Oct 28, 2016 | 1:10 PM - 2:40 PM | Loft 2

Ms. Ragne Raceviciute, Ph.D.

“Tied in Knots to the Past”: War and Trauma in Silko and Boyden

Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Ceremony” and Joseph Boyden’s “Three Day Road” present a search for historical and poetic truth through stories of post-war trauma and survival. The parallels between the novels are traced from a post-colonial perspective. This article focuses on the convergence of three “manufactured realities”: the realities of World War I and World War II, the colonial realities of Aboriginal peoples in the 20th century United States and Canada, and the cultural realities of the Laguna and the Cree specifically.

The two novels make a similar attempt to present a revision of glorified war narratives and to juxtapose the truth of war/violence/trauma to a spiritual truth that originates in Aboriginal traditions. Silko’s “Ceremony”, a story of a Laguna man coming back from WWII, provides a valuable counterpoint to “Three Day Road” as an alternative narrative that rejects the conventions of the novelistic form by including mythology and poetry. Boyden’s novel, written nearly 30 years later, focuses on Cree soldiers during and after WWI; it adopts a more traditional narrative form switching between two first person narrators.

The historical truth of Aboriginal soldiers fighting in the two world wars is the starting point for the exploration of trauma in the two novels. Of interest are the specific historical events and realities Silko and Boyden choose to focus on in each narrative. In order to talk about subaltern subjectivity in an international war context, Silko affirms the principle of connection (between the protagonist and humanity), while Boyden relies on disconnection and alienation. The differences between the two narratives provide for a worthwhile reflection on global colonial legacies and “us-against-them” ideologies.

Ms. Alison MacAulay, B.A. Hons.

Commemorating Genocide: History, Memory, and Victimhood in Rwandan Cinema

After the events of 1994, the Rwandan government launched a massive project of reconciliation. A significant part of this process was the elimination of Hutu and Tutsi as categories of political and social identification. The government has since replaced these identities with ones centered on an individual’s relationship to the genocide – whether it be as a victim or survivor, a perpetrator, a bystander, or as someone who was not in Rwanda at that time. Government initiatives such as the gacaca trials, the ingando reeducation camps, and the creation of a series of national genocide memorial sites have reified these new identities.

 Connected to the national process of reconciliation, whether intentional or not, is the rising success of the Rwandan film industry. Looking at the 2014 Rwandan International Film Festival as a particular historical moment, as it commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the genocide and the tenth anniversary of the festival, my paper focuses on the various articulations of victimhood in Rwandan film, and the connections between these narratives and older expressions of Rwandan identity and history. Used in conjunction with pre-genocide mythologies, histories and public articulations of identity (such as radio or newspapers sources), I demonstrate how film acts both as a form of testimony, as witness to an event riddled with complications connected to trauma and memory, and as a new addition in a long trajectory of Rwandan conceptions of the past. The curated collection of films screened at the 2014 festival, aptly named ‘Reflection’, demonstrates a community of Rwandans who are now visually reconstructing historical narratives, and adding to a national archive of memory. This paper argues that Rwandan filmmakers are not only a part of the process of reconciliation, but are also actively taking part in the writing (or re-writing) of their country’s history.

Dr. Kit Ying Lye, Doctorate (awaiting conferment)

Writing the Artistic Testimony: Resisting a Fetishized Remembrance of the Khmer Rouge

The ongoing (though not progressive) Khmer Rouge tribunal and the active campaigning of war remembrance by diasporic Cambodian writers and artists have demanded a re-assessment of the Khmer Rouge period of Cambodia from 1975-1979. In addition, the intentional publication of testimonies and historical fiction on anniversaries that mark the genocide in Cambodia also ensure that the nation’s tragic past remains in the public consciousness.

Among the handful of testimonies and historical fiction written in English, Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields complied by Dith Pran, Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father, and Chanrithy Him’s When Broken Glass Floats have received critical attention for their representations of the Khmer Rouge period and genocide. These testimonies attempt to tell what happened between April 1975 and January 1979, and to grant insights into the remembrance of Cambodia’s traumatic history. As with most testimonies, these stories often have dark and depressing (not to mention, unimaginative) titles such as “Memoir of a Child’s Nightmare,” and “The Dark Years of my Life,” with a focus on the hardship of starvation, fear, and survival, mostly through realistic portrayals and detailed descriptions of the gory executions rampantly carried out during the period. These texts define themselves, and are often regarded by fellow Cambodian scholars as uncontested testimonies to the Khmer Rouge period and genocide, thus claiming an authority over the remembrance of this specific period in Cambodian history.

Most of these testimonies appeal to Cambodian scholars because the stories are “accurate” and “authentic” to the actual experiences of the Cambodians. The emphasis on responsibility and truth-telling clearly indicates a privileging of an uncontested accuracy over artistic and creative representations in testimonies concerned with war and genocide. This tension between immediate truth telling and artistic retelling is thus the main concern in this chapter. For, as the discussion will show, Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012) posits that the aesthetics of the written testimony need not be sacrificed for accurate truth-telling, but that the use of a Khmer Buddhist aesthetics enables her readers and her to resist a fetishized memory of the genocide, and seek reconciliation with their traumatic experiences.

Biographies

Dr. Ragne Raceviciute

Ragnė Racevičiūtė studied English language and literature at Vilnius University, Lithuania. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics for her thesis "Metaphorical Motivation of English and Lithuanian Somatic Idioms" in 2002. She taught English at Vilnius University for eight years, and moved to Canada in 1998.

Since 2003, Ragnė has been a member of the English Department faculty at John Abbott College (JAC) in Montreal. She teaches courses on Native Canadian and American literature, magical realism, and poetry. She also teaches courses on Romanticism, Enlightenment, and literary criticism in the Liberal Arts program. In 2010, she completed a project aimed at indigenizing the curriculum at JAC and submitted a report called “Aboriginal issues in the curriculum and awareness of Aboriginal issues at John Abbott College”. Presently she is a participant in a teacher-initiated project “Decolonizing Pedagogies: Unlearning Settler Colonialism and Settler Colonial Logics”.

Publications: Racevičiūtė, Ragnė. “On Compositionality of Idioms.” Kalbotyra, 1998, V. 46(3): 69-79. Print. Racevičiūtė, Ragnė. “Metaphorical Motivation of Lithuanian, English and French Idioms with the Lexeme Mouth.” Kalbotyra, 2002, V. 51(3): 121-131. Print.

Alison MacAulay

Alison MacAulay is currently a History Ph.D. candidate at the University of Toronto in the Department of History. Her time as an intern at the Rwandan Film Festival in 2014 has inspired the majority of her academic research, including her major B.A. Honours thesis and her major M.A. research paper. Alison has also presented her work on Rwandan cinema and history at the University of Westminster, the University of Toronto, and most recently at Cambridge University. Alison hopes to continue her research by looking at questions of 'the archive' in the Rwandan context post-genocide.

Dr. Kit Ying Lye

Kit Ying is currently a lecturer at UniSIM college, SIM University, Singapore. Her dissertation focuses on the use of magical realism in the re-presentation of violence that occurred during the period of the Cold War in Southeast Asia. Her research interests are mainly magical realism, history and its remembrance, postmodernism,postcolonialism, and environmental sustainability in Southeast Asian literature.