Non-mourning and ecocritical ethics in Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda

Abstract

In this article I read Véronique Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana through its embedded account of ecotourism and the environmental space of Rwanda’s Parc National des Volcans. In the context of Rwandan genocide, I make a case for re-grounding mourning through environmental co-ordinates. Considering what I term an “agriculturalisation” of genocide, present both in the implementation of genocide in rural areas and in environmental hermeneutics for genocide, I connect the work of mourning to a de-naturalisation of received landscapes and land orthodoxies. I suggest that The Shadow of Imana presents us with a vernacular mourning ecology for post-genocide Rwanda, in which non-mourning enclaves — spaces where a human conception of mourning does not obtain — animate a mourning for everything else that remains.

In 1998 Véronique Tadjo travelled to Rwanda as part of the Fest’ Africa project “Rwanda: Écrire par devoir de mémoire” (Rwanda: Writing as a Duty to Remember). The project, funded by la Fondation de France, enabled a group of African writers — Tadjo is Ivorian — to travel to Rwanda and to visit some of the genocide memorials there, as well as to meet with survivors, prisoners and NGOs. Situated at the centre of Tadjo’s The Shadow of Imana: Travels in the Heart of Rwanda is an account of ecotourism. The account is stimulated by Tadjo’s encounter with an American primate researcher during a Sabena flight from Brussels into Kigali. Tadjo records: “I am sitting next to a woman who is part of the Dian Fossey Foundation. We are talking about gorillas. They are Rwanda’s principal tourist attraction” (2002: 81). This recollection prefigures Tadjo’s most sustained engagement with the non-human environment, in which she describes the otherworldly “heights of the chain of volcanoes” (2002: 81) — the Virunga mountains where the “last silverback [gorillas] are living” (2002: 81). But what is an account of ecotourism doing in an account of genocide? This may feel like the wrong question to be asking about a text that foregrounds such a grossly inhuman context, but it is precisely this language of the “human” which fixates our attempts to account for genocide and to describe its horror. Genocide, Tadjo notes, is the attempt to violently re-inscribe the limits of the human:

To erase all humanity. To look no more into the faces of others. Above all to exchange no more glances. An animal, a heap of flesh. A skull cracking like a dry branch […]. To be master of the slave kneeling at one’s feet. (2002: 117)

Genocide is conceptualised here as a process of rendering other humans as animal — of seeing “not people but a people” (Gourevitch, 1999: 202). This descriptive apparatus implicitly equates speciesism with racism, where the racial or ethnic other is conceived of as animal, and the animal is conceived of as less-than-human. What remains unthought is how our humanity is a naturalised assumption: how the multiplicity of animal beings radically complicates divisions between “the human” and “the animal”. The rationale that uses the animal to mark the outer limit of the human remains unchallenged.

Jacques Derrida observes that by instituting a specifically human symbolic, we refuse animals certain qualities presumed to be exclusively human, qualities such as language, culture, guilt, crying, laughter, lying, and, significantly for this essay, mourning and an awareness of death (2008: 134–135). What the animal lacks is “precisely the lack by virtue of which the human becomes subject of the signifier […] to be subject of the signifier is also to be a subjecting subject, subject as master” (Derrida, 2008: 130). This position of mastery, which relies on the sacrifice of the animal and the animalistic, produces a “symbolic economy in which we can engage in a ‘non-criminal putting to death’, as Derrida phrases it, not only of animals but of humans as well by marking them as animal” (Wolfe, 1998: 39). An exclusively human symbolic allows us to “use animals as a source of social division”, a marked factor in histories of Western racism and slavery in which the animalistic and primordial was exiled to Africa in order to confirm Western dominance (Huggan and Tiffin, 2010: 135). The animal question can shed some light on the ideological mechanisms through which we place relative value on the alterity and agency of different life forms, including our valuations of human lives. This question of the animal, cannot, I suggest, be thought separately from the rationalisations of environmental space, including the enclaving of areas of protected nature, that differentially delimit ways of being human and animal. A response to genocide that interrogates the limits of the human must therefore also work to de-naturalise received landscapes.

