This article explores how survivors’ experiences of extreme violence change their relationship with time. It draws on extensive fieldwork undertaken with survivors of the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsi and participatory observation of Rwanda’s annual commemoration ceremonies. It focuses on the practice of ‘care-taking’ that survivors engage in at genocide memorials that display human remains and dead bodies. This article identifies the different temporal practices that survivors use to help remake their worlds after the 1994 Genocide. In doing so, it asks: how do survivors construct time through informal mnemonic practices? How do they experience time during the commemoration? And what mode of temporality is inscribed in the materiality of memorials? The article demonstrates that care-taking and imagination produce a symbolic time-reversal, whereas the materiality of the memorial sites preserves the past in the present. The commemoration constructs different temporal logics, such as time homogenisation and a traumatic cyclicalisation, something I describe through the notion of ‘trauma-time’. The article concludes that multiple temporalities are produced and reproduced in various attempts to remake lives after genocide that counter simplistic ‘before and after’ accounts of time dominant in the transitional justice discourse.

Transitional justice comprises a broad set of responses to violence committed during periods of confl ict, repressive rule, or occupation. 1 Over the last thirty years, criminal trials, truth commissions, memorialization projects, and restorative justice processes have been implemented with increasing frequency across the globe, creating a rapidly expanding area of human rights practice. Within this domain, international criminal trials have emerged as the predominant approach, described in recent scholarship as "a key componentperhaps the most powerful component-in the broader universe of transitional justice." 2 Coinciding with this well-documented resort to law, there is a critical turn in the scholarship as transitional justice processes come under growing scrutiny. 3 Scholars criticize criminal trials and truth commissions as initiatives that further the reproduction or, according to some, the imposition of Western norms, leading to observations of cultural miscommunication or imperialism. 4 Driven by a similar impetus, challenges are raised against the evidentiary foundations of both * Special thanks to Prabha Kotiswaran for her diligent work as part of the editorial team for this special issue. 1 There is a large body of scholarship on transitional justice, a term coined in the early work of Ruti G. Teitel, Transitional Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Neil J. Kritz, Transitional Justice: How Emerging Democracies Reckon with Former Regimes (United States Institute of Peace, 1995). The term initially referred to the use of law, be it criminal, constitutional, civil, or administrative, to facilitate the move from violence to peace, or autocracy to democracy. More recently, "transitional justice" has been invoked to refer to a broad set of legal and non-legal responses to particular types of violence during periods of political change.

Building on legal anthropology and performance studies, this chapter analyses the Gacaca law talk and performances to evidence the wider context of changes in Rwanda post-1994 due to national and international pressures. The Rwandan government legally mandated Rwandans to actively participate in the gacaca courts from 2004 to 2012 for crimes committed during the 1994 Genocide against Tutsi. Every citizen was required to attend the local level courts to provide testimony and to serve as judge, witness and testifier on a weekly basis. In total, 15,300 courts ruled over nearly two million cases. Based on a 'kaleidoscopic' reading of optical illusions, or a slight shift in perspective to integrate the multiplicity of performances within the gacaca system, we demonstrate the dramaturgic nature of gacaca through gacaca law, policy and practices. Ultimately, such visual metaphors provide important interpretative tools to grasp how gacaca scripts were performed for different audiences with different effects and functions depending on micro to macro politics, and the resulting performances of competing narratives and the variances within the gacaca system.

This paper explores the silences and the gaps that cut through witness testimonies at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) by applying a trauma lens to the narratives that emerge on the witness stand and by contrasting those with a survivor testimony. It compares the recollection of a traumatic experience with the production of legal meaning. To do so, it focuses specifically on a survivor testimony shared with the author at the Rwandan Nyange memorial in 2014 where the crimes in question happened, and the ICTR The Prosecutor vs Athanase Seromba trial that relates to the events at that particular site. This paper shows that the experience of trauma not only challenges the language of law but also blurs the legal narratives and functions of tribunals like the ICTR.

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