Grey Matter (Matière Grise, 2011), directed by Kivu Ruhorahoza, contemplates the effects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide upon the psyche and the social world. It is the first feature-length narrative film directed by a Rwandan about the 1994 genocide, and the only to offer a Rwandan’s rich visual interpretation of its impact. For this alone, Grey Matter holds a critical place within the film library of sub-Saharan Africa. But the film is also an important reflection on how Rwandans imagine, speak of, and visualize the relics of trauma. It traces, in different domains and voices, dynamics of abjection and pain and the ethics of love both in and beyond trauma. This careful attention to the psychosocial dynamics of trauma, loss, and witnessing offers much to contemporary reflections upon African modernity. How is it possible to recuperate what has been lost? How might a Rwandan subject mourn not only the loss of the object per se, but also the loss of a lovable and loved image of herself or himself? What, indeed, is a Rwandan subject within modernity?

The film draws our attention to these questions through its structure. There are three distinct stories, all of which are connected by trauma, and as the film progresses we begin to wonder which events happened and which exist in the minds of the characters. First, there is young Balthazar (Hervé Kimenyi) on his bed conceptualizing the script of a film, “The Cycle of the Cockroach” (Le cycle du cafard). He wants to produce the film in the capital city of Kigali, and he has approached the government for support. But they refuse to finance his film, suggesting instead that what the country needs is work about HIV prevention and domestic violence. No one, the administrator concludes, is interested in your film. Balthazar is not discouraged by the bad news, however, and he continues with plans for filming, telling an actress that the government money will soon be deposited in his account.

This leads to the second part of the film, in which Balthazar’s story takes shape in the portrait of a man, a wartime assassin, who is locked up in an asylum. His violence is focused upon a cockroach in a jar (the term cockroach was used by Hutu extremists to designate Tutsis during the genocide), and his fury against this small creature is fueled by the rhetoric being spouted from the radio in a seductively smooth female voice and the beer being passed through the bars of his cell window. The lines between the individual and the state begin to blur, along with our grasp of reality. Is it possible to consider his psyche without questioning the entire nation? We might return to Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychotherapist who clearly articulated in Peau noire, masques blancs (1952) that in order to treat the psyche of patients during wars, it is important to revisit the entire system that has organized the war. Another key text is Moses and Monotheism (1939), in which Freud conceived of the difficulties of translating from the psyche of the individual to the psyche of the masses as a problem of historical investigation and historical depth. While describing the social conditions of his own writing under Nazi persecution and through his escape into exile, he asked what kind of evidence might support the notion of a social unconscious and the claim that groups and cultures retain unconscious memory traces of their past. As psychoanalytic theory and feminists have eloquently argued, the implications of responses to questions about psychic processes are always political. Enriching Freud’s insight that the interrelations between the psyche and the social may be conceived as a problem of translation, Ruhorahoza problematizes the interrelations between the psychic and the social, suggesting new connections between psychoanalysis and social theory in this specific story of the Rwandan genocide.

In the third and final section, Balthazar concentrates on two siblings, Justine (Ruth Shanel Nierere) and Yvan (Ramadhan Shami Bizimana). These two young people and their family were victims of genocide, and the brother and sister struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder as they try to reconstruct their lives. They are trying to make sense of the loss, but their psychic distress holds them back because every detail reminds them of it and they have internalized the pain. Yvan attempts to protect himself by wearing a helmet like a fortress, but he finds it is also a prison that is impossible to escape. As Julia Kristeva argues in New Maladies of the Soul (1993) and Sense and Nonsense of the Revolt (1996), if the ego ideal (or super-ego in Freudian terms) only punishes us, then we are left with paranoia or masochism—paranoia that we are constantly under the harsh surveillance of the law or masochistic thoughts that we are deserve punishment from the law. Watching Yvan struggle with this paranoia, we are compelled to ask: What are the possibilities for social and psychic life beyond war trauma? How are specific figurations of the psyche and the social implicated in the trauma, and in the opening of vital spaces for free subjectivities? And how might individuals be expected to begin to make sense—to claim and love—their changed subjectivities?

These questions are all the more interesting when we learn that Yvan was not even in the country during the genocide. Although his sister, who was, does not like to recall the events, he reminds her of how his parents were killed. Justine struggles against this—and her brother’s helmet—as she attempts to carry her trauma invisibly. But its presence causes her to move like a zombie, without fullness of her “human essence.” Grey Matter thus contributes to the psychoanalytic study of interrelated forms of trauma by bringing together critical discussion of rape and other sexual abuses. Justine refuses to talk about her rape, and yet she gives sexual favors to the psychiatric doctor who is treating her brother. We also know that their mother was raped before being killed, and through Yvan’s eyes we see a women being raped in their home. The film thus suggests how violence done to women can be manifested in diverse ways, as it proposes two very different topologies of a post-Freudian, post-Lacanian social unconscious.

In the final scene we find Justine locked in a mental institution, her vacant stare trained upon a cockroach in a glass jar. This returns us to the assassin from the second part of the film and also Balthazar’s insistence, in the first, that the film suggest the disturbing ways in which violence is repeated. In a subtle manner, we find new meaning to the material presented in flashbacks. Details—the images of people burning on television, the machete used to cut people in pieces, memories of hunger (e.g., boiling raw avocadoes, etc.)—become events that repeat themselves within the psyche, creating the possibility for more violence. The filmmaker’s insight is powerful, because we find the moments of repetition also become the moments when even everyday objects like avocadoes become dehumanized and tormenting. This excess is the mise-en-scène of tragedy par excellence. The presence of these details means that one is subjected to violence whose origins are beyond one’s individual grasp, but it also engenders a spectacle whose “aesthetic” power increases with one’s increasing awkwardness and helplessness. The violence has not stopped; it surfaces randomly here and there—and it becomes its own aesthetic object—one that repeats itself until its origins are confronted.

At the end of the film we are introduced to a beautiful piece of music performed by a young woman who sings with a voice that seems divine enough to bring the dead back to life. The camera pans backward, and we see the equipment that was used to make the film. This closing attention both to beauty and to artifice raises another set of questions. Can beauty replace the ugliness of war as a kind of social support for psychic space? How can life or existence move into this stance of openness and possibility? Or are there experiences on the edge of the lifeline that preclude any possible artistic representation, and therefore a return on the part of the sufferers to a version of “normality”? Is it futile to hope that for Justine and Yvan there are possibilities for recovery, or even a new or different life? Indeed, we might even ask, if psychoanalysis allows for a unique interpretive access to trauma, does it also reduce social action to psychic processes and psychic experience to social hegemony? In short, Grey Matter opens up readings of trauma and evokes a new ethics of psychic and social depth within African modernity.