In this article, I argue that in the context of Rwandan genocide, we need to think about mourning in terms of environment and landscape. The Shadow of Imana presents us with a vernacular mourning ecology for post-genocide Rwanda in which non-mourning enclaves ¹ — spaces where a human conception of mourning does not obtain — animate a mourning for everything else that remains. Genocide alters what the non-human environment, the landscape, means. I therefore make a case for re-grounding mourning through environmental co-ordinates — rather than conceiving of mourning as a “natural” response to generalised social trauma. I connect the work of mourning to a de-naturalisation of received landscapes and land orthodoxies. As such, the larger insight I offer to readings of post-genocide landscape is that the way environments are rationalised inflects mourning, while, in turn, how and what we mourn affects our consequent rationalisations of space. To establish this argument, I make the following steps. First, I contextualise two key environmental spaces represented in The Shadow of Imana — Rwanda’s rural hill territories and its nature reserve in the Virunga mountains — in terms of their material human histories, including what I call the “agriculturalisation” of genocide. Second, I consider what the aesthetic and psychical segregation of the nature reserve from agriculture might mean within a terrain of loss, and examine why we might need to de-naturalise certain received landscapes and landscape orthodoxies — one example is a certain level of opportunism interceding in hermeneutics for genocide supplied by those with vested environmental interests. Third, I argue that The Shadow of Imana re-contextualises the Rwandan landscape in terms of a failed humanitarian mourning for genocide. I identify the landscape of humanitarian mourning with a parallel pre-genocide template — mourning the destruction of the environmental space of the nature-reserve (or at least a certain vision of this environment). Fourth, I connect the triangulation that The Shadow of Imana negotiates between the animalised dead, dehumanised perpetrators and the “frighteningly human appearance” (Tadjo, 2002: 81) of non-human gorillas to the environments in which they are encountered. These environments are rural massacre sites, prison fields, and the mountainous gorilla reserve. I suggest that, within this triangulation, the non-human term acts as a springboard for a vernacular mourning ecology.

In the context of Rwandan genocide, I focus deliberately and counter-intuitively on enclaves of non-mourning because this approach enables a re-negotiation of what mourning can mean in a post-genocide landscape — as that which bears not only upon loss but also upon future terrains. The classical Freudian conception of mourning implies that everything can (and is available to) be worked though. This does not seem possible (or desirable) in a post-genocide context. Foregrounding that which is already set aside, a reserve (with all the implications of a resource for futurity that this term implies) within mourning retains a remainder that is not worked through and allows mourning to continue by means other than mourning. This allows us to connect mourning for genocide to environmental ethics: to the space of the nature-reserve as a resource for the future. In addition, foregrounding such spaces avoids segregating past from present and subsuming Rwanda to a “genocide-landscape” — a vision that is propped upon the proliferation of images of mass graves among banana plantations, for instance, or of rivers filled with the bodies of the dead. The Shadow of Imana interrogates genocide’s psychical impact on the environment: how genocide alters what the landscape means. In responding to and re-presenting post-genocide Rwandan environments, the text de-naturalises the received post-genocide landscape and allows an alternative ecology of mourning to take shape.

In Tadjo’s account of the apes, separated by “the mystery of their imposing presence” (2002: 81), we find a tableau of primeval time, an eco-archaic “refuge in the mountain peaks” (2002: 81). The vision of unexplored territory, prevalent in both eco-touristic discourse and in the advancement of colonial ideologies, transfixes her account:

Strange vegetation plunged into a thick fog, territory lost in eternal mists, it is here that the mountain gorillas have chosen to make their home. In this silent space, outside of time and far from humans, dense bamboo forests, gigantic plants, prehistoric flora and long-haired trees stand guard over these majestic animals. (2002: 81)

Here, Tadjo fashions a sense of impenetrability, of a timeless non-human pristine, registering the separation of these “creatures of another world” (2002: 82) from the social symbolic. In positioning the gorillas’ mountainous environment as a space of exception — an island zone of refuge and otherness — Tadjo plays on what Rob Nixon has termed “the temporal enclave mentality of the eco-archaic”: “a charmed space that is segregated, among other things, from the history of its own segregation” (2011b: 160, 166). While stylistically reproducing the gorilla reserve-land as “a sanctuary of illusory innocence and eco-archaic return” (Nixon, 2011a: 187), Tadjo ultimately indicates that the nature-reserve is not an amnesiac space, isolated from external relations. Tadjo connects the ape enclave to human histories of violence and warfare in the region, commenting that “[d]uring the whole period of genocide and war, the great primates were not harmed. They took refuge in the mountain peaks. But people say in any case none of the fighters would have attempted to harm them” (2002: 81). This connection between a zone of refuge and that which has been reserved from a particular time — the time of genocide and ever-propagating ecologies of violence in the region — allows Tadjo to mould some consolation, a space for non-mourning within “the time when humans […] had not yet discovered their humanity” (2002: 9).

