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Narrative and the re-co[r]ding of cultural memory1 in Moses Isegawa's Abyssinian Chronicles and Snakepit

The attempt to write extreme violence, or to reco[r]d[e] traumatic cultural memory – the representation of horror – tests both the representational capacity of language and the rationality of subjecthood. Much narrative endeavour is spent trying to narrativise or ‘structure’ horror into story. However, because traumatic memories resist the narrative framework of the novel, questions are posed not only about the reliability of the narrator's memory and his/her ability to narrate a credible story, but also about the suitability of the fictional form of the novel to represent historical events such as extreme violence. How does language in narrative, with its insistence on order and sequence, ‘capture’ the de-structuring nature of violence? Where is the subject or the idea of rational subjectivity in these de-structuring acts of violence? I will attempt to address these issues through a critical ‘reading’ of Moses Isegawa's novels Abyssinian Chronicles (2000) and Snakepit (2004). In these novels, Isegawa recasts and reenacts a period of recent Ugandan history marked by violence and chaos, emanating from the dictatorship of Idi Amin. However, both novels stretch the limits of ‘factual’ or historical credulity, reminding the reader that they are in fact works of historical fabrication. I am of the view that the narrative endeavour in these two novels is not only to record the chaotic events experienced during the years before and after the fall of Idi Amin, but to recode, through the tropes of language (symbol, imagery, and metaphor), the devastating effects of those years on the literary landscape of Uganda.