APORIAS OF BELONGING IN SANDRA UWIRINGIYIMANA’S „HOW DARE THE SUN RISE. MEMOIRS OF A WAR CHILD” (2017)
APORIAS OF BELONGING IN SANDRA UWIRINGIYIMANA’S „HOW DARE THE SUN RISE. MEMOIRS OF A WAR CHILD” (2017)

Summary/Abstract: This paper discusses the memoir How Dare the Sun Rise: Memoirs of a War Child (2017) by Sandra Uwiringiyimana, exploring it in the context of hospitality as both ethics per se and as an underlying principle of the human condition. Hospitality is considered what governs interactions between people and helps to understand how we approach our sense of identity and integrity when faced with the unfamiliar. Referring to the texts of Jacques Derrida (conditional and unconditional hospitality, the work of grief), the works of Paul Ricoeur (linguistic and narrative hospitality), Richard Kearney, Melissa Fitzpatrick, and others, Uwiringiyimana’s memoir is discussed as a testimonial account and a narrative document of a member of an ethnic minority of the Banyamulenge from South Kivu, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As a girl, she becomes a stateless Internally Displaced Person who manages to migrate to the United States, where she is finally granted citizenship. Fraught with trauma and grief, but also hope and resilience, the memoir is shown to provide a unique space to record, evaluate, and foster acts of hospitality that undocumented refugees and migrants experience. In these reports, hospitality emerges as intricately intertwined with hostility; whether the one or the other will prevail is a matter determined anew in each confrontation between the self and the other. The implications of such a recognition of hospitality for both authors and readers of the memoir are also considered, alongside the memoir’s value as a genre of a distinct form and function.

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