In her novel on the 1994 genocide,
The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Hearth of Rwanda, Véronique Tadjo visits memorial sites in Rwanda after the genocide against the Tutsis. Despite the enormous suffering, the author and certain victims succeed in understanding the mechanisms of hatred while, at the same time, believing in life at the end of the book. How is this conclusion possible given the scale of pain felt by the victims, the author and intellectual witnesses? The answer is in the leitmotif of Kristévian abjection that is interwoven throughout the text. In her essay
Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva theorizes how people can continue to live despite facing the abyss of death. By working through the process of abjection, victims and intellectual witnesses can participate in the tragedy in Rwanda and then let life begin anew, which makes the theory of abjection one of the stakes in Tadjo’s work.
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