Writing around Pain — Personal Testimonies from Rwanda by African Writers

Abstract

Philip Gourevitch poses this fascinating and troubling question more than halfway through his account of the genocide in Rwanda, We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families. It appears in the midst of a chapter littered with corpses: a young car crash victim dead on the roadside; the thousands of dead in the Kibeho refugee camp; and the decomposing bodies of genocide victims that Gourevitch sees when he visits the memorial site at Nyarubuye. Gourevitch recounts these deaths and then goes on to stress the specific horror of Nyarubuye because it is framed as a genocide, because of the horror of intent. He comments: ‘No wonder it’s so difficult to picture. To do so you must accept the principle of the exterminator, and see not people but a people’ (202). Recalling his companion’s comments about the suffering of one particular body at Nyarubuye, Gourevitch asks: ‘But what of his suffering? The young man in the car wreck had suffered, albeit for an instant, and the people at Kibeho had suffered. What does suffering have to do with genocide when the idea itself is a crime?’ (202). In querying the relationship between suffering and genocide, he shows the extent to which the project of genocide removes the agency of its victims and reframes the world through the eyes of the perpetrator, aims to render testimony to the personal impossible because its intention is to annihilate every witness.