device through which cultural anxieties are displaced onto bodily difference. Tadjo’s text simultaneously participates in and interrogates this logic. Blindness and muteness become metaphors for traumatic rupture, yet the narrative also foregrounds the material suffering of genocide survivors, preventing disability from functioning merely as abstract symbolism.
From the outset, Tadjo equates forgetting with physical impairment: ‘To forget Rwanda after the sound and the fury was like being blind in one eye, voiceless, handicapped. It was to walk in darkness, feeling your way with outstretched arms to avoid colliding with the future’ (Imana, 3). Disability here signifies not only individual loss but also the ethical failure to remember. Through Garland-Thomson’s concept of narrative prosthesis, Tadjo’s repeated invocation of blindness and muteness can be read as a structuring device that stabilizes the text’s meditation on trauma. Disability becomes the metaphorical hinge upon which memory and forgetting turn. Yet this strategy also produces what Ato Quayson (2007) terms ‘aesthetic nervousness’: the discomfort that arises when embodied difference carries heavy symbolic weight (Quayson 2007, 15, 22, 25). The metaphor risks reducing disability to lack, even as it seeks to articulate the inexpressibility of trauma. In this tension, Tadjo’s narrative reveals both the expressive power and the ethical fragility of disability as a literary figure. The metaphor of blindness recurs throughout the narrative; the failure to foresee genocide is itself described as an inexplicable ‘blindness’ (Imana, 72). Trauma thus becomes a disabling force that obstructs vision, speech, and orientation toward the future.
Read through Mitchell and Snyder’s (2000) concept of narrative prosthesis, Tadjo’s recurrent deployment of blindness and muteness reveals disability as both a narrative strategy and an ethical problem. Disability functions as a representational mechanism that gives form to trauma otherwise resistant to articulation. Yet the text simultaneously complicates this symbolic economy by refusing to leave disability at the level of abstraction alone. Blindness and voicelessness are not merely rhetorical devices signifying collective amnesia; they become embodied experiences tied to grief, displacement, and psychic fragmentation. In this way, The Shadow of Imana both mobilizes and unsettles disability metaphor, exposing the limits of language in representing genocidal violence.
This sensory imagery is reinforced in Tadjo’s portrayal of survivors. She describes a man in exile whose eyes are ‘covered in an opaque film’ and in whose ‘deep, unfathomable gaze’, ‘[n]othing could be read’ (Imana, 5). His eyes are ‘those of a prisoner, eyes blinded by darkness and emptiness’ (ibid.). Trauma here appears as a disorienting disability, a condition that impedes both recognition and testimony. Bearing witness, however, is framed as indispensable: without the act of articulation, memory becomes a burden that threatens to ‘crush’ its bearer (Imana, 3). Tadjo explicitly links this responsibility to writing, questioning whether Africa’s orality might constitute a ‘handicap to the collective memory’ and insisting that ‘[w]e must write to give information some permanence’ (Imana, 27). Writing thus functions as a corrective to metaphorical disability, a means to ‘open our pupils to see the truth’ (Imana, 102).
Quayson’s (2007) notion of aesthetic nervousness is especially productive here, since the survivor’s body resists narrative containment. The opacity of the man’s gaze—his eyes ‘covered in an opaque film’ (Imana, 5)—generates interpretive instability, interrupting any easy movement from bodily sign to psychological meaning. Trauma cannot be neatly translated into representation. Instead, Tadjo foregrounds precisely the discomfort of witnessing, compelling readers to confront the inadequacy of visual and linguistic frameworks when faced with the aftermath of genocide. Disability here marks not deficiency but the fracture of ordinary systems of perception and testimony.
For survivors of rape, this metaphorical disablement becomes viscerally embodied. Anastasie, violated by her own brother, is ‘trapped in the prison of her flesh’ (Imana, 63). Her trauma manifests as physical obstruction: ‘Her tongue felt furry, and prevented her from uttering the slightest word… She no longer recognised the inside of her body’ (ibid.). She is ‘welded to the darkness’, wondering ‘if the morning light could wipe out her memory of the years emptied of all sweetness’ (Imana, 63–64). Daylight offers no redemption; it merely prolongs wakefulness until sleep returns (ibid.). Similarly, Annonciata becomes ‘[a] shadow of her former self’ (Imana, 74), withdrawn and silent: ‘Retreating into herself, she wouldn’t speak, took no interest in anything anymore, had completely lost her appetite. She spent her days in bed, and at night she lay awake, eyes staring, motionless’ (ibid.). Having contracted AIDS during her assault, she carries a permanent physical marker of genocidal violence (Imana, 75). In these portrayals, disability is not abstract symbolism but a lived condition in which psychological and bodily violation converge.
