Remounting, Remembering: Gendered Memorials and Colleen Wagner's: The Monument (Critical Essay‪)‬

On 4 JULY 2008, COLLEEN WAGNER'S PLAY THE MONUMENT--in which a mother seeks revenge for the wartime rape and murder of her daughter--opened in Butare, Rwanda. July fourth is Liberation Day in Rwanda, and opening night was timed to mark the end of that country's one-hundred-day genocide. The play featured an African cast and crew, Tutsi and Hutu both and, after its opening in Butare, toured in makeshift theatres across Rwanda. Houses were full and postshow talkback sessions often lasted for hours. In an essay about her experience mounting the African production, Canadian director Jennifer Capraru notes how closely Rwandan audiences identified with the play: In fact, The Monument was written by a Canadian and is likely set--as its few details, such as the characters' names, Mejra and Stetko, indicate--not in Rwanda but in Bosnia. That Rwandans watching The Monument take it to be "their story" speaks, I contend, both to the virtue and the problem of Wagner's play: while the play allows for effective substitution (the Rwandan context fits convincingly into the Bosnian text), such substitution risks effacing the differences among women killed in war. This problem places the play, a monument itself in many ways, at the centre of a current debate over the most responsible and productive ways of memorializing violent crimes against women.