In The Shadow of Imana, the rendering of an eco-archaic enclave in the mountain peaks — suspended, as it were, in the centre of the text — establishes a space of reserve, where a human conception of mourning does not obtain, but which nonetheless animates a mourning for everything that remains. What is being set aside, both in the nature-reserve and as a reserve within mourning, cannot be fully translated and opens onto the question: “What is it, in loss, that can be metabolised in loss, and what cannot?” — a question framed by Jean Laplanche in the essay “Time and the Other” (1999: 245). In this essay, Laplanche suggests that human temporality might best be thought in relation to the “terrain” of “loss: of the human being confronted with loss; to the extent that the dimension of loss is probably co-extensive with temporalization itself ” (1999: 241). We can adapt the conception of a “terrain” of loss to received landscapes in post-genocide Rwanda — where geographical terrain is often constructed in terms of radical endangerment and loss, both human and ecological. Laplanche disputes the classical Freudian conception of mourning, in which nothing about the loss is withdrawn from consciousness, and in which “everything can be metabolized” (1999: 245). For Laplanche, mourning is never an entirely conscious process, because the enigmatic message of the other’s death continues to confront the subject faced with loss. This message resides in the realm of the “to-be-translated” because “for the person in mourning, that message has never been adequately understood. Mourning is hardly ever without the question: what would he be saying now? What would he have said?” (Laplanche, 1999: 254). If we are to think of a terrain of loss in relation to landscape and environment in a post-genocide context, then the contouring of this terrain would need to reflect the “limitation on mourning” (Laplanche, 1999: 244) — the fact that not everything in loss is fully metabolisable.

To understand the vernacular landscape of mourning that Tadjo’s text premises, we need to consider what the gorilla enclave means in relation to that which it lies suspended above, as an altitudinal, but not hermetically sealed, island. The nature-reserve, as a non-mourning enclave, needs to be thought alongside human histories and geographical pressures in the region: as a variously endangered and appropriated arena, an inhabited place that both apes and humans traverse. Mountain gorillas exist in small communities, scattered throughout the Virunga ecological region, an area that extends across the borders of the nation states of Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda and Rwanda. The contact zones for people and primates in this region are game parks and nature-reserves, but far from existing as apolitical and atemporal tourist enclaves, these spaces lie at the intersection of legacies of Belgian, German, and British colonialisms and subsequent histories of decolonisation and warfare, as well as contemporary globalisation processes. The Virunga ecological region also lies at the confluence of various other enclaves produced by shifting political conflict, including humanitarian zones and refugee camps, as well as areas governed by militias and private security companies (Whitlock, 2010: 473). This is also an arena of intense regional flux and demographic fluctuation. The sustainability of human communities — and human uses of protected environments — is particularly fragile in the pressured geography surrounding the Virunga region’s national parks, where population densities are among the highest in the world (Maekawa et al., 2013: 128).

The vulnerability and endangerment of the gorillas cannot be thought separately from the combination of environmental scarcity and social vulnerability that surrounds the Virunga mountain frontier. In Rwanda, the physical contouring of the landscape around the Virungas is inflected by the perimeter of the national park: its border is unmistakable, with farm fields cultivated to its very edge. In this geography, what I term inflection, as “a change of curvature from convex to concave at a particular point on a curve” (OED, 3), metaphorises the shift from environmental scarcity — “the hard human existence along the Virunga frontier” (Weber and Vedder, 2001: 136) — to the perceived plenitude of the forest above. The interests of preservation and agriculture, strictly demarcated, invoke different forms of plenitude: ecological plenitude, in relation to bio-diversity, and agricultural plenitude, in relation to cultivation or production. In Kingdom of the Gorillas, Bill Webber and Amy Vedder (2001) suggest that, due to the exigencies of land-pressure, local communities naturalise the forest in terms of its unutilised potential for cultivation (2001: 137), while their own account of this environment uncritically naturalises ecological endangerment and extinction: “[i]t was the forest that suffered from a thousand smaller wounds inflicted each day, from cut bamboo to wire snared animals” (2001: 136). The plenitudes of both the nature-reserve — and of the agricultural hills are ambivalent, marked by human and ecological endangerment respectively. Weber and Vedder emphasise the “study in stark contrasts” (2001: 136) subtended by the park boundary:

Neat rows of white potatoes were planted right up to the sparse line of exotic cypress trees that marked the boundary […]. It was a binary world: all fields and people to one side, all forest and wild animals on the other, with no transition zone to buffer influences in either direction. (2001: 136)

Here, it seems, “influences” might be defined not only materially (as the incursions of bio-prospectors) but also non-materially: as the provocation of unutilised land subtended by the nature-reserve, or the lived experience of a land pressure that places both human communities and undeveloped land — the habitat of the gorillas — under duress.

