Affective travel: Terror and the human rights narrative in Véronique Tadjo's the Shadow of Imana

Abstract

Travel writing, this paper argues, is linked to human rights discourse because it constructs genocidal spaces through an ethnography of mourning within its narrative of witnessing, the creation of new contact zones of suffering and violation, and generating an affective literacy about the world as constituted by genocidal spaces. It examines Véronique Tadjo's The Shadow of Imana, a travel narrative about Rwanda, for this purpose. Beginning with the assumption that human rights demand a narrative, it explores two major components of Tadjo's work. It is proposed here that Rwanda is constructed as a 'genocidal space' because it is a space of human rights violation. The first part of the paper deals with Tadjo's 'narrative of witnessing'. This 'narrative' is generated through two modes: the semi-ethnographic 'observation' mode and the deeply subjective. The narrative also constructs an ethnography of mourning through representation of 'sites of mourning'. Further, it also enacts individual stories of terror. It is in this last that the individual subject emerges-and the individual, as Michael Ignatieff and others have argued, is the locus of human rights. The second part of the paper develops the idea of 'affective geographies'. Adapting the notion of 'contact zones' from M L Pratt, it argues that the emergence of 'new' contact zones is built on the recognition of suffering. This 'contact zone' is one where Tadjo encounters violations, deprivation, death and mourning. By folding the singularity of suffering terror into something larger (an ethnography), Tadjo's travel narrative enables the creation of an entire archive of feelings, and this is the affective geography of the world. By widening our knowledge of suffering about the world, travel writing creates an 'affective literacy'. This 'affective literacy' induced by narratives such as Tadjo's, is the source of the discourse of human rights. © 2009 IUP. All Rights Reserved.