The structure of civil war narratives

Abstract The Rwandan writer, Scholastique Mukasonga chronicles her eye-witness account of Rwandan civil war and genocide; her two novels are part of literary attempts to historicize ethnic collective trauma and memory, but they end up traumatizing national history itself and deconstructing Eurocentric representations. Her works are popularly read as autobiographies and could be mapped under trauma studies. However, this study intends to read these works as autoethnographical texts which this hyphenated writer uses to dismantle conventional boundaries of linguistic morpho-syntax of French, to deconstruct European historical constructions and to contest Eurocentric epistemologies that gave rise to the literary cartography of the Other world. This Eurocentrism produces markers of post/colonial idioms such as “civilized/primitive” and “modern/traditional” as means of justifying the essence of empires. Mukasonga’s account opens our eyes to Rwandan indigenous art, science, medicine and society; therefore, it contests the ontology of European civilization. Although her novels are predominantly written in French, Mukasonga uses her native dialect of Kinyarwanda to unveil age-long Rwandan [African] civilization, thus forcing her European readership to see the “lilies in the mires”.

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A War of Their Own: Three Novels about the Lebanese Civil War Written by Women

Al-Raida Journal ◽

10.32380/alrj.v0i0.188 ◽

1970 ◽

pp. 76-83

Author(s):

Dalila Mahdawi

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

Middle East ◽

War Literature ◽

Lebanese Civil War ◽

War Narratives

Women have historically been excluded from war literature. Recently, however, women, including those in the Middle East, have begun to recount the stories of war and create alternatives to time-honoured masculinized war narratives. Their articulation of their experiences is having a dramatic impact on perceptions of conflict, sexuality, and society.

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Gender in Narrative Memory: The Example of Civil War Narratives in Tajikistan

Ab Imperio ◽

10.1353/imp.2012.0089 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 2012 (3) ◽

pp. 279-307 ◽

Cited By ~ 4

Author(s):

Sophie Roche

Keyword(s):

Civil War ◽

War Narratives

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Persecution in Igbo-Nigerian Civil-War Narratives

Matatu ◽

10.1163/18757421-04902001 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 49 (2) ◽

pp. 241-259

Author(s):

Ignatius Chukwumah ◽

Cassandra Ifeoma Nebeife

Keyword(s):

Domestic Violence ◽

Short Stories ◽

Civil War ◽

Political Instability ◽

Early Years ◽

War Narratives ◽

Nigerian Civil War

Abstract Sociopolitical phenomena such as corruption, political instability, (domestic) violence, cultural fragmentation, and the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) have been central themes of Nigerian narratives. Important as these are, they tend to touch on the periphery of the major issue at stake, which is the vector of persecution underlying the Nigerian tradition in general and in modern Igbo Nigerian narratives in particular, novels and short stories written in English which capture, wholly or in part, the Igbo cosmology and experience in their discursive formations. The present study of such modern Igbo Nigerian narratives as Okpewho’s The Last Duty (1976), Iyayi’s Heroes (1986), Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun (2007), and other novels and short stories applies René Girard’s theory of the pharmakos (Greek for scapegoat) to this background of persecution, particularly as it subtends the condition of the Igbo in postcolonial Nigeria in the early years of independence.

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