Spring 2018 RGSLL Department Newsletter

Department Spotlights
Department Announcements
Alumni Updates/Class Notes
Donor Recognition

---

Department Spotlights

RGSLL Mentoring 

RGSLL’s Honey W. Nashman Center’s Faculty Engagement Winner

RGSLL’s Very Own Acclaimed Author

In 1998 Abdourahman Waberi, then a 32-year-old novelist and poet, embarked on a mission to Rwanda with 10 African authors and filmmakers. It was just four years after the devastating genocide in which thousands of the country's Hutu ethnic majority unleashed unspeakable violence mostly on the Tutsi minority. In only 100 days, nearly one million people perished.

Waberi, now an assistant professor of French and Francophone literature at Columbian College, went to Rwanda in part to open the eyes of the international community, but mostly to listen to witnesses of the massacre. A native of Djibouti, Waberi felt compelled “to mourn with the Rwandan people, to show them compassion and solidarity,” he said. He visited traumatized survivors in their homes—and unapologetic perpetrators in their prison cells.

But when he sat down to piece through the harrowing notes he’d collected, he was reminded of German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno’s dictum on “the impossibility of writing about Auschwitz.” How do you tell the story of an atrocity, Waberi asked himself, without trivializing peoples’ pain?

“Language remains inadequate in accounting for the world and all its turpitudes, words can never be more than unstable crutches,” Waberi said. “And yet, if we want to hold on to a glimmer of hope in the world, the only miraculous weapons we have at our disposal are these same clumsy supports.”

After another mission to Rwanda in 1999, Waberi was ready to begin his book Harvest of Skulls, a genre-bending mix of fiction, journalism and poetry which he originally wrote in 2000 but was released in English for the first time in 2016. And, despite the passage of time, the voices of the people he met—from grief-stricken mothers to machete-toting teenagers—still resonant in his life and his work. “My trips had a huge impact on me, both artistically and emotionally,” Waberi said. “They made me a better man and a better writer.”

Returns and Departures

Even before traveling to Rwanda, Waberi’s writing was interwoven with Africa and his native Djibouti, a tiny nation nestled in the Horn of Africa between Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia. He grew up poor in a “shantytown.” Few people in his village were literate. By age 10, Waberi was paid in candy to draft neighbors’ lover letters and job applications. He was just 12 when Djibouti declared its independence from France in 1977.

Critical of Djibouti’s authoritarian regime—President Ismail Omar Guelleh has been cited by Human Rights Watch for abuses such as denying freedom of speech and suppressing political opposition—Waberi today considers himself an exile from his own country. He left in 1985 to study in France and hasn’t returned since 2007. Not all of books are readily available in Djibouti and he worries that if he enters the country to see his mother, he might be jailed for his outspokenness. Still, Waberi felt a literary obligation to write about his homeland. His novels like Transit and Passage of Tears explore his personal feelings of displacement. “My books are filled with returns and departures,” he said.

Waberi had completed a trio of novels about Djibouti when he first traveled to Rwanda with the team of African artists. For two months, he “immersed, shared and mourned” with Rwandans who were willing to talk about the horrors they'd seen. Not everyone was forthcoming. For many, the wounds were too fresh. Others challenged Waberi. “They said to me: ‘Now you want to write my story? Where were you four years ago?’”

In Harvest of Skulls, Waberi set out to represent a full portrait of the genocide, capturing the stories of the victims alongside the murderers. He “lightly fictionalized” his real life encounters, he said. In one chapter, he described an old widowed woman who named her dog Minuar, after the French name for the United Nations peacekeeping mission she said “failed to protect us.” The dog “fattened up on human flesh during the genocide,” Waberi writes, even feasting on the bodies of slaughtered family members. At Rilima prison, Waberi spoke to genocidaires (“those who commit genocide”) who justified their killings as acts of war. “We found them to be accusatory and punctilious in the way an American attorney can be,” he recalled. “They were determined, assured in their position and didn’t sound the slightest bit penitent.”

Since leaving Rwanda, Waberi has received numerous awards and honors. In 2005, he was chosen one of the “50 Writers of the Future” by the French literary magazine Lire. He recently received the prestigious "Chevalier" Order of Arts and Letter Medal from the French Culture Minister. His writing has been translated into 10 languages. Harvest of Skulls is his fifth book to appear in English. His most recent works—a novel about writer and activist Gil Scot Heron and a new volume of poetry—will be translated later this year. Since coming to Columbian College in 2013 to teach Francophone literature, Waberi’s classroom has been a forum for discussions relating to philosophy and the global view. “I have had the privilege of crisscrossing the world and sharing my words, thoughts and emotions with the amazing students of this fabulous institution,” he said. He is encouraged by the recent emergence of African novelists—from Nigeria’s Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (author of Americanah) and Chigozie Obioma (The Fisherman) to Ethiopia’s Dinaw Mengestu (All Our Names)—and applauds what he predicts is a shift in the epicenter of the literary world. “Maybe the next great novel isn’t coming from Vienna, Venice or Valencia, but from Nairobi, Lagos or Dakar,” he said.

Still, the legacy of Rwanda weighs on him. Looking back, he continues to worry that his writing didn’t do justice to the emotional gravity of the tragedy. “It’s not only an issue of artistic failure. It's also something you cannot overcome psychologically,” he said. But he’s heartened by Rwandan writers and artists who have since produced their own works about the dark era in their country’s history.

