ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the question of memories of return in “post-conflict” situations. The two texts under study consist of Criba (Sieve) (2013) by Julián Pérez Huarancca and Nuages sur Bukavu: carnet d’un retour au pays natal (Clouds over Bukavu: Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) (2007) by Charles Djungu-Simba. Both texts are temporally removed from the actuality of violence and focus on the conception and perception of a “post-conflict” reconstruction of individuality and spatiality. Unlike the texts discussed in the previous chapter, these novels narrate the past through survivors’ memories. The violent event is not represented in its present, but rather as an act of re-visualising, re-imagining and re-thinking the past. The texts provide critical in-roads into the politics and poetics of memory at the national level but most notably at the level of individual psychobiography.
