Conferring Visibility on Trauma within Rwanda’s National Reconciliation: Kivu Ruhorahoza’s Disturbing and Salutary Camera

Abstract

This chapter analyses Kivu Ruhorahoza’s recent film Grey Matter (Rwanda 2011) as an unprecedented attempt to confer social visibility on the mental scars that survivors of traumatic violence carry within themselves and their daily attempts to negotiate the haunting past of the genocide against the Tutsi. Grey Matter underlines the social tensions surrounding the political and institutional responsiveness to trauma, both for survivors and perpetrators. It opens and ends with the political and economic struggles of a young Rwandan film-maker who seeks funds for his film, The Cycle of the Cockroach. Within that film, which is embedded within the main film, he denounces the perverse and self-destructive dynamic that requires those who were targeted by ideological discrimination to hide and remain silent about their struggle and mental scars. This film-within-the-film encourages the viewers to reflect both on the psychological reality of victims and perpetrators of violence, and the cultural visibility a post-genocide society is willing to give to a traumatic past within its present reunification process. Breaking with the historical realism that defines cinematic production on the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda, Ruhorahoza favours a symbolic and haunting huis clos that dramatises the loneliness of survivors and perpetrators who are each respectively trapped in mental prisons—be they the result of ideological constructs or of traumatic violence. While one survivor finds a way to overcome his mental entrapment, his sister and a genocide perpetrator end up in the same mental institution. Ultimately Grey Matter explores through its embedded and self-reflexive structure the interrelations between personal reconciliation and national reunification, and the role of cinema as a cultural medium to confer social visibility on these interrelations.