ABSTRACT
In a situation where memorial sites, unofficial and official, not only display artificial or non-human material artefacts of the genocidal violence, but also the actual victims’ remains, genocide survivors have been disagreeing on whether the remains of the victims should be buried with dignity or displayed as a warning. Along with the trials of genocide perpetrators, memorials and memorial policies on how to depict the genocide in Rwanda are fraught issues, but the question of ‘proper’ memorials has come to embody the aftermath of the genocide and the difficulties concerning the political, legal and economic reorganisation of Rwandan society (on the intricacies of reconstruction see Prunier 1997). At the heart of this question lies the material fact of the victims’ remains. With these remains the places where they lie gain importance. Memorials to the dead negotiate the relationship between corpses and their places. Memorials are institutions that aim to govern and determine, for an indefinite time, the meanings and understandings of the events they memorialise. As materialised understandings, this field of representation helps to examine the move from real event into its representational constructions.
