Here is an excerpt from an introductory frontispiece of IT IS DIFFICULT, a book about Alfredo Jaar's Rwanda Project from 1994-1998.
Jaar quotes Nigerian writer Ben Okri who won the Booker Prize in 1991.
In "A PRAYER FROM THE LIVING," Orki writes:
Inside, all the space was taken up with the dead.
But here the air didn't have death in it. The air had prayer in it. The prayers stank more than the deaths. But all the dead here were differently dead from the corpses outside.
The dead in the school were--forgive the paradox--alive. I have no other word to explain the serenity. I felt they had made the room holy because they had, in their last moments, thought not of themselves but of all people who suffer. I felt that to be the case because I felt myself doing the same thing. I crawled to a corner, sat against at wall, and felt myself praying for the whole human race. I prayed--knowing full well that prayers are possibly an utter waste of time--but I prayed for everything that lived, for mountains and trees, for animals and streams, and for human beings, wherever they might be. I heard the great anguished cry of all mankind, its great haunting music as well.
And I, too, without moving my mouth, for I had no energy, began to sing in silence. I sang all through the evening. And when I looked at the body next to me and found the luminous unfamiliarity of its face to be that of my lover's--I sang all through the recognition.
I sang silently even when a good-hearted white man came into the school building with a television camera and, weeping, recorded the roomful of the dead for the world--and I hoped he recorded my singing, too.
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Philip Gourevitch’s We wish to inform you that tomorrow
ReplyDeletewe will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda
It’s difficult to know where to start when writing a response to a book like this, and I’m still struggling to wrap my mind around many of the stories that Gourevitch told. Before reading this book, I had a very basic understanding of Rwanda’s government and politics — much of which I probably learned from the kinds of American news stories that Gourevitch criticizes — but about 50 pages in, I realized how embarrassingly little I actually knew about Rwanda’s history. Gourevitch’s telling of the 1994 genocide and the events that led up to it helped clear up many of the misconceptions I had, but it’s still difficult for me to fully comprehend what happened. Throughout much of the book, I kept thinking back to something Gourevitch wrote in the beginning: “I already knew, and believed, what had happened in Rwanda. Yet looking at the buildings and the bodies, and hearing the silence of the place, with the grand Italianate basilica standing there deserted, and beds of exquisite, decadent death-fertilized flowers blooming over corpses, it was still strangely unimaginable. I mean one still had to imagine it” (p. 16). Even in the face of the atrocities, it seems impossible to truly realize what had happened because it’s hard to believe that human beings could do something so horrible.
As far as the writing goes, I appreciated that Gourevitch started off by explaining where he was coming from and what his intentions were in writing the book. He clearly establishes himself as an outsider and says, “this is a book about how people imagine themselves and one another — a book about how we imagine our world” (p. 6). Because of this admission, I was able to read the book not only through the eyes of Gourevitch as a journalist who reports what he sees and hears during his time in Rwanda, but also through the eyes of Gourevitch the American who writes about how he feels and understands something that few of us have experienced. Because in some ways I was able to identify with where Gourevitch was coming from, it helped me realize that I can’t expect any amount of reading to make me truly understand what happened in Rwanda, but a book like this can affect the way I “imagine our world.”
I think it’s also interesting to consider the various pictures of journalism that appear in this book. There’s the untrue propaganda “news” that’s fed through radios and TVs in Rwanda, the shallow American news stories that appear off and on in the U.S., and there’s also Gourevitch’s literary approach that makes up the book, itself. Clearly, there was a story to tell in Rwanda, but the full truth was hard to come by — even among the journalists who held truth as a standard. Even with Gourevitch’s account, though well reported and beautifully written, there’s a bias that can’t be erased and a perspective that comes from his experience. This isn’t to say that Gourevitch’s work isn’t valuable or truthful — I believe it’s both — but it does make me wonder how close we can really come to fully understanding a truth without having our own experience to draw from.