Garland-Thomson’s critique of disability as a cultural metaphor becomes particularly salient in these depictions. Anastasie’s and Annonciata’s experiences resist any simplistic symbolic reading because their suffering is insistently material, gendered, and embodied. The text moves beyond metaphor by showing how genocidal violence transforms the body into a site where psychological trauma and physical violation converge. Rather than reducing disability to narrative shorthand for suffering, Tadjo foregrounds the lived consequences of violence, thereby complicating ableist assumptions that equate disability solely with loss or deficiency.
Tadjo extends this metaphor beyond individual suffering to encompass the collective body. Corpses are described as ‘look[ing] like things destined for the scrapyard […] scarcely recognisable remains’ (Imana, 13), signalling the material disfigurement wrought by violence. Survivors struggle to reintegrate into social and economic life. The Kubwimana family exemplifies this social disablement: Jean-Baptiste, imprisoned on suspicion of complicity, cannot find work after his release; Constance attempts to reconstruct domestic stability; Isaac is disillusioned; and Thérèse remains estranged from half her family and skeptical of the nation’s future (Imana, 20–21). The genocide has profoundly disrupted the very structures that sustain communal life. In this sense, Tadjo’s narrative resonates with the social model of disability: impairment is not confined to individual bodies but produced and intensified by disabling environments. Rwanda itself emerges as a socially disabled landscape in which ordinary forms of belonging, trust, and participation have been radically disrupted. Read through Gilson and DePoy’s interactive model, disability here exceeds the level of individual impairment and becomes a condition produced through environmental devastation, fractured institutions, and unresolved collective trauma. Tadjo’s narrative thus shifts the focus from disability as bodily deficit to disablement as a social consequence of genocidal violence. The nation becomes a space struggling toward reconstitution while remaining marked by profound interruption.
Yet the literary deployment of disability in The Shadow of Imana remains ethically fraught and theoretically unstable. On the one hand, equating trauma with blindness, muteness, and handicap risks reinforcing ableist tropes that construe disability primarily as deficit or brokenness. On the other hand, these metaphors serve to underscore the magnitude of genocidal rupture: humanity itself has been rendered ‘disabled’, unable to see, speak, or orient itself without confronting its own history. Disability, in The Shadow of Imana, becomes both a figure for trauma and a testimony to the enduring fragility of post-genocide recovery. To remember, to write, and to bear witness are thus framed not merely as literary acts but as ethical imperatives, necessary steps toward restoring a social and moral vision darkened by genocide.
Conclusion
Across both texts, genocide emerges at the intersection of political exclusion and normative regulation. Mamdani elucidates the colonial production of racialized political identities; Davis clarifies how such identities become subject to the violent enforcement of normalcy; Garland-Thomson reveals how disability mediates the cultural imagination of deviation. Diop and Tadjo, in different narrative registers, stage this convergence: one by dramatizing the ideological architecture of extermination, the other by tracing its disabling aftermath across bodies and social worlds.
Diop and Tadjo offer complementary literary responses to the Rwandan genocide that engage with disability in distinct but interconnected ways. Diop’s Murambi utilizes a polyvocal structure to critique the rational, bureaucratic, and ideological nature of genocidal violence, embodied by the character of Dr. Karekezi. In doing so, it challenges the diagnostic model that dehumanizes victim groups and exposes the calculated rationality behind the violence. Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana employs the diagnostic model metaphorically to articulate the profound and disabling trauma of the genocide’s aftermath, using blindness and muteness to represent the struggle to remember and testify. However, by showing how trauma disables entire families and the social fabric, her work also gestures toward the social model, illustrating how genocide creates a disabling environment for all.
Together, these works illuminate genocide both as a systemically organized project of destruction and as a force that produces lasting individual and collective trauma. They illustrate the critical role of literature as a form of surrogate witnessing that navigates the ethical complexities of representing atrocity. By juxtaposing the architecture of destruction with its disabling consequences, Diop and Tadjo demonstrate how literature can bear witness to the complex realities of genocide, challenging simplistic narratives and honoring the imperative to remember.
Notes
[3] (Small, 2007).