The naturalisation of segregated “pristine” environments overlaps with the ideological co-ordinates of genocidal discourse. Freud found the creation of “nature reserves” in the terrestrial realm a “perfect parallel” to the “creation of the mental realm of phantasy” (1916: 372). This “realm of phantasy” is an after-effect of the reality principle’s dominance — from which it is “withdrawn” or set aside in reserve (Freud, 1916: 372). The nature-reserve, too, is enclaved only as human transcendence over “nature” is compounded. Freud defines the nature-reserve as a place wherein “[e]verything including what is useless and even what is noxious, can grow and proliferate” (1916: 372). The anthropocentric and hierarchical segregations interposed between biota — “what is useless”, “what is noxious” — in this description position “the requirements of agriculture” (1916: 372) as a form of ecological cleansing. During the Rwandan genocide, “bush clearing” was one term that coded for the systematic slaughter (Mironko, 2009: 187). The agriculturalisation of the genocide included the use of agricultural implements in killing and burial. Those hiding in the bush or in sorghum fields were felled along with the vegetation and treated as animals to be “hunted” or weeded out in a process of “environmental culling or sanitation” (Mironko, 2009: 192).

For Freud, the nature-reserve is analogous to the realm of fantasy because it is unadulterated: the nature-reserve “preserves its original state which everywhere else has […] been sacrificed to necessity” (1916: 372, emphasis added). A strict ideological distinction between what is utilised (mastered) and what is preserved propagates the same kind of “world-imagining” (Eltringham, 2004: xi) upon which the perpetrators of genocide rely. Tadjo illustrates that the construction of territory as untouched, to the violent exclusion of other claims to land and resources, is a dangerous rationale for action: “Who knows what I might do tomorrow if the threat of punishment were removed? If I saw before me a vast unexplored territory where my previous humiliations, my frustrations could all be avenged?” (2002: 116). Here, the vision of “vast, unexplored territory” is just that — a fantasy. For Freud, fantasy exists as a “species of thought activity” that has been “split off ”— preserved — and “kept free from reality testing” (Freud, 1911: 221). One implication of Freud’s thinking here, if we re-ground the metaphor, is that areas of protected nature — amid that which has been sacrificed to “the requirements of agriculture, communications and industry” (Freud, 1916: 372) — are particularly saturated arenas of fantasy. Nixon has examined how the “racialized theatre” of conservation has allowed whites to self-mythologise as “stewards of nature”, while marking black cultures as non-coeval with white society in ethical terms (2011a: 170). As such, the rationale for strict preservation — for isolating an area from external interactions — starts to look like enclaving along racial lines, excluding certain relationships between peoples and environments. Tadjo’s description of the nature-reserve as “outside of time and far from humans” (2002: 81) reflects how these spaces are constructed as “enclave[s] from which history has been banished” (Nixon, 2011a: 181). But these “preserves” of “prehuman natural time” (Nixon, 2011a: 181) also police the human/animal divide: constructing a temporal limit between the human and the animal that can be exploited in terms of mastery (game hunting) or commodified transcendence (ecotourism). ²

In The Shadow of Imana, the question of what can be metabolised after genocide, and what cannot, is connected to the post-genocide Rwandan landscape, in which environmental spaces are differentially charged with meaning. Tadjo suggests that enigmatic provocations inhere within certain environments without being metabolised. These environments start to act like something in consonance with a message, the precise meaning of which is enigmatic. In Tadjo’s text, the intimidating signature and continued provocation of the genocide is crystallised in the rural hill territories — the “necklace of a thousand hills” that overhangs both the “international airport” and the “lunar landscape” of rubbish tips where children scavenge a meager existence (2002: 87). Here, the term “necklace” is significant for the way it evokes a South African historical context — necklacing the country, the hills are beautiful, but provocative of human suffering. Even Tadjo’s most sensual descriptions of the hills — “in the distance the hills are making love to the sky” — are marked by a fearful excess: “their silent groans create the floating clouds you see” (2002: 17, emphasis added).