—Katrina
On Philip Gourevitch and Rwandan genocide:
ReplyDeleteHere’s the simplest (and arguably the most narcissistic) question I had while reading Philip Gourevitch: how do I describe my reaction to this book? Usually I “love” books I can’t put down. Love is the wrong word here, but certainly my thoughts and life have been subsumed by this story of Rwanda. To borrow Jenny Rogers’s phrase, I freebased this book.
Usually that kind of attention, for me, denotes dissonance: my mind is trying to resolve something beyond resolution. Yet, there is so much that is ungraspable about the Rwandan genocide, trying to find a single source of the dissonance becomes the overriding quest. What is the core of the horror here? Is it that people killed neighbors and friends? Is it the sheer numbers? Is it the dispassionate lack of response by the entire global community?
For me, the wellspring of terror is the annihilation of the individual. There’s a powerful line in Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” when four men face what they think is certain and imminent death. The Correspondent looks up at the sky and says, “Yes, but I love myself,” as if the power of individual thought and will to live could alter the capricious realities of death. In Gourevitch’s account of slaughter, the individual is often missing. Tutsis go to meet their deaths with resignation, and Hutus perform their work as if they are simply removing unwanted organic matter. Dehumanization—in the minds of both the victims and the killers—is the dissonance I can’t resolve.
The hopeful thought I had while reading this book came from a conversation I had with Salem several weeks ago. After we talked one day, I looked up her home country online. (And yes, I realize she is not from Rwanda, and to conflate the Rwandan conflict with her home country’s issues would be like saying Canada has a Mexican border drug problem.) It turns out her country was recently ranked number one in oppression of journalism—the first country to beat out North Korea for that distinction in recent years. In thinking about Salem and Philip Gourevitch and Paul Rusesabagina I realized something: if the slaughter of 800,000 happens because of the death of the individual, it is the single individual who can change this reality. If dehumanization is the core of genocide, one brave voice is its negation.
--Tracy
I am surprised how much of the conflict, including the initial "racial" divisions of Hutu and Tutsi, are based on artificial construction. Gourevitch makes this clearer by starting with a brief history that broadens the context of this cacophony of despair. It is interesting to see how popular western science contributes to the artificial drawing of "race" characteristics much in the way of the completely disruptive artificial drawings of African countries decades later. In an effort to create advantage, groups sought power by creating a feebly backed pecking order and bringing foreign chaos. I worry about how Western forces at work today are changing the way groups of people imagine themselves in the context of their neighbors.
ReplyDeleteWhat I also find interesting is how religion is used, despite this being ultimately a primarily socioeconomic and racially produced genocide. Again artificial mysticisms are created first for advantage and then run wild. There is a faith bound aspect of the fight. And of course, Mary is here really speaking for cause. The case of the priests is intriguing but to me less unimaginable, given many priests, consumed with will to protect themselves first, bow. This is not to shrug cases of exceptional neglect and violence towards the Tutsi we hear of some priests who are personally aligned for some benefit. Some of the most interesting passages of the book were discussions of the 1954 definitions and codes of conduct toward genocide made by the United Nations General Assembly following World War II. It is as though with that 1946 stroke they named the "thing," the "beast," but remained with their fears. Drenched with fear, the word shocked the world stiff with word from Rwanda.
Memory, accuracy and literature
ReplyDeleteWhen can the author of an autobiography be considered an unreliable narrator?
That thought kept going through my mind as I read Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father.
Ung uses the voice of a child narrator -- alternately petulant, unsophisticated and angry -- to tell her story. I had difficulty believing she could remember with such vividness situations and conversations that occured when she was just a child. It's not just the details of her memories as a five-year-old, but her mature observations ("I know we are middle-class because of our apartment and the possessions we have") that make them suspect.
Also, there is very little context or background to Ung's story. Rather, she uses dialogue as an explanatory device which sounds awkward and forced. It also puts the history of Cambodia and the conflict in the mouths of her parents -- hardly unobjective commentators.
There's also a strain of ethnic stereotyping that runs through her book, particularly the way she describes the differences between the Chinese and Khmer. The way she goes on and on about her mother's white skin you start to wonder just where Ung's biases lie.
