ABSTRACT
The Kigali Genocide Memorial Museum is a symbolic cultural outgrowth of the genocide of 1994, a formal instance of public memory work. It is also a political response that creates and promotes an authoritative national history of the genocide. The narrative it creates through its formal artifacts and projections seems coherent: the genocide had a beginning, a middle, and an end. The memorial presents a univocal story of the genocide.
This chapter argues, however, that the coherence projected by monumental memorials, such as the one in Kigali, contains moments of rupture and elision. One such element of the formal construction of the national memorial is the open grave on the grounds outside the museum. The chapter focuses on the interplay between the open grave and other formal elements of the monumental memorial. The chapter uses an aesthetic methodology to critique this interplay to discover how monumental memorials ratify certain ways of remembering, certain memories, and elide or suppress aspects of Rwanda's fraught and controversial politics and history. The chapter argues that this work of discovery is important, to shift the burden of memory from the monument and back to the observer.