The Shadow of Imana cathects the hills with an ambivalent excess because these areas are associated with a terrible significance in collective memory. Tadjo remarks, “[i]n the hills everyone knows everyone else, you couldn’t hide your identity […]. The cleansing had to be absolutely total” (2002: 104). Fujii touches upon a similar geographical provocation while describing her fieldwork in Rwanda. Describing one of the rural towns from which she collected interview data, Fujii depicts a fertile landscape of “low rising hills, dotted with thin clumps of trees and fields of coffee, bananas, corn, and other crops” (2009: 23). Yet this picture of an ordered agricultural Eden is ruptured by an enigmatic provocation: she continues, “it was difficult to imagine how anyone could have escaped the carnage, so un-forgiving was the terrain as to render all movement visible” (Fujii, 2009: 23, emphasis added). For Tadjo, “the hills, the thousand hills of this country” (2002: 48) have themselves become a fetish, a standing-in-for the unrecoverable event: the event which “destroys our ability to imagine it” (Bartov, 1998: 798, qtd. Eltringham, 2004: xi). Tadjo observes that “[f]rom a distance the city seems to have forgotten everything, digested everything, swallowed everything” (2002: 9), but up close a tangible “[f]ear has remained in [the] hills” (2002: 27). This fear is presented alongside the fact that “[d]ogs fed on the bodies” (2002: 27), indicating that the disordering of a naturalised ecology, with humanity at its apex, caused certain bodies to lose their symbolic status as human.

Attentive to the provocation of genocide that resides in the hills, The Shadow of Imana starts to define vernacular mourning ecology propped upon the physical landscape. Tadjo suggests that “[j]ust as in some of the Pacific Isles, people return to settle at the foot of an extinct volcano to till the fertile soil, Kigali is shedding its past and donning the raiment of a new existence” (2002: 10). Here, a mountainous space of exception is directly linked to the fertile agricultural land (associated with social recovery), below. Tadjo’s panoramic depictions of the post-genocide environment connect the agricultural hill territories to the reserve-land in the volcanoes: “[i]n the distance, the outline of volcanoes dominates the hills. Armed soldiers are marching along the verges of the path. We pass a line of peasant farmers going to the fields. One of them is carrying an axe” (2002: 19). The focalisation in this passage descends from the mountains, from beyond the hills, to the soldiers marching along lower inclines. This focalisation evokes something that Tadjo suggests elsewhere: that it is only “the world [that] stretches beyond the other side of those hills, far from death” that holds any possibility for those condemned to “mourn the future” (2002: 27). An ecology of violence ties the landscape together, connecting the volcanoes that dominate the hills to the farmer’s axe that recalls the use of agricultural implements during the genocide. This mourning ecology does not attempt to completely metabolise everything: “[a] lot of time is needed to accept that trees planted in this land of sorrows have been able to bear fruit” (2002: 10).

In exploring that which cannot be metabolised, or adequately translated and worked-through after genocide, The Shadow of Imana turns to environment: to Rwanda’s hill territories, where a pacific environmental beauty has taken on unnatural connotations. Tadjo remarks: “I try to decipher the expressions of the people we pass. Everything seems so peaceful. The hills are so green, so fertile. Terraced crops descend like giant staircases” (2002: 18). This observation dissembles the apparent peace that returns after genocide — to the everyday lives of those who continue to farm the land’s fertile slopes — for it is now peace that acts as the provocation of a violent past. Nonetheless, the text also associates non-human and environmental beauty with the transcendent possibility of peace (rather than peace as practical necessity) and in doing so also starts to de-naturalise other received post-genocide landscapes. A connection is drawn between the mountain gorillas, “symbolic of a beauty that passes our understanding” (2002: 81) and the genocide, which “passed all understanding” (2002: 32). Here Tadjo riffs on Philippians 4:7 — “the peace of God passeth understanding” — a verse that appears in a passage exhorting reconciliation among the leadership of the Philippian church. There is, in Rwanda, a vernacular association between the hills and the divine: “Rwandans have traditionally described their country of a thousand hills as ‘the land where god comes to rest’ ’’ (Hron, 2009: 275). In The Shadow of Imana, the hills are re-positioned as sites of spiritual transcendence after genocide through a vernacular mourning ecology that connects different temporalities (environmental, human, non-human). In the hill territories, the return to seasonal agricultural cycles that are abandoned during genocide marks a return to human temporality: to mourning. Laplanche suggests, “the dimension of loss is probably co-extensive with [human] temporalisation” (1999: 241). As such, that which lies beyond human temporality — here, the gorillas and their environmental enclave, “outside of time and far from humans” (Tadjo, 2002: 81) — reflects a limitation on mourning: a zone of non-mourning that makes a mourning for everything that remains possible.

