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History, nation, ghetto
Kruger, Marie
Kruger, Marie
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n1156-5100-1-PB.pdf
Adobe PDF, 204.2 KB
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"In Yvonne Owuor’s short story “Weight of Whispers,” a Tutsi prince escaping from the Rwandan genocide laments the loss of his privileged life to the nostalgic tune of the “Indépendance Cha Cha Cha.”1 Once, the desire for political power and sovereignty was immortalized in Kabasele’s well-known song; now the historical figures lauded in the upbeat celebration of Independence—Lumumba, Tshombe and Kasavuvu—have become martyrs and assassins, the ghosts of a past which failed to deliver on its promise of peace and prosperity. As the prince applauds the colonial divisions of race and ethnicity from which he has profited, Kabasele’s famed song transforms from celebratory dance into the routine performance of epistemological and institutional violence. In their search for shelter from state-sponsored persecution, the protagonists of Owuor’s “Weight of Whispers”, and A Farm Called Kishinev by Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye will only be disappointed by the exclusionary practices of the modern nation-state and its insistence on the oppositional categories of “settler” and “native”, “citizen” and “stranger”. In the narratives of Owuor and Macgoye, modern institutions generate divisive political identities which encourage the production of moral apathy towards those marked as “different” and therefore excluded from the protection of the state.2 To ensure their survival, even those displaced by the Holocaust will eventually appropriate the institutional apparatus of the nation-state to contain unruly minorities. Meanwhile, a “Tutsi prince” is victimized by the racialized identity he was once eager to embrace. Victims can indeed become killers, while those responsible for today’s (epistemic) violence might be tomorrow’s victims.3"(pg 1)
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2009
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With permission of the license/copyright holder