In the 1990s, women's writing about war in Africa took a new turn as Yvonne Vera and Calixthe Beyala began to publish texts interweaving explicit sexual descriptions and graphic violence. With their examination of sexual relationships in the context of the Nigerian and Sierra Leonean civil wars, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun and Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love continue this trend. Why is it that female African writers are currently turning to sensuality as a means to explore conflict? This article argues that sex and violence are intricately interwoven and that the examination of sexual pleasure in these novels forms both a language and strategy with which to explore and contest violence against women. In doing so, it draws on theoretical insights about the sexual nature of outsider perspectives on conflict, the political choices involved in describing gender-based violence, and the crucial role of intimacy in representing war and wounding.
Much of the photography and literature published in response to the Rwandan genocide focuses on catastrophic human damage and highly visual manifestations of suffering. This work, whilst essential to documenting the events and the aftermath of the killings, has been in danger of obscuring the individual person, a tendency which is exacerbated by international representations of 'Africa' as a place of violence, illness and death. In Les Blessures du silence, a collection of photographs and testimonial interviews from Rwanda, Alain Kazinierakis and Yolande Mukagasana challenge this pervasive foregrounding of injury by focusing instead on the ongoing emotional suffering of the individual. This article will examine how Kazinierakis's photography interacts with Mukagasana's interviews to provide an unusual contribution to the literature memorialising genocide.
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