Memory and justice

This child’s drawing showing the traumatic representation of killings, highlights the naked violence of the massacres in Rwanda. The Tutsi children, mostly orphans and witnesses of atrocities, were deeply marked by their experience.
Many of them have nevertheless rebuilt themselves and been able to find their place in society by pursuing studies, practicing a profession and starting a family.
This moral force or rather this ability to overcome the trauma that is referred to as resilience highlights the personal work these people have undertaken on their own representations of their wounds.

The resilience that allows us to master and distance what is happening to us is a process that is clearly helped by speech, drawing, and writing. Artistic practice also plays a major role in the ability to evolve traumatic memory and free oneself from the past.