Caroline Williamson Sinalo's Rwanda After Genocide is a welcome critical addition to the plethora of post-genocidal literature that has been slow to decolonize theoretically and to deconceptualize methodologically. The balance of power and control over the stories of survivors is still held by international institutions, governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), foreign researchers and those making careers based on the use of trauma as commodity. Williamson Sinalo's work is based on forty-two testimonies of survivors which had French, English and Kinyarwanda transcriptions (p. 12). It is about the need to engage in more reflection about bias in who collects and interprets those accounts, as well as how such translations function to uphold orthodoxies, such as the non-culpability of the colonial and postcolonial international community, or national unity virtue-signalling of a despotic regime after genocide.

The book is split into five chapters, the first of which debunks two common myths: first, that survivors do not want to talk about their experiences post-genocide; and second, that there is no post-traumatic growth. There are negative and positive aspects to trauma and her main argument is that:

In order to examine the gendered dimensions of post-traumatic growth, an in-depth analysis is undertaken of the testimonies that were collected by other survivors in Kinyarwanda for the Genocide Archive of Rwanda. These were facilitated by the Aegis Trust, an international charity that campaigns against genocide and runs the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre with support from the Rwandan government.

The second chapter explains what post-traumatic growth is and how it is different from concepts such as resilience or recovery. Post-traumatic growth occurs when, after experiencing a traumatic event, ‘individuals positively accommodate their world view to the new trauma-related information’ (p. 56) – telling new stories about themselves. Yet, instead of using Western-based psychological measures, Williamson Sinalo argues that this is best understood using a narrative approach that takes cultural and historical factors into consideration. Williamson Sinalo then elucidates what post-traumatic growth would look like in the testimonies of men, arguing that the concept of Rwandicity or Ndi Umunyarwanda, while heavily criticized in the West, is being appropriated by men and could also represent postcolonial growth. This is because Rwandicity has allowed men to rebuild a constructive identity that is more in keeping with positive and indigenous understandings of their cultural norms and values. The third chapter, examining women's growth, is more ambiguous, noting that women suffered devastating losses to interpersonal relationships and, despite gaining agency, do not feel a part of the communal. The communal includes women's traditional roles in society, as well as political discourses around forgiveness and reconciliation, from which – women relate – they are excluded.

In order to investigate this in more detail, Chapter 4 presents the ways in which women and men gain agency or communal growth. The author argues that, according to a model of collective post-traumatic growth, both drives have to function in a society. It is noted that women are more agentic and men more communal, but more men ‘experience both drives together’ (p. 145). Collective concepts such as Rwandicity can discount women because of their militaristic undertones. Moreover, current political discourses do not empower female survivors to reconceptualize what roles in society could promote their communal as well as agentic identity. In Chapter 4, Williamson Sinalo tries to understand why this is happening, as stories survivors tell become important to challenging dominant ideologies – and, by extension, the development of communal and agentic drives. She notes that aspects of survivor testimony, in international hands, become muted in translation into English and French. This is because translators follow dominant trauma scripts as well as ideas about gender or culpability, which she debunks. In a context where human rights and free speech are also nationally constricted, ensuring the faithful testimony of survivors, and especially of women who do have the strength to speak, becomes crucial. This also means understanding that stories will change as people's circumstances change, and we should be open to this messiness, contradiction, criticism and being put on the spot.

The book ends with consequences for the ways in which we understand how to facilitate post-traumatic growth in clinical settings. It considers the therapeutic regimes that exist in Rwanda and how more culturally informed approaches could facilitate post-traumatic growth. The book is thus significant in several ways, in that it decolonizes the methods and theories that we use to do research, as well as debunking conventions about trauma that can act as gatekeeper tropes. The most important lesson is the need for cultural sensitivity, to listen and learn from survivors by empowering them to tell their stories in their own terms. However, this is also where the book falls short. We never get any insights about how the survivors themselves view Williamson Sinalo's gendered reading of post-traumatic growth or if they agree or disagree with it. In this way, survivors are potentially disempowered again. Another theoretical interpretation or co-witnessing is enforced, even if it claims to be culturally sensitive. It is not user-led and additionally does not rethink the way in which testimony is politically collected and who has overall ownership. Decolonization is not just about processes of translation but about questioning why translations are needed in the first place, and how the final say should belong with the survivors.