Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda

AUTHOR: Stassen, Jean-Philippe

ARTIST: Jean-Philippe Stassen (illustrator)

PUBLISHERS: Dupuis (French); First Second Books (English)

FIRST BOOK PUBLICATION: 2000 (English translation, 2006)

Publication History

Jean-Paul Stassen developed the graphic novel Deogratias based partly on the coverage of the Rwandan genocide and partly on his own love of the country, where he eventually settled with his family. Déogratias was published in French and Dutch by Dupuis and Uitgeverij Dupuis, in 2000. It was later translated to Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish, and the first English publication appeared in 2006. The English version features an introduction by translator Alexis Siegel, who gives an account of the events leading up to the genocide and discusses the shortcomings of the international response. Siegel also includes background information on the political climate and international relations that influenced the development of some of the characters.

Plot

Deogratias was inspired both by the events of 1994 and 1995 that later became known as the Rwandan genocide and the lack of response from the international community, as scenes of ethnic cleansing unfolded on television and in other media. While the horrific images that came out of the area during the genocide were well publicized, world leaders were reluctant to intervene or even to use the term “genocide.” An essentially powerless U.N. peacekeeping force was the only help available for victims.

The graphic novel represents Stassen’s attempt to depict both the victims and the perpetrators of the genocide as fully developed individuals, a response to the images of large-scale suffering disseminated by the media. Deogratias is among a number of graphic novels that examine large-scale violence and genocide and is meant to stand alongside other works about historical events that address young-adult or adult audiences. Deogratias was originally written in French, which is significant partly because of the French government’s tacit involvement in the genocide depicted in the graphic novel. Rwanda was initially colonized by Germany (beginning in the late nineteenth century) and later controlled by Belgium, but France made extensive arms shipments to Rwanda prior to its civil war.

Deogratias depicts the experiences of one man during the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. The main character, Deogratias, is a member of the Hutu majority and is among those Hutu that carried out extensive mass killings of the Tutsi minority during the genocide. The plot oscillates between Deogratias’s experiences in the present and his memories of the time before the genocide. In the present, he is an alcoholic who becomes insane when he cannot find enough to drink to obliterate his memories. Prior to the genocide, he is depicted as an average young man trying to win the affections of two local Tutsi sisters, Benina and Apollinaria, whose mother is forced to prostitute herself so that Benina has the opportunity to go to college. Apollinaria prefers to work at the local church, where Father Prior Stanislaus ministers to the local population. Father Prior Stanislaus and Brother Philip are both committed Catholics who are attempting to do ministry work in the region, but when the genocide begins, they are forced to flee. Whether or not they are able to save any of the local Tutsis as they flee is treated ambiguously in the text. Benina and Deogratias date briefly, and at the beginning of the genocide, he attempts to hide her in his room until she escapes to find her sister and her mother. He ultimately joins the Hutu militia and assists in the rape and slaughter of his neighbors. At the end, he tells Brother Philip, who has returned to Rwanda, that he has murdered all of the other complicit parties through the use of poison.

Characters

•Deogratias, the main character, is a Hutu man and an alcoholic who uses Urwagwa, a liquor, to forget about crimes he perpetrated during the Rwandan genocide. When he cannot get drunk, he is depicted as turning into a dog, remembering moments during the genocide. His flashbacks form the bulk of the dramatic action in the comic.

•Venetia, the mother of Benina and Apollinaria, is a Tutsi woman who fled Rwanda during an earlier period of ethnic strife, hiding in Zaire. She returned to Rwanda and is attempting to get her daughters into college in spite of the ethnic quotas, which limit the number of Tutsi allowed into schools. She works at least partly as a prostitute.

•Apollinaria is Tutsi, the daughter of Venetia and, rumor has it, Father Prior Stanislas. Deogratias is in love with her, but she denies him because he goes to taverns and he is forward with her. She prefers her work in the local church, hoping to gain the opportunity to go to college.

•Benina, the half sister of Apollinaria, is a Tutsi and in love with Deogratias. She works as a translator for the French. Her mother, Venetia, is attempting to send her to college, which is difficult because of ethnic quotas, but she eventually manages it. She becomes involved in politics and is easily angered by the ethnic slurs directed at Tutsis.

•Brother Philip is a heavyset young white priest who works at the church. He arrives in Rwanda at the beginning of the narrative.

•Father Prior Stanislas is the primary caretaker of the church. He previously helped Venetia flee Rwanda during an earlier attack on the Tutsi and apparently had a sexual relationship with her, during which he fathered Apollinaria.

•Augustine, a Twa, has been a friend of Venetia’s since childhood. He is a groundskeeper for the white residents. He is bitter about his circumstances because he trained at a university, but professors’ salaries are lower than those in the service industry.

•Bosco is an acquaintance of Deogratias in the aftermath of the genocide. He provides him with Urwagwa and mythologizes the political climate of Rwanda prior to white colonization.

•Sergeant, a.k.a. the Frenchman, is a white man from France serving as a member of the French postcolonial military contingent tasked with keeping peace in Rwanda. However, he is more interested in promoting the brewing ethnic strife, having sexual relationships with as many Tutsi women as possible, and calling the people of Rwanda “savages.”

