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5 - What Is Really Unspeakable?

Gender and Post-Traumatic Growth at the International Level

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 October 2018

Caroline Williamson Sinalo
Affiliation:
University College Cork
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Summary

Chapter 5 examines processes of collective posttraumatic growth at an international level. As the testimonies collected by the Genocide Archive of Rwanda are translated and made accessible in international exhibitions, survivors who give their testimonies have an opportunity to communicate with, and contest the dominant perceptions of, the world beyond Rwanda. Some of the testimonies also appear in a book entitled We Survived: Genocide in Rwanda, edited by Wendy Whitworth. While such a text might be considered an important platform for survivors to gain a voice with transformative power, Chapter 5 argues that this is in fact not the case. Through a comparison of the published testimonies with the archive translations, the chapter identifies a number of editorial interventions which serve to make Rwandan survivors appear more passive and less critical than the original texts. The chapter also demonstrates that, while the words of both men and women are altered in published text, criticisms of the international community are censored to a greater extent in the testimonies of women than those of men. In the concluding remarks, I refer back to trauma theory’s insistence on the unrepresentability of trauma and highlight once again how damaging such a concept can be in a context where survivors, particularly women, have to fight to be heard.
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Chapter
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Rwanda After Genocide
Gender, Identity and Post-Traumatic Growth
, pp. 147 - 180
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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