64

Rape was used systematically as a dreadful weapon in the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. The cruelty accompanying the sexual abuses relied specifically on taboos found at the very heart of society, thus turning the culture against itself (Godard 2014). The present article deals with the experiences of the women who were the victims of the terrible acts perpetrated in this context. They bear the mark of an invisible and secret destruction of the very site of fecundation, of the inner space where life and thought germinate (Altounian 2000). Their testimonies are given and gathered in the context of an action research project that took place by means of support groups. Within this clinical work plan, the women encountered try to renew ties with their origins and the thought annihilated by rape with a view to genocidal extermination. Their accounts testify to this work of re-origination and recovery of personal thought, and of re-appropriating their history in order to begin it again. At personal risk to themselves, individually and as a group, they grapple with the (re)creation of their own person and a female collective. The article shows how such a process notably involves the mythical elaboration of a familial origin set against the very disappearance of the family; a shared, perilous, yet vital attempt at a personal and social recovery of lived events that prevented life, which repeat themselves between generations and which need to be recognized and transmitted when relating that history; and a voyage through the shared thought and words of the experiences of death undergone during the rapes and other sexual abuses during the genocide.