I think what's most compelling about this book is how it brings up the problem of how to criticize the literature of survivorship. Can you say, this isn't very good writing without diminishing the importance of the story? Can you find fault with its details but still appreciate its overarching truths?
Lillian Helman's Pentimento has been shown to be primarily a figment of her imagination (I hope she doesn't come back from the grave to sue me for saying that!) but it so wonderfully written that you can overlook the veracity for the craft.
Ung's young life was is harrowing and so very tragic. I really wanted this book to be much better than it is. I think her story deserves better.
Looking at "First They Killed My Father" as a piece of the literature of journalism mostly made me question the validity of a memoir to be journalism. Nothing could be more compelling and heartbreaking than the story of a survivor of genocide told from the survivor's perspective, but that story will never have any hope of being objective. Of course, there seems to be a movement away from objectivity in journalism, but this debate still leaves the classification of this book as journalism up in the air.
ReplyDeleteI too struggled with the fact that a five-year old girl would remember so many details to the point where she could write such a compelling book so many years later, but after reading the dedication and the acknowledgments, I assumed she simply wrote down what she could remember from such a powerfully horrific experience and filled in the gaps with others' memories and historical facts. I thought the meshing of these two was done well, not seamlessly, but well enough for me.
While Ung's story was difficult and heartbreaking to read, I was unable to put it down. Ung focuses on the things that stand out to a child: the feeling of hunger in her stomach, her unwavering belief in her father, her attachment and remorse over the burning of her red dress.
Even though Ung came from a family of higher privilege than others who suffered in Cambodia, I think that gave her story something more because she had so much to lose and her life changed so drastically. She went from wealth to the lowest class of a "classless" society. This adds to the story's strength, I believe.
Whether it qualifies as journalism or not, I believe this Ung's memoir is important, compelling, and disturbing.
Gourevitch’s account of the history of violence in Rwanda and the evolution of ethnic identity in Rwanda brought up my own murky questions. Just as the defense of so many criminals rests on a troubled childhood, much of the genocide in Rwanda seemed to hinge on the perception of victimization. Despite the history of Hutu crimes against Tutsis since the 1960s—which left me amazed that so many Tutsis were even around to be massacred in 1994—the government and many Rwandans seemed content with
ReplyDeleteGourevitch writes that every genocide survivor he spoke with had an unanswerable question. I suppose my unanswerable question is something like this: can a person’s behavior be justified by wrongs committed against him or her? Or to phrase it a different way, what does it mean to be a victim?
This was the question that I kept returning to while reading Always Running. While I am not equating gang violence with genocide, there were some similarities in the set-ups of both books. Always Running details the systematic discrimination against Latinos in L.A. and the near inevitability of falling into gang life. Gourevitch’s book describes a country where the inferiority of the Hutus was ingrained in the cultural and mythological roots of the people, a sense of inequality that did not go away even when the Hutus became the oppressors. With encouragement from the government, Hutus turned on their Tutsi neighbors and literally hacked them to death. It seems unlikely that murder on that scale and at that level of brutality would have happened arbitrarily—there had to have been some sense of righteousness, of having been wronged, of justification, on the part of the Hutus.
Gourevitch never suggests that the Hutus who committed murder were somehow innocent, but he does seem to come down harder on the government officials who were pulling the strings and community leaders who may have had the influence to stop the violence than he does on the people who actually wielded the machetes. The description of his visit to a Rwandan in Texas, a pastor who was alleged to have killed thousands of Tutsis during the genocide, makes it clear that the author found the pastor guilty as sin, even more so than others who killed because of his position as a clergyman.
Gourevitch, or at least some of the sources he selected, seem to say that the Rwandan population was too uneducated and too steeped in ugly cultural norms to resist the order to kill their countrymen. On page 180, he outlines a list of factors that led to the genocide: economic collapses, the RPF, propaganda, and “the extreme poverty, ignorance, superstition,” among others. It’s fascinating to understand the years of history that led to 1994, but in doing so, I find a strange sort of absolution of the murderers. It’s tempting to want to excuse a crime because the criminal had a lousy life. It’s tempting to want to explain why people commit murder with a myriad of social, economic, and political factors. But at point are people responsible for their behavior, regardless of the poverty and suffering they or their ancestors may have suffered?
