Faith, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation in Women’s Narratives of the Rwandan Genocide: A Comparative Reading of Left to Tell and A Long Way from Paradise

Nisarga M; Veena M K

doi:10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.84317

Faith, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation in Women’s Narratives of the Rwandan Genocide: A Comparative Reading of Left to Tell and A Long Way from Paradise

Author(s)	Ms. Nisarga M, Dr. Veena M K
Country	India
Abstract	This article comparatively examines Immaculée Ilibagiza’s Left to Tell and Leah Chishugi’s A Long Way from Paradise to investigate how women survivors narrate faith, forgiveness, and reconciliation after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. Drawing on feminist life-writing, trauma studies, and transitional-justice scholarship, it argues that the memoirs construct two distinct but intersecting models of restorative agency. In Left to Tell, faith is principally an interior discipline: prayer reorganizes fear and rage, enables unilateral forgiveness, and supports a redemptive vision of national healing. In A Long Way from Paradise, faith is more ambivalent and relational. Chishugi’s sense of divine abandonment is not resolved by doctrine alone; it is gradually reconstituted through interracial religious community, surrogate kinship, encounter with a perpetrator, and humanitarian work with conflict-affected women and children. Both memoirs refuse a simple equivalence between forgiveness and forgetting. Yet their differences expose the ethical danger of making survivors responsible for reconciliation without truth, accountability, safety, institutional repentance, and material repair. The article proposes a survivor-centred reconciliation continuum comprising intrapersonal release, interpersonal recognition, and sociopolitical justice. It concludes that faith can sustain women’s post-genocide agency, but only when forgiveness remains voluntary and when spiritual narratives are held in productive tension with memory, gender justice, and legal responsibility.
Field	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 8, Issue 4, July-August 2026
Published On	2026-07-22
DOI	https://doi.org/10.36948/ijfmr.2026.v08i04.84317

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Faith, Forgiveness, and Reconciliation in Women’s Narratives of the Rwandan Genocide: A Comparative Reading of Left to Tell and A Long Way from Paradise

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