Writing the landscape: a poetic detour to address genocide in Rwanda

The Maison Suger is pleased to invite you to the seminar Writing the landscape: a poetic detour to address genocide in Rwanda. The researchers in residence, Vanessa Ferreira Vieira and Rosanne Bezerra de Araújo, will present their research.

Vanessa Ferreira Vieira is a doctoral student in Foreign Languages and Translation (PPG-LETRA) at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Her thesis focuses on the autobiographical works of Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga. She holds a master's degree in Literature Studies, and in 2020 defended her dissertation entitled Autobiografia de meu pai: La place, by Annie Ernaux, at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, in the state of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). French-language literature is one area of her research, focusing on writings of the self in relation to social and historical issues.

Rosanne Bezerra de Araújo has been a professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Natal, Brazil, since 2009. She teaches in the Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures and in the Postgraduate Studies Program in Language and Literature, where she was coordinator from 2022 to 2023. Her areas of interest are Brazilian literature, comparative literature, critical theories and foreign language teaching and learning. She obtained her PhD in Letters at the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB) with a year of research in the UK (2007-2008) at the University of Nottingham, she published her thesis - Niilismo heroico em Samuel Beckett e Hilda Hilst: fim e recomeço da narrativa (2012).Her teaching and research experience focuses on the novelistic genre (from the birth of the English novel in the eighteenth century to contemporary times). She also studies the Theater of the Absurd, in particular Beckett's theater, and has been a member of the Beckett Studies Group at the University of São Paulo (USP) since 2011.

The project

"Is it possible to imagine a new world to inhabit based on a scenario of extermination? Fifty years after her birth, the Franco-Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga published her first book, Inyenzi ou les Cafards (2006), an autobiographical account focusing on the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. From there, other works on the same theme were published by the author, revealing numerous refuges, places where people lived whose sole purpose was to escape death. The transmission of painful memories, both individual and collective, reveals a particular style of writing in Mukasonga, sliding towards the poetic, always with an emphasis on the landscapes that surround the characters. According to the West Indian writer Édouard Glissant, a new way of thinking about the world is possible, in a dynamic of perception of otherness and a change in the imaginary of humanities. The aim of this research is therefore to analyze whether these places woven into the universe of poetic writing constitute a possible way of deconstructing thoughts of inhospitality, despair and fear, based on Glissant's philosophy."