One wonders, upon picking up Becoming Human Again: An Oral History of the Rwanda Genocide against the Tutsi, what yet another oral history of the genocide against the Tutsi can offer beyond the magnificent existing accounts by Erin Jessee, Jean Hatzfeld, and Anne Aghion.Footnote 1 The answer is, not much.
In attempting to differentiate itself from other oral histories on Rwanda, Becoming Human Again claims a ‘very holistic’ approach, by which the authors simply mean that they address multiple topics. Ironically, the outcome is that not one of these topics is treated holistically. Despite the book's impressive data set — it draws from 260 interviews conducted over 15 years — each topic is addressed as its own case study, without meaningful contextualization within the fields of Rwanda studies or genocide, trauma, memory, and reconciliation studies more broadly. The authors’ conclusions thus sound more like personal reflections than the sort of critical interventions one expects from the University of California Press.
Structured in standard chronological sequence, the book begins with a basic literature review of the causes of the genocide against the Tutsi. The review cites the usual sources without adding any new commentary, thereby missing an opportunity to utilize oral history as a lens into Rwandan interpretations of the causes of genocide, as Jessee's work has shown that oral history is uniquely poised to do. The remainder of the book is divided into two sections: the first on the experiences of women and children during the genocide; the second on healing in the aftermath of genocide. Both sections contain valuable raw data in the testimonies quoted. However, readers are left with little interpretive payoff after getting through such harrowing material. In a chapter on trauma, for instance, the text relies on a cursory definition of post-traumatic stress disorder from the American Psychiatric Association instead of engaging the robust research that exists on trauma within genocide and memory studies.Footnote 2 Similarly, the case study of a grassroots healing community that gives the book its restorative slant lacks contextualization with other institutions in Rwanda working to support survivors; it comes across, therefore, as a single example and nothing more.Footnote 3
The uncritical praxis of the text's content also plagues its form. Becoming Human Again tries to be formally holistic by blending oral history scholarship with memoir, but it doesn't do either one well. This is not an inevitable consequence of genre blending. As works such as Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route demonstrate, autoethnography can strengthen rather than detract from the searing material of scholarship on atrocity's aftermath.Footnote 4 But the emotional tenor of the Miller family's self-referencing sounds consistently off-key. In describing a visit with one of their interview subjects to a latrine where the ‘decapitated head of one of her daughters’ had been found, the authors conclude: ‘Collecting ourselves after these rather dramatic encounters, we crossed the road and made our way up another hill’ (5). The colloquially diminutive ‘rather dramatic encounters’ cheapens the scene; it reads as a fumbling misuse of autoethnography. If the authors do not possess language up to the task of writing their experience, they could have said just that, or alternatively excised their presence altogether, as both Aghion and Hatzfeld do in their representations of Rwanda to genuinely dramatic effect.Footnote 5
This is not to say that the Millers come across as self-promoting or as disrespectful to their subjects. To the contrary, they consistently express admiration, commitment, and even love for the Rwandan people. But that is part of the book's problem. The Miller's self-described ‘love affair’ with Rwanda positions love rather than intellectual inquiry as the rationale for their project. Consequently, the meaning of key concepts such as ‘human’ are universalized in a soupy mix that includes the Millers themselves. The preface proudly admits as much:
While we chronical [sic] in this book the process of survivors regaining their humanity after the genocide, it is also true that after every trip to Rwanda, we felt more truly human. The superficial elements of life had been stripped away. The rudimentary fact of living interdependent lives searching for our common humanity had become primary (xi).
An academic working on genocide should know better than to collapse the categories of a survivor's healing process (the origins of the phrase ‘becoming human again’) and the authors’ research process, even if both of those processes occurred simultaneously. Beyond evacuating the concept of ‘becoming human’ from historically specific meaning, the preface activates longstanding stereotypes about the African continent enabling Westerners to ‘shed the superficial’ and to ‘get in touch with their basic humanity’. And while this framing does not persist explicitly throughout the entire monograph, it reemerges often enough that one can never be quite sure if the authors are basing a claim on reasoned interpretation or personal feeling. Through its ‘holistic’ coverage and form, Becoming Human Again sidesteps the expectations of both oral history and autoethnography, leaving its subjects’ histories without the depth of reflection they so richly deserve.
