“You would not add to my suffering if you knew what I have seen”: Holocaust Testimony and Contemporary African Trauma Literature

The aim of this article is to explore possible correlations between literature of the Holocaust, widely defined, and recent works about genocide, mass-murder, and atrocity in Africa. It will focus on a number of texts that concern both the Rwandan genocide (Gil Courtemanche's novel/memoir A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali [2003] and Paul Rusesabagina's memoir An Ordinary Man [2006]) and the victims of the numerous conflicts on the continent (Uzodinma Iweala's Beasts of No Nation [2005], Dave Eggers's What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng [2006], and Ismael Beah's A Long Way Gone [2007]). However, as both the initial hypothetical linkage and the object of discussion (African trauma literature) are problematic concepts, I will offer an introductory account of how and why this might be a fruitful comparison. The Holocaust and the Postcolonial In his study of the discourse of the Third Reich, Victor Klemperer writes that Strafexpedition [punitive expedition] is the first term which I recognised as being specifically National Socialist.... For me the word Strafexpedition was the embodiment of brutal arrogance and contempt for people who are in any way different, it sounded so colonial, you could see the encircled Negro village, you could hear the cracking of the hippopotamus whip. Later, but unfortunately not for very long, this memory had something comforting about it despite all the bitterness. "A mild dose of castor oil." (43) In this fragment, two things become proleptically clear for the future understanding of the Holocaust and twentieth-century history. The first--"it sounded so colonial"--is the complex interweaving between the discourses of empire and colonialism on the one hand and the discourses of the Third Reich and the Holocaust on the other. The second--"A mild dose ..."--is the immediate diminution of these complex interweaving histories. Working though what Dirk Moses calls "conceptual blockages" as well as issues of prejudice and layers of collective memory, historians, cultural thinkers, and philosophers are now turning with more interest to exploring the complex and contentious relationship between the Holocaust, colonialism, and genocide; and they are finding this relationship more than "a mild dose.'" Mark Mazower, for example, notes how Hitler's "imagination was caught by the example of the British in India. Their model of imperial rule, such as he conceived it, struck him as admirable ... for him the Ukraine was 'that new Indian Empire': the Eastern Front would become Germany's North-West frontier" (150). Yet those who develop these historiographical congruencies tread a delicate path. As Jurgen Zimmerer and others point out, they should try to avoid using the Holocaust as a paradigm or "benchmark" for genocide and atrocity: yet, as Moses's account of recent historical research suggests, this is very hard. He cites historians of the Armenian and Cambodian genocides who use the Holocaust as a "heuristic device" and others who develop concepts of "cumulative radicalization," "race branding" ("The Holocaust" 547-49), and more diffuse and complex links between violence, modernity, and state building, all drawing from the study of the Holocaust. Other approaches trace the impact of colonial policy, or wider European imperial discourses, on the development of the genocidal operations of the Reich. And others, too, explore contrasts between different genocides. Despite the desire not to let a small number of examples from Europe, taken without context, set the agenda, the pull of the Holocaust is sometimes simply too strong. Those making these comparisons must also avoid the opposite risk of collapsing the Holocaust into the history of colonialism contra Aime Cesaire's famous comment on Nazism: "the people of Europe tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them ... because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples" (14). …