Representation of an African Disaster in Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali
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By contrasting the controversial picture of a man falling from the World Trade Center on the day of the 9/11 attacks—which was eventually banned from public press—with the faces and bodies of non-Western (particularly African) victims that are openly exposed by the Western media, Susan Sontag problematizes the imperialist gaze and the unequal power dynamics embedded in circulating and consuming the representation of a historical event that occurred outside the West. She criticizes that such representations transform the pain of the African Other into shocking imagery and cliché for Western audiences, reproducing pre-existing and widely circulated stereotypes of Africa—a dark, primitive place of tribal conflicts, inhuman violence and genocides, stricken with poverty and AIDS. These stereotypes are perpetuated in literary texts. Gil Courtemanche’s novel, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (2000), which depicts one of the most violent human-made disasters in the twentieth century, is a notable example of the aforementioned issues in representing a historical event in the context of an African tragedy. Analyzing how Courtemanche adapts the 1994 Rwandan genocide into a well-structured love story between Bernard Valcourt—a Quebeciois journalist—and Gentille, a Tutsi girl, I examine how the novel represents the genocide as an exotic African event and reproduces stereotypes about Africa. I also reveal the imperialist discourse underlying Courtemanche’s representation of his narrator as a Western humanitarian and problematize how the novel silences the voices of the Rwandan people.
Abstract
By contrasting the controversial picture of a man falling from the World Trade Center on the day of the 9/11 attacks—which was eventually banned from public press—with the faces and bodies of non-Western (particularly African) victims that are openly exposed by the Western media, Susan Sontag problematizes the imperialist gaze and the unequal power dynamics embedded in circulating and consuming the representation of a historical event that occurred outside the West. She criticizes that such representations transform the pain of the African Other into shocking imagery and cliché for Western audiences, reproducing pre-existing and widely circulated stereotypes of Africa—a dark, primitive place of tribal conflicts, inhuman violence and genocides, stricken with poverty and AIDS. These stereotypes are perpetuated in literary texts. Gil Courtemanche’s novel, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (2000), which depicts one of the most violent human-made disasters in the twentieth century, is a notable example of the aforementioned issues in representing a historical event in the context of an African tragedy. Analyzing how Courtemanche adapts the 1994 Rwandan genocide into a well-structured love story between Bernard Valcourt—a Quebeciois journalist—and Gentille, a Tutsi girl, I examine how the novel represents the genocide as an exotic African event and reproduces stereotypes about Africa. I also reveal the imperialist discourse underlying Courtemanche’s representation of his narrator as a Western humanitarian and problematize how the novel silences the voices of the Rwandan people.
참고문헌 (20)
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