I now turn to a consideration of why a vernacular mourning ecology that de-naturalises the received landscape might have practical significance. As a fetish (that stands in for the unrecoverable event), Rwanda’s densely cultivated hills are environments that allow a disavowal to be directed towards an external reality: agro-ecology. A level of ambivalence, in which the traumatic perception of humanitarian failure is disavowed and vitiated of its explanatory power, is evident in those hermeneutics for genocide that identify environmental scarcity, resulting from overpopulation, as the primary motivating factor in the genocide. Jared Diamond writes that those “who visited Rwanda in 1984 sensed an ecological disaster in the making. The whole country looked like a garden and banana plantation. Steep hills were being farmed right up to their crests. Even the most elementary measures that could have minimized soil erosion […] were not being practiced’ (2005: 320). This environmental narrative of disaster fits within a wider framework of colonial constructions of African landscapes. Thomas Bassett and Donald Crummey (2003) observe that colonial constructions of landscape either depopulate an environment and construct it as “pristine”, or, when they do recognise human presence in the landscape, construe its role in “almost entirely negative terms” (2003: 4). Diamond implicitly repositions the genocide as an “ecocide” (2005: 6), clouding multiple human contexts both with his nominal definition for the term — an “unintended ecological suicide” by people who inadvertently destroy their own environmental resources — and with that which the term “ecocide” actually suggests: the concerted attempt to completely destroy a natural environment. What might again be referred to as an “agriculturalisation” of genocide is at play here, for to read genocide as ecocide introduces a slippage in which genocide becomes a rationalisation of space for which agriculture is the ultimate paradigm — prompted by overpopulation and land pressure. Simultaneously, agriculture becomes a form of ecocide, leading inevitably, Diamond presumes, to soil erosion and environmental collapse.

If the way that The Shadow of Imana de-naturalises received landscapes in post-genocide Rwanda suggests that we need to reconceive certain environmentalisms (those that construct “pristine” environments as more valuable, and sustainable in comparison with agricultural relationships to the land or to models of sustainable use) — then it also re-contextualises the Rwandan landscape in terms of a failed, or inadequate, “humanitarian” mourning for genocide. This failed “humanitarian” mourning relates both to the failure of humanitarian intervention during and after the genocide and to the inadequacy of a “humanitarian” (or human-centred) conception of mourning in this context. Tadjo works to show that in accounting for genocide, ethical refinement cannot replace attentiveness to the material needs of those still alive. Her focalisation of Rwanda’s geography draws attention not only to the mountains, to the “thousand hills” of the country, but also to the “lunar landscape” of garbage dumps that “overhang Kigali” and the international airport “in the distance” (2002: 87). In foregrounding these social and ecological enclaves, Tadjo suggests that Rwanda is a place in which multiple temporalities of loss and recovery loom up against one another. The “island of garbage” (2002: 87), peopled by children who “left, one day, to live a wandering life” (2002: 86), has become another kind of temporal reserve in which the “future extends no further than the end of the street” (2002: 87). Social grief is circular. The paths of flight adopted by these children lead them into new “rigid hierarch[ies]” (2002: 87) — an observation that recalls another hermeneutic for genocide — and ever-propagating ecologies of violence: for the rootless “void of their wandering days” (2002: 88) presages enrolment in “barefoot arm[ies]” (2002: 88). As a “lunar landscape” of “island[s]” (2002: 87, 88), the garbage dumps mirror, and re-inflect, the endangered altitudinal “islands” in the mountain peaks, with their “lakes huddled inside craters” (2002: 81), so valued as sites of eco-touristic pilgrimage.

