In 2020, Rwanda commemorated the 26th anniversary of the genocide against the Tutsi which resulted in the slaughter of over 800,000 people in approximately 100 days. A few literary texts in response to the horrors of 1994 have since been published yet relatively few by Rwandan authors. Gilbert Gatore's maiden novel, The Past Ahead (2008), constitutes the first fictional text written by a Rwandan who experienced the genocide first-hand. The novel was well-received commercially yet was also the target of strong criticism in academia where Gatore was accused, amongst other things, of historical revisionism. The novel tells the story of two main characters: Niko, a young man who actively participated in the killings and who has since withdrawn from society and Isaro, a young French survivor of the genocide who returns to Rwanda as an adult to transcribe survivors' memories of the event in a book. In this paper, I propose to examine the manner in which Gatore interweaves the stories of Niko and Isaro to propose a sedimented vision of history and memory. Working with Max Silverman's concept of palimpsestic memory which draws on the palimpsest as a key metaphor for writing memory, I will demonstrate how the interwoven trajectories of the two main characters attest to the mediated nature of cultural memory through literature. By writing and re-writing in fictionalised form, Gatore does not engage in historical revisionism of the genocide but rather attempts to reveal its inherent human complexity by moving past its inexpressibility.
