ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on novels that capture recent outbursts of violence in the Congo and Peru through a close and critical study of Óscar Cochaldo’s Rosa Cuchillo (2009) and Pius Ngandu Nkashama’s En suivant le sentier sous les palmiers (Following the Path Underneath the Palm Trees) (2009). Cochaldo’s text is analysed as an Andean perspectival representation of the gruesome experiences of the insurgency carried out by the radical Maoist guerrilla group, the Shining Path, from 1980 to 2000. With regard to the Congo, Pius Ngandu Nkashama’s novel captures the sordid atrocities of the Congolese civil wars from 1996 to the first decade of the 21st century. In both texts, the analysis focuses on witnessing and how it frames the actual realities of pain and suffering unleashed by war within culturally specific but universalisable experiences. The act of witnessing becomes a defining mediation that unsettles the readers’ perception as the witnessed events unmake the witnesses in the process, leaving the reader/witness with refracted insights into the haunting effects of the pity that war distils.
