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5 pages/β‰ˆ1375 words
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MLA
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Literature & Language
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Essay
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English (U.S.)
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AFR 201 Asignment: Diop, Murambi, The Book of Bones

Essay Instructions:

https://www(dot)gradesaver(dot)com/murambi-the-book-of-bones
AFR 201
Information about the Final Essay Assignment
The goal of this assignment is to deepen the analytical work that we did in the previous essay. The essay will cover literature that we’ve recently read, but the critical approach is similar to the last essay. It incorporates your own research from outside our syllabus.
Selecting literature and a topic
The essay should address one or more of our more recent readings (Murambi and after). If by any chance you included Murambi in the previous essay, please choose other work(s) to address this time around. Keep in mind, the text(s) you choose can include visual material we’ve studied, including poems, music (and music videos), etc. Comparisons between artworks of differing media, including literature, often make for excellent papers, so if you have an idea for an innovative critical approach to our sources, go for it!
As with the previous essay, this composition should pertain directly to the course theme of literature in African languages (broadly understood—European languages used in African lit. included). Discussing history, politics, and social trends is totally acceptable for providing context, but such discussion should be of clear relevance to a central argument about the literature itself.
Instead of a critical prompt from me to you, this time we want the initial research question to come from each student. Writing up an essay proposal (working hypothesis, basic outline of thee essay, and working bibliography) to show to your TA and/or to me in our office hours is something I strongly suggest, although it’s completely up to you whether you take advantage of that opportunity.

Also recommended: Branch out this time. If your prior essays have focused more on prose fiction than poems, see how you might shift more toward poetry here, or vice versa. If you discussed postcolonial theory last time, consider some of the other theory we’ve encountered, e.g., the moral arguments that come out of Arendt’s piece or Couto’s lecture on how to use African languages (coming up this semester). It can be tempting to stick to conceptual areas that you’ve developed in essays so far, but at its best, the final essay pushes our thinking forward more than any previous project of the semester.

Research
Same as the previous assignment. The essay should make use of at least one book-length critical source from beyond our course syllabus. (It’s also a good idea to include secondary lit. we’ve already read in class, but that’s not required for this project—your scope of critical readings will primarily depend on your topic and how you approach it.) In order to ensure that the outside source(s) are academically sound, it’s advisable to choose works published by university presses, although that’s definitely not the sole indicator of a book’s bona fides. If you find a source that seems useful for your argument but you’re not sure of its scholarly qualifications, speak with library staff and/or your TA and/or me in office hours.
As to your engagement with the critical sources themselves, the same guidelines from last essay assignment still apply: to make your essay as strong as possible, you’ll want to find the most relevant criticism in dialogue with your thesis—you might agree with it, disagree, or want to expand the conversation that the critic begins.

Length: at least 1500 words, not including Bibliography/Works Cited (definitely include a bibliographic section for your reader’s benefit). Students who have talked with me about fulfilling the pre-med writing requirement: essay must be at least 2000 words, not incl. bibliography; and it should cite at least two book-length critical sources that you’ve found and researched independently of our assigned syllabus readings. Please email the essay directly to me, Cc-ing your TA, before the deadline.

Editorial Style: Same guidelines as previous essays.

Due date: May 11 (anytime before that, or anytime day or night on that date, is fine)

Format: Also same as previous essays: upload the essay to Canvas.

Questions? Please ask me in person or on Canvas Discussions, under the topic dealing with essay-specific questions.

This assignment gives us a chance to see you synthesize a semester of your thought, and make your most probing argument about our course topic. Keep in mind, the TAs and I are available to chat with you about your project along the way. To speak with me in person about the essay, it’s best to see me this week.

Essay Sample Content Preview:
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The Role of Fictional African Literature in History
Diop, Boubacar Boris is an African author who visited Rwanda with other African writers to tell the story of the 1994 Rwandan genocide through the eyes of a writer. Journalists cannot write comprehensively about genocide as it will only tell a story of isolated individuals. He thought rather writing on genocide has to be an act of imagination. As Veronique Tadjo also echoes, if there were about 800,000 to 1 million people killed in Rwanda during the massacre, then there must be at least 800000 to 1 million stories that can be told about it. Therefore, although The Murambi: The Book of Bones is fictitious, it tells the story of African imagination through another lens that is critical in preserving the history of Africa through its literary writers.
In one account, Diop, Boubacar Boris draws the ignorance and/or inaction of the world during the massacre into the story in a way that reminds the author that the world did not care about the people in Rwanda during the genocide. Through one of the characters, Michael Seremundo who is a businessman and we are introduced to him as a normal citizen who was conducting his business on the day of the president’s assassination. As he returned home to his family, he notices militia wreaking havoc on the city and arrives home to find his son missing. When he considers moving out to look for him, his wife advises him to stay indoors. He assures her that nothing will happen to her because the rest of the world is watching. He had hopes that the rest of the world would come to their rescue. He shortly explains that he is lying and that the rest of the world wasn’t watching because ‘the world cup was about to begin in the United States. The planet was not interested in nothing else.’ This quote emphasizes the inaction and ignorance of the rest of the world as the genocide unfolded. These are some of the elements that fictitious African literature tell about her history and contextualize the events in the larger context of the role of the world in it. Through that quote by seremundo, the reader understands why the world largely ignored the massacre.
The book of the bones also tells a story of Rwanda as a country before and after the genocide. The story is centered on the darkest moments of the country’s history, the 1994 Rwandan genocide. Through the fictional account of the Rwandan genocide, people have a better understanding of Rwanda’s history. Fictitious literature dissociates the Rwandan genocide from the framework of a single story told by journalists and government agencies of Rwanda. It is told from imagination and therefore not bound by conventional frames of how to tell the story of genocide. That way, the Murambi: The Book of Bones shows an important part of Rwandan history that although told by an outsider and several years later, captures the true picture of the unfolding and subsequent slaughter of innocent people numbering in hundreds of thousands. It is also told from several perspectives notably through the character of Cornelius Uvimana who is a victim who lost his family in the genocide and son of an Interahamwe(militia group which perpetrated the kill...
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