Content area
Full Text
For Jennifer Harold
We might conjure some of the sites that, in recent memory, have generated the most pressing debates and intense questioning of human rights. . . . [T]hese wars and conflicts, for good or ill, have helped shape and define the shifting grounds both of rights and of what it means to be human.
Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava (279)
Late in 2006 in Johannesburg, just by chance I met an aid worker from Goma, and heard a harrowing first person account of witnessing the traumatic suffering of women and children in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). She described a degeneration of society beyond ordinary imagining, and spoke of her own frustration that she was not eloquent enough to write and do justice to the traumatic gendered violence she witnessed. More generally, she raised the question of how networks of humanitarian witnessing might become engaged in the eastern DRC now, in the interests of victims of rape warfare. Then, most memorably, she spoke of a specific community that concerned her and her colleagues in World Vision: a small group of African women and children struggling to survive together near Lake Kivu, "just across the border from where Fossey watched the gorillas." The contrast is striking: Dian Fossey and the gorillas remain familiar figures in a global public sphere. But how do the testimonies of Congolese women find recognition beyond their immediate familial and communal networks? What follows unfolds from this conversation, and explores this implied adjacency of absence and legendary presence to consider the visibility of African people and creatures and the claims of animal and human rights in shaping a Congo "watch" from afar. Vivid memories of Dian Fossey and the mountain gorillas raise questions about how life narratives engage in representations of the Congo region, after genocide in Rwanda and the associated and ongoing suffering in the DRC. How does the Fossey life story relate to the ongoing presence of mourning and violence in central Africa now? How does it contribute to contemporary feminist engagements with "distant suffering" that are productive for the victims of trauma at this unique contact zone where species meet?
Ongoing remediation of life narrative renders both Fossey and the mountain gorillas associated with her familiar...