We can connect the landscape of failed “humanitarian” mourning in Rwanda with a pre-genocide template for mourning: a suspended mourning for a certain vision of “lost nature” that fixates on the threatened environmental space of the nature-reserve, where the “last ‘silverbacks’ are living” (Tadjo, 2002: 81). Tadjo riffs on but ultimately de-naturalises this construction of environmental space — she writes: “[t]he mountains stretch across Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda. On the Rwandan side, the Volcano National Park has been given over to their use. Dian Fossey had made of it a kingdom” (2002: 81). What is being positioned in terms of loss here is not the nature-reserve as environmental space but, rather, as ecological empire. Fossey’s “kingdom”, Tadjo suggests, allows a Western environmental consciousness to model itself by protecting gorillas — a fetish or “totem-animal” (2002: 81) for the would-be philanthropist West — and by directing human, emotional and material resources into conserving a “green orientalist” (Lohmann, 1993: 247) vision of endangered nature. Within this arena, Western research stations can live out a fantasy of complete control — “[a] satellite surveillance system will track the movements of the primates with its artificial eye” (Tadjo, 2002: 82) — their use of expensive monitoring technologies unavoidably a display of cultural power. Tadjo critiques how “foreigners […] with their enormous cameras and plans for some expensive project” would arrive “[b]efore the gaze of dumfounded villagers” and “disappear into the mountains without looking back” (2002: 82). Tadjo notes that “[i]t took the establishment of a research station for [local populations] to understand that these creatures were Rwanda’s most precious possession. More precious than themselves? The competition was on” (2002: 82). In this hierarchy of value we can observe the same “hazy linkage” between “morality and power” which reveals “humanitarian” intervention as that which is “actually based more on power than on legal right, and [which] can therefore serve as an exercise in power” (Klinghoffer, 1990: 135–136).

Just as Rwanda’s mountains are reified in a Western environmentalist imaginary as a place where nature ought to be preserved intact, so Rwanda becomes typified as a place in need of exorcism: “I have not recovered from Rwanda. Rwanda cannot be exorcised. Danger is ever-present, lurking in the memory, crouching in the bush in neighbouring countries” (Tadjo, 2002: 118). While this reference to regional instability evokes failed humanitarian intervention — the French-led Opération Turquoise, which instituted a safe zone in southwest Rwanda, allowed genocidaires to escape into neighbouring eastern Zaire — the provocation of danger “crouching in the bush” also finds co-ordinates in Tadjo’s consideration of the kidnapping and murder of a group of eco-tourists who were tracking gorillas in Bwindi Impenetrable Forest in Uganda, 25 kilometres north of the Virunga Mountains in which Rwanda’s Parc National des Volcans is situated. During the two journeys she makes into Rwanda, Tadjo contemplates the international lure of mountain gorillas in the context of regional instability. During her first journey, Tadjo notes: “[t]he tourists murdered in Uganda are still making headline news […]. Eight foreigners, including an American couple, have been murdered in the Ugandan jungle by, according to informed sources, Hutu rebels” (2002: 7). Here, Tadjo indicates the uneven contouring of international concern: how certain narratives of suffering accrue currency while others are neglected. During her second flight into Rwanda, Tadjo meets an American primate researcher making her “sixth trip” into Rwanda to attend “[p]ress conferences, negotiations, discussions” (2002: 83).

By installing an account of the preservationist’s multiple returns to Rwanda — Tadjo makes two journeys while others are unable to return — Tadjo implicitly questions where we place our humanity: our human and material resources, in the aftermath of trauma. In a sleight of hand referring to the bureaucracy surrounding ecological research and tourism — “if you want to see the silverbacks there are humans to be dealt with first” (2002: 83) — she covertly criticises how certain agencies extend and delimit compassion, investing cash in gorilla conservation and research rather than in sustainable communities. In doing so, Tadjo carves out a space for ecocritical ethics in a text on genocide. In post-genocide Rwanda “[r]esearch activity is being resumed. The National Park has opened its doors to the public. The country needs money, foreign exchange” (2002: 83). Tadjo introduces into this ecological economy an hermeneutics of caution, attentive to the human exigencies that are neglected when we pursue a “melancholy nature”: itself the subject of a commodified mourning expressed through “eco-tourist pilgrimages to endangered places” (Mortimer-Sandilands, 2010: 333).

When Tadjo notes that “[a]s far as the authorities are concerned everything is back to normal. The chain of volcanoes is peaceful once more” (2002: 83), she indicates the space between official consensus and other dimensions of loss. Tadjo also responds ambivalently to the official dispensation of mourning in post-genocide Rwanda, which converts rural massacre sites into state-sanctioned memorials and makes a commodified mourning available to international visitors. The value of these sites inheres in the level of authenticity they project: at Ntarama Church “[s]omeone cries, ‘You shouldn’t have cleaned the blood off, you can hardly see anything anymore!”’ (2002: 15). This bears out a comparison with the artificial scene of witnessing available to ecotourists, who wish to “get close to [the gorillas and] watch them in the splendour of their freedom” (2002: 82). Tadjo comments that the memorial is a “death laid bare” — a presentation for consumption of the disintegrating “bones of skeleton-corpses” and the “horror of sullied earth” (2002: 12). What Sara Guyer terms the “nonanthropomorphising style of commemoration” (qtd. in Meierhenrich, 2011: 289) at rural massacre sites has been “enormously successful as far as marketing the genocide is concerned” (Meierhenrich, 2011: 289). As such, rural sites of “humanitarian mourning” and sites of ecotourist pilgrimage might be said to invoke structurally similar “ecologies of looking” (Nixon, 2011a: 176). Rob Nixon uses this phrase to refer to “the interconnected webs of looking and being seen in a context where the idea of the natural predominates” (2011a: 182). This idea of the natural is, in both instances, an aestheticised vision of something “untouched” — whether “red brick stained with purplish drips” (Tadjo, 2002: 15), remains that are no longer recognisably human, or “pristine” nature — but that is nonetheless fetishised in relation to anthropogenic annihilation.