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ReplyDeleteIn reading First They Killed My Father, I was struck by two things.
ReplyDeleteThe first is the principle that to be effective, narratives that deal with this kind of trauma have to humanize the victims. In order for the victims to become human to the reader, the author must convey them as familiar, recognizable people, not as some far off strangers, some tragic statistic.
As someone who has recently become familiar with debates over the Holocaust in collective American memory, I know this to be a central topic of debate when it comes to how we remember that catastrophe. Some have observed that stories of Holocaust victims tend to be especially resonant because the victims look like "us," i.e. the white, middle-class of mainstream American society. But since Cambodians. Sudanese, Rwandans and other victims don't resemble "us," mainstream American society tends to shrug off news of catastrophes in such far off places. Our political leadership, therefore, follows from this cue.
It's perhaps in recognition of this reality, as disagreeable as it may be, that more recently narratives have been constructed in ways that highlight how such victims do, indeed, resemble us. Maybe the movie Hotel Rwanda is so effective because it focuses on a boderline character--a man who is African, and yet who is clearly conversant with the Western middle class. Maybe that also explains something of the effectiveness of First They Killed My Father, which begins by showing the Western reader the kind of ordinary, middle-class family life that so many of "us" can relate to.
As I reflected upon the events of Cambodia, which did seem so far off and so long ago to me, I had the sense that these people were very much in the wrong place at the wrong time. Then it occurred to me that in April 1975, I too was five years old, the same age as our narrator, Loung. Somehow, it didn't seem so long ago and far off anymore.
The second thing that struck me was paradoxical hopefulness of the narrative. As things for the family grew increasingly dire, their love for one another seemed to grow ever deeper. I've heard it said once that people who have suffered together have stronger connections than those who are most content. In reading a story like this, I can see how that can be true.
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families struck me not just as a chilling tale of a nation’s ethnic genocide, but also as a disturbing narrative on the lack of international attention that the tragedy received. Coupled with the book of photographs shared in class on Tuesday, Philip Gourevitch’s work makes it startlingly clear that the U.S. news media, and Western civilization in general, was shockingly slow to report on one of the most important stories in recent history. As my generation has grown up in a world which prides itself on the notion of globalization, here stands an alarming anecdote when even a intimately connected world failed to notice a mass killing in its midst. As such, part of me can’t help but wonder whether today’s omnipresent digital media environment would have worked any differently in spreading the “stories from Rwanda” that Gourevitch tells so compellingly years later. Surely it would’ve, I find myself saying, yet I am almost immediately reminded of the conflict in Darfur that too has gone underreported.
ReplyDeleteThus, that failure to inform a world audience sooner and stronger is what I took away from this reading the most. We, as journalists, believe in a social responsibility to enlighten and explain the events of our day, and yet all too often we miss the forest for the trees in all areas of reporting, not just in regards to international coverage. Gourevitch’s tale is a stark warning of the ramifications of such an oversight.
It is one thing to read about a violent, oppressive regime from history books or to read an account from someone who lived through it, but to see it through the eyes of a child is something else altogether. It is perhaps, the most powerful way to make the ideologies of adults look completely ridiculous.
ReplyDeleteAt the age of 5, Loung Ung was living an idyllic life in Phnom Penh the capital city of Cambodia. Her father was a major in the military police for the government of Lon Nol, leader of Cambodia in the early 1970’s. She enjoyed luxuries like free movies at the theater, running water, two home telephones and maid at home. She describes the family’s life as middle class, but upper class may be an even more accurate description.
But all that changes in April 1975 when a group of long haired dark-skinned men enter the capital in triumph. They are the rebel fighters from the Khmer Rouge and have just ousted Nol’s government. What follows is one of the most terrifying examples of Communist ideology gone awry that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Cambodian civilians.
