RW-94: Four perspectives on the same story
Detailing from Page 18, Chapter 2 RW-94: Reflections on Rwanda
The approach Christian and I took to the story of Rwanda from 1994 to the present was inspired by Rashomon, the 1950s film describing a rape and murder via four differing perspectives. The viewer gets twisted in the trauma through the lenses of the varied witnesses.
The movie put my pulse on Christian’s character of voice and his pacing. He is a conscientiously complex all-New York and now-Norway thought-wise personality. He habitually mixes his living, breathing and teaching in Michigan with long passages across international borders as a scholar. Both macro and micro ideas permeate his considerations.
His writing style is a kind of deliberate improvisation; a song vividly terse in memorable characterization and observation. His mixes diary with theoretical treatise. I thought his writings were perfect for comic interpretation. Comics provided ample opportunities for he, glamorous aesthete, to fluidly meander as a narrative guide.
Detailing Page 1, Chapter 1, RW-94: Reflections on Rwanda
We open our unique collaborative voyage in Chapter 1, confidently as “Western” characters dropping within the African country like Christian did. No sense in being anything but what we are. These start the travelogue sections: the sections where Christian is his “most comfortable self.” He speaks from the heart and he starts us at the heart of his journey… Kigali, Rwanda, in 2001. This is where he dives in to the study of what happened in 1994. We want to show where the research came from and Christian’s personal process of studying the conflict. So these sections are hand-drawn, with an effect of unease and confusion in finding one’s place in a situation where something terrible happened and few are willing to discuss it.
Detailing from Page 10, Chapter 1, RW-94: Reflections on Rwanda
In the background of the travelogue is a standard story: the story that has been largely adopted by the world as to what happened in 1994. These are the teaching sections, where Christian steps out of his street clothes and takes on his role as a conflict scholar to relay the historical and scientific facts needed to understand we knew about the 1994 conflict and what we learn later. I usually show him as emphatic or physically interactive with an audience.
Page 15, Chapter 2 RW-94: Reflections on Rwanda
We also want to include primary evidence: the documents that are foundational to the research Christian did there and the conclusions drawn about what happened. He has a small archive he aims to dive into and show raw in the novel—or with modest, artistic design alteration (as above).
I drew inspiration for this from Maus, Meta-Maus, and Belonging/Heimat: packaging raw materials, papers, and documents is a kind of strategy that has been used before. Christian’s years as helper to the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda helps us weave a more complex and nuanced picture of the 1994 conflict than we’ve come to expect. Including these documents directly in the comic establishes authenticity and realism to the storytelling, as well as presenting yet another perspective—the records—of the conflict.
Page 16, Chapter 2 RW-94:Reflections on Rwanda
Finally, there are witness testimonies. These are words taken directly, verbatim, from the ICTR court documents that detail what victims experienced in 1994, in their own words. We tell a fraction of the stories that exist. But they highlight lived experience and the multiple layers of interpretation that enter into social scientific research and understanding.
To make these sections feel like a different experience than Christian’s travelogue and research experiences, we chose a bold art medium that comic artists rarely use: collage.
More on why we chose collage next week…