For Mortimer-Sandilands, our engagements with environmental loss cannot prompt a “criticism of the relationships that produced the loss in the first place” because they occur “within the confines of a society that cannot acknowledge non-human beings, natural environments and ecological processes as appropriate objects for genuine grief” (Mortimer-Sandilands, 2010: 333, 337). Like an engagement with “melancholy nature”, the reified presentation and consumption of Rwanda’s dead — within a symbolic economy that occludes multiple human exigencies — pushes the spectator beyond a temporal frame that can foster critical questions: specifically, questions about post-genocide governance and the legitimacy of the RPF government. Jens Meierhenrich suggests that state-sanctioned memorialisation in Rwanda can be read in “the context of state-building” and the modes of “spatial control” that the RPF government has, more recently, been seeking to popularise in the countryside (2011: 285). These include ambitious agrarian reforms that prohibit vernacular cultivation techniques in favour of regional monocropping, and a coercive villagisation programme designed to replace the traditional residence pattern of scattered homesteads as a matter of national security and land rationalisation (Newbury, 2011; Ansoms, 2011). The agricultural projects run in Rwanda’s prisons, overcrowded after genocide, also lie within the agro-ecology of state space. At Rilissa Prison, where “[s]orghum fields mark the prison grounds” (Tadjo, 2002: 96) and prisoners till the fields, Tadjo suggests that agro-ecological beauty de-naturalises the “horror of sullied earth” (2002: 12): “[g]reen shoots create abstract art on the black earth” (2002: 96). Although “the regularity of furrows suggests there will be good crops” (2002: 97), these agricultural enclaves are not being aligned with land rationalisation but with mourning. Crucially, I suggest, it is not only through an association with agriculture but also in traction with the non-human that Tadjo is able to write the prisoners, dehumanised by their crimes during genocide, in new and dignifying ways. She writes: “[i]n the growing darkness, the pink trail of their uniforms snakes through the tall grass” (2002: 97, emphasis added). While non-anthropomorphising, the snaking formation of the prisoners is dynamic: it suggests an inevitable moving-forward. Similarly, at the rural memorial, the dead are neither recognisably human, nor recognisably animal — but are still, crucially, alive-in-spirit: “these dead are screaming still” (2002: 12).

Derrida suggests that when we think about the gaze of the other, we should not limit ourselves to the human other: that the gaze of the animal has a peculiarly ethical or moral function (2008: 381). The fact that we are intent upon jealously cordoning off qualities we consider proper to man, means that we miss that which “the gaze called animal offers” to our sights, which is “the abyssal limit of the human” (Derrida, 2008: 383, 381). We find in Tadjo’s text repeated inscriptions of an alterity suspended on the threshold of human life. The enigmatic presence of that which is beyond the human provokes her questions: “[d]o the great apes know what happened at the foot of the mountains? Were they aware of the carnage, did they sense death as it spread across the territory?” (2002: 83); “Driver ants criss-cross the red earth. What do they remember of the genocide?” (2002: 13); “Did the ancestors know the crime of genocide?” (2002: 97). These questions indicate foreclosed sites, hollowed-out spaces that provide the possibility for provisional explanations, while remaining outside of explanation themselves. These liminal sites of being, both the animal (the apes) and the transcendent (the ancestors), exist in different states of transport. However, Tadjo implies, the non-human gaze can offer an ethical structure for mourning, initiating translation across incommensurable zones of experience. This can help the living to address their need to “bear witness to the cruelty that has been inflicted upon them as well as the suffering of those who are dead” (2002: 97), and produce an eco-critical ethics which is not constructed through violent segregations of human and non-human difference.