ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the responsibility of the humanist scholar to the stipulations of the void. Reflecting on Ta Nehisi Coates’ important testimony, Between the World and Me, alongside the Rwandan genocide, it seizes upon Coates’s argument that voids in writing signify “the defining feature of being drafted into the black race [which] is the inescapable robbery of time.” This allows the essay to argue that the void is, quite literally, the empty space of erasure and extermination – of missing persons, destroyed things, hidden histories, lost records, expropriated lands, murdered minorities. The humanist must graphically evoke such emptiness and erasure without filling these absences while remaining wary of every dream and nation. Amongst the dreams the essay is especially chary of are those that seek justice as adjudication. Without quite endorsing them as an alternative, it points instead to the work of gacaca or grass-mat courts in Rwanda, which have practiced a politics of reconciliation amongst neighbours in small tight-knit communities. Involved in practices such as the gacaca is a sustained sense of the value of the commonplace, of the ordinariness of things. The destruction of the ordinary plumbs the depths of evil; at the same time, the survival of the ordinary provides a measure of moral and social recovery.