The Khmer Rouge, known as “Angkar,” or the organization, wanted to recreate the ideal, agrarian Cambodian society and sought to do this by forcing everyone to relocate from the cities to the villages where they will live communally. Ung, her six brothers and sisters and her mother and father set off first by truck and later on foot to their new life.
Through Ung’s eyes, we witness how the Khmer Rouge have begun exterminating everyone who previously worked for the regime and all other people believed to be potentially disloyal including intellectuals. People with glasses can be killed on the spot. This puts Ung’s father in a particularly perilous position and the family must lie about their previous life once they are relocated to a village.
To see this new order through the eyes of a child is something extraordinary. At a village called Ro Leap, the second one the family flees to, they are instructed by the village chief that “The children will change what they call their parents. Father is now ‘Poh’ and not ‘Daddy,’ ‘Pa’ or any other term, mother is ‘Meh.’”…The new Khmer have better words for eating, sleeping, working, stranger; all designed to make us equal.” (60)
All of this is designed to erase all foreign influences from Khmer culture and to hoist up the rural lifestyle as the ideal way of living. The Khmer prohibit watches, electronics and all colorful clothing. Children work in the fields or train for war instead of going to school. But to a child this backward movement of society is deeply confusing. ‘Pa, what are capitalists and why should they be killed?” Ung whispers in her father’s ear. (57) A simple question with no good answer.
Ung, however, as a narrator is both child-like and naive and oddly perceptive at the same time. She persists in believing she’ll be allowed back home by the Khmer regime long after it becomes clear that will never happen and she wonders aloud why anyone would ever want to harm her father. But some of the observations made by either her or her siblings seem so keenly observant and politically driven that it’s hard to believe the children would have been capable of making them.
For example, Kim, 11 years old at the time, ponders the fact that the food rations seem erratic going up one month and then back down again with no warning. He “speculates that it has to do with the Youns---the Vietnamese---attacking the borders. Everytime the Angkar thinks the Youns will invade Cambodia, the soldiers stock up on food and supplies and ship more rice to China in exchange for guns. When it turns out the Youns are not attacking us, the Angkar stops buying arms and our rations increase.”(120)
That is quite a sophisticated understanding of geopolitics and macroeconomics for an 11-year-old.
There are other points in the story, little vignettes, that seemed plucked from a historical rather than a personal account of the Cambodia horrors. For example, Ung describes using paper money as toilet paper to wipe herself which neatly illustrates both the collapse of the government and the scarcity of supplies. Upon leaving the capitol city---undoubtedly a terrifying experience for a small child---she takes time to note that all the huts stood empty and the fields unattended. A stark landscape, but what frame of reference would a spoiled five year old city girl have to make this comparison? Taken together, it is nearly impossible to accept this book completely as a work of non-fiction. Ung’s memories as a 5 to 9 year old would have to be superhumanly photographic.
That does not, however, mean the account should be dismissed. Ung saw this misguided revolution from the ground level. She was nearly starved to death even as she spent her days in the fields and paddies harvesting plentiful rice and shrimp. She learned how to use a weapon, was force-fed propaganda and was worked to the bone as a child laborer. Her horrifying account of sitting helplessly in a thatch hut with a distended belly and choosing to steal dry rice from her own family is heartbreaking.
Some parts of this book may have been remembered by Ung with the aid of news accounts or later interviews with family members. Some parts of the account may simply have been dreamed up. However, it is impossible to come away without being inspired by the journey this little girl has been on. If she is an author of fiction, we understand where that need to imagine comes from. When her father is taken away by Khmer soldiers she imagines being with him as he awaits execution on the edge of a mass grave. When her sister dies of food poisoning, Ung imagines being at her hospital bedside.
Some of the details of this work may be embroidered or embellished, but it shouldn’t be dismissed outright. There were, by some estimations, 2 million people killed by murder or illness during the reign of the Khmer Rouge. Almost none of them had the ability to commit their story to print which makes Ung’s account all the more valuable.