“Maybe what I did was only to put down a first layer of ink, but that first layer may have given tools to Rwandans to talk about these events.”

This article originally appeared in the CCAS Spotlight newsmagazine.

Back to top

---

Department Announcements

Faculty Kudos

Lynn Westwater received, together with her colleague Meredith Ray, a $190,000 National Endowment for the Humanities Scholarly Editions and Translations Grant in the 2016-2017 academic year. During the fellowship leave, Professors Ray and Westwater translated and wrote the critical apparatus for two devotional works of the Venetian nun and political dissident Arcangela Tarabotti (1604-1652), volumes that are part of their larger interest in early modern women's devotional literature. These two texts, Convent Paradise (originally published 1643) and Lament for Regina Donà (originally published 1650), are slated for publication in The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe series, pending review. This work was also supported by a grant from the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation. She also co-edited the publication Ippolita Maria Sforza: Duchess and Hostage in Renaissance Naples: Letters and Orations (ACMRS Publications, 2017).

Abdourahman Waberi received the "Chevalier" Order of Arts and Letter Medal from the French Culture Minister. He also hosted a discussion at the NeMLA March 2017 Conference. He published the book Harvest of Skulls (Indiana University Press, 2017). He authored the following articles for Le Monde: “Happy Kwanzaa, Mr. Trump!”; “Lumière sur l’histoire du colonialisme allemand, une première à Berlin”; “Imaginary speech by Donald Trump"'  "I love Africa and Africa adore me”; “And tomorrow, Indafrique?”; "Black Negroes to the Black Panthers, the history of self-defense can inspire Africa”;  “A graphic novel continues the investigation into the assassination of Judge Bernard Borrel”; and “Who was afraid of Fred Hampton?" He was quoted by Radio France Internationale (online) in the articles “Abdourahman Waberi: "Djiboutian history is tragic.”

Jocelyne Brant received the GW Honey W. Nashman Spark a Life Award as Faculty Member of the Year.

Masha Belenky and Kathryn Kleppinger co-edited the book  French Cultural Studies for the Twenty-First Century (University of Delaware Press, 2017).

Sergio Waisman authored the article “Fue lo que siempre quería leer, escuchar y escribir” for La Nación, “On translating Piglia” for the Buenos Aires Herald and “Piglia in Translation” for Latin American Literature Today. 

Peter Rollberg was quoted by El Universal in the article “El poderoso embajador ruso que complica al gobierno de Trump.”

Bernd Schaefer was quoted by The Diplomat in the article “What’s Next in Cambodia-North Korea Relations?

Current Students

Hannah M. Weckstein, is an outstanding student who has been enrolled in three upper division Spanish literature courses taught by Professor Manuel Cuellar since the fall of 2016. She has actively participated in each course, sharing her knowledge and music while working with various Latinx communities in D.C. and her experience abroad in Chile. Hannah’s dexterity in Spanish derives from a profound understanding of how language works, not only linguistically but also, and perhaps more importantly, culturally. Over the last year and a half, Professor Cuellar has witnessed the development of her linguistic skills in the various projects she has undertaken, from classroom presentations to service learning activities. By learning Spanish, she has come to understand the cultural intricacies embedded in any form of verbal and written communication.

 

---

Department Events

3/1/18: Audra Simpson, Columbia University, author of Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States, 6 p.m., Gelman Library, Teamsters Room 702

4/19/18: Jared Sexton, UC Irvine, author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism, 6 p.m., Gelman Library, Teamsters Room 702

3/30/2018  César Chávez and Dolores Huerta Celebration 

Back to top

---

Alumni Updates/Class Notes

 

Back to top

---

Donor Recognition

THANK YOU FOR YOUR SUPPORT!

The Department of Romance, German & Slavic Languages & Literature would like to gratefully acknowledge the following generous donors who made a gift to the department from January 1, 2017 – December 31, 2017. 

 

Benevity Community Impact Fund *

Embassy of Italy *

Dr. Warren D. Ashby, BA ’61, MA ‘66

Terese A.D. Beauchamp, BA ’72

John R. Cremer #

Annabel de Braganca, BA ’11

Dr. Maria J. de la Fuente +#

Donald Hubert Duffy, BA ’11

Cynthia M. Figueroa, BBA ’12

Daniel H. Gallagher, BA ’75

William H. Girvan, MPhil ’70

Elizabeth A. Goodwin, BA ’16

Christopher Blair Hill, BA ’11

William E. Kaduck, BA ’14

Jordan N. Kestenbaum, BA ’15

Karen Joan Kocher, BA ’85

Conrad Lee *

Elisabeth Penina Liebow, BA ’84

Thomas E. McCullough #

Renee May Meyer, MA ’77

Gabriel S. Miller, BA ’17

Sarah Alyse Moga, BA ’13

Mark E. Richter, BBA ’79

Marilyn C. Schwartz, BA ’17

Jonathan Thomas Vasdekas, BA ’12

Maria Soukhanova Watson, BA ’67, MA ’72

Margit Angelika Williams, MA ’77

Kristen L. Zaehringer, BA ’02

 

+ Faculty/Staff
# Parent
~ Student
* Friend

Back to top