•Julius is one of the leaders of the Hutu militia that massacres Tutsi citizens.

Artistic Style

Stassen uses a realistic style. The primary transitions are those between day and night, for which he uses different color palettes: The daytime colors are warm, while the nighttime and interior palettes are cool. Characters and objects are depicted using heavily inked outlines. Individual characters are differentiated partly through facial structure and body type and through skin tone. Deogratias is depicted as a dark-skinned and muscular young man. Benina and Apollinaria are drawn similarly, but Benina is depicted with darker skin than Apollinaria, which is meant to call into question the ethnic divisions around which the plot revolves.

Panels are densely packed on the page, but the minimal color shading lends a sense of spaciousness within panels. Action-to-action and scene-to-scene panel transitions dominate and are particularly effective in smoothly transitioning between present-day scenes and flashbacks. Temporal transitions are marked by visual cues within similarly structured panels, including panels depicting Deogratias as a clean-cut young man followed by panels depicting him as a ragged alcoholic beggar, standing in the same position.

Unlike many autobiographical graphic novels that deal with large-scale violence, Deogratias is careful to avoid fully collapsing the reader into the perspective of any particular character. This is partly because of the historical context of the work—the Rwandan genocide was well publicized as it occurred, but the world stood by and watched. The structure of the artwork is an implicit indictment of the readers’ attempt to access this experience vicariously and to find catharsis through fictionalized works of art based on an actual historical situation.

The artistic style is important partly for its response to the widely disseminated photographs of the genocide, many of which lent the sensation of witness to the viewer but failed to produce an adequate international outcry to stop the violence. Deogratias works partly because it maintains distance between viewer and subject, and, while vicarious access to the experiences depicted is limited, it uses this distance to implicitly indict the viewer.

Themes

The primary thematic elements of Deogratias concern what human beings are capable of becoming. While the flashbacks in the narrative develop a fairly familiar coming-of-age story, this bildungsroman is disrupted by the genocide and Deogratias’s complicity in it. During his development into an adult, Deogratias is concerned with girls and drinking, making him quite recognizable to the average Western reader. However, at the cusp of his adulthood, rather than becoming a man, he becomes a dog; his involvement in the genocide, in terms of both what he has witnessed and what he has done, damage his self-image. This is important not only in its subversion of the coming-of-age narrative but also in its allusion to Art Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1972-1991) and other graphic novels in which human characters are depicted as animals. Deogratias modifies this familiar trope, however, by depicting a physical transformation that takes place during the incursion of traumatic memories—that is, Deogratias becomes a dog only when he cannot find enough alcohol to dull his senses.

Additionally, both the visual and the textual elements of Deogratias question to what extent imaginatively accessing the experiences of victims of genocide is ethical. The connection between the passive reader and the text is made partly through the sympathy the reader develops for the Deogratias character, who is ultimately revealed to be among the perpetrators and not the victims. In addition, the artwork, while rendering violent scenes, never positions the reader within the perspective of victims, effectively closing the reader off from vicarious access. This can be read as an indictment of the international community that watched these events unfold in Rwanda but did nothing about them.

Impact

Deogratias represents a broadening of the politically themed autographs of the late 1990’s and early 2000’s. Works such as Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical Persepolis (2003) and Spiegelman’s biographical Maus used individual experiences to contextualize broader historical events, the Iranian Revolution in the former and the Holocaust in the latter. Both Persepolis and Maus have been used extensively in classrooms and have been widely lauded for their impact on the way readers view distant historical events. By fictionalizing characters and certain events, Deogratias contributes something new to this framework. It resembles much of the earlier works’ political motivations but, as a fictional work, is given significantly more latitude in terms of artistic invention. It draws on but alters the conventions of earlier autographic works. For example, as in Maus, it depicts a human character as an animal, but instead of depicting the character based on national or ethnic identity, Stassen chooses to have Deogratias transform into a dog to represent his complicity and guilt. Additionally, while many autographs position the reader within the viewpoints of their characters, Deogratias remains largely closed off from the perspectives of its characters, implicitly arguing against the way many people teach about genocides. Genocide is conceptualized as something that can be avoided if one feels for the victims, as this will reduce the likelihood that one will engage in violence, but the Rwandan genocide in particular demonstrates the limits of this assumption.

Deogratias won several awards after its publication and met generally positive reviews, though some reviewers predicted that the story would not be widely read given its emotionally demanding content and lack of catharsis.

Further Reading

Abouet, Marguerite. Aya (2007-2009).

Kannemeyer, Anton, and Conrad Botes. The Big Bad Bitterkomix Handbook (2008).

Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1987).

Vaughan, Brian K., and Niko Henrichon. Pride of Baghdad (2008).

Bibliography

Chute, Hillary, and Marie DeKoven. “Introduction: Graphic Narrative.” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (2006): 767-782.

Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nyugen. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2007.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper, 1994.

Repetti, Massimo. “African Wave: Specificity and Cosmopolitanism in African Comics.” African Arts 40, no. 2 (Summer, 2007): 16-35.