The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Placing Philip Gourevitch’s Account of Genocide within Literary, Postcolonial, and Human Rights Frameworks

Zoe Norridge

Introduction

Three years after the end of the Second World War, the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the General Assembly on December 9, 1948 in Paris. A day later, the same Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Genocide, or more specifically, responses to the horrors of the Holocaust, played a key role in the international community’s turn towards human rights in the second half of the twentieth century. Defined as the attempt to destroy a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, in whole or in part, the concept of genocide was comparative from the start. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term in 1944, cited the Armenian genocide as evidence of such an attempt, and sadly, by the end of the century, there would be several more examples across different continents, including genocides in the Balkans and Rwanda in the mid-1990s.

In Rwanda between 800,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis and their perceived Hutu and Twa sympathizers were killed in just 100 days between April and July 1994. A small East African country, around the size of Belgium, Rwanda was densely populated with people who had lived together for centuries, sharing a common culture, language, religion, and history. However, over the course of the twentieth century, beginning with the Belgian introduction of identity cards in 1926, ethnic politics in Rwanda became increasingly fraught (Hintjens 2001: 27; Buckley-Zistel 2006: 135). In 1959 the Tutsi monarchy was deposed by the majority Hutu population to create a Hutu republic, and years of violence against the Tutsi ensued in what Bertrand Russell described at the time as “[t]he most horrible and systematic human massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis” (quoted in Melvern 2000: 17). Polarization, facilitated by propaganda, legislation, and political organization, continued through Independence (1962), Habyarimana’s coup d’état (1973), and the civil war of the early 1990s (Prunier 1995; Newbury 1998; Mamdani 2001). When President Habyarimana’s plane was shot down on April 6, 1994, a planned campaign of violence erupted swiftly in Kigali and then unfurled across the country.

A year after the genocide had been ended by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (an army of exiled Rwandan Tutsis trained in Uganda), Philip Gourevitch travelled to the country for the first time. His seminal account of the Rwanda genocide We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, was published three years later. Controversial genocide scholar René Lemarchand claims that the book had a profound effect on Clinton’s international policy (2005: 99). This was achieved not solely through political and historical analysis (of which the narrative has plenty) but also through Gourevitch’s extraordinary ability to animate different testimonial voices and to explore the complexities of violence and responsibility in the Great Lakes. He himself comments: “This is a book about how people imagine themselves and one another – a book about how we imagine our world. … This is what fascinates me most in existence: the peculiar necessity of imagining what is, in fact, real” (Gourevitch [1998] 2000: 7).

Genocide and the fight against genocide are driven by ideas: the idea that a people do not deserve the status of human and can be exterminated, the idea that such horrendous crimes can be addressed and prevented. Literature, including literary nonfiction, offers an extraordinary space in which to explore the imaginative frameworks necessary for such gestures. How does We Wish to Inform You, one of the earliest and most influential books about the Rwanda genocide, articulate these ideas? What frames does the American journalist use to approach such a foreign subject matter? And how does the literary nature of his project contribute to our understanding of events in the region? This chapter argues that Philip Gourevitch, through his extraordinary ability to personalize and question dominant narratives, makes a unique contribution to complicating human rights debates in a manner that continues to shape both literary and scholarly representations of Rwanda.

Global geographies of genocide

Literary accounts of the genocide in Rwanda repeatedly place the violence within a global context. Gourevitch, who dedicates We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families to his parents, themselves refugees from Nazi Europe, opens his narrative with an italicized paragraph reflecting on the “decimation” of the Rwandan population ([1998] 2000: 3). He compares the rate at which Tutsis were killed to the pace of the murder of Jewish prisoners during the Holocaust, concluding “[i]t was the most efficient mass killing since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” (Gourevitch [1998] 2000: 3). This global comparison serves several functions: it stresses the seriousness of the human loss; it evokes an organized attack on a population (rather than the theme of senseless “tribal killings” which recurred in early media responses); and it offers an accusation – Rwandan mass killing is compared to an American (and Allied European) action – the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan. Such juxtapositions and accusations continue throughout Gourevitch’s narrative and also feature in other literary responses to the genocide by both visiting and Rwandan writers (Hatzfeld 2000; Mukagasana with May 1997).

By referring to his family, Gourevitch grounds his connection to genocide in personal experience of the international Jewish diaspora. For example, he describes visiting the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC in May 1994. As he queued, he read a newspaper about the killings in Rwanda accompanied by a photograph of “bodies swirling in the water, dead bodies, bloated and colorless, bodies so numerous that they jammed against each other and clogged the stream” (Gourevitch [1998] 2000: 152). Seeing this image of genocide as he waited outside the Holocaust Museum, Gourevitch felt the redundancy of messages of “Remember” and “Never Again.” This personal disillusionment is later echoed through his use of epigraphs. He begins the final section of the book with two quotations from Italian survivor Primo Levi’s writing. The first, from 1958, states the impossibility of the Holocaust happening a second time. The second, from 1986, asserts, with the bitterness of experience: “It happened, therefore it can happen again” ([1998] 2000: 275). We Wish to Inform You relentlessly questions why the world failed to learn from earlier events.

Gourevitch goes to great lengths to explore the complicity of the international community in the Rwanda genocide. He refers to Belgian colonial legacies, French support of Habyarimana’s genocidal army, US inaction and equivocation in the face of mounting evidence that genocide was taking place, the withdrawal of UN troops, ineffective international measures, misreadings of the refugee crisis in (then) Zaire, and the harboring of alleged perpetrators in France and the US. Some of his harshest criticisms engage with the ways in which badly reported and incomplete information about the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath has damaged the country. Critiques of global media and the mistakes of international governments could have resulted in a book focused on international relations to the detriment of situated individual stories. However, as we will see in the next section, Gourevitch deliberately balances overarching global concerns with narratives that are grounded in historical and geographical specificities.

Specifically situated crimes

Whilst most academics, human rights activists, and Rwandans agree that the international community responded inadequately to the 1994 genocide, opinions remain divided about the actions of the incoming government in the aftermath of violence. We Wish to Inform You seeks to explore this contentious terrain through in-depth discussion of a particular rights violation. Gourevitch first visited Rwanda for The New Yorker on a mission to make sense of news reports of refugees who had been killed in the “internally displaced persons” camp in Kibeho. He wanted to understand “how the killings at Kibeho camp related and compared to the genocide that preceded them” (Gourevitch [1998] 2000: 187), rejecting from the outset the observation by genocide scholar Filip Reyntjens that “[i]t’s not a story of good guys and bad guys, it’s a story of bad guys. Period” ([1998] 2000: 186).

We Wish to Inform You identifies an issue that continues to plague scholarship on Rwanda today: how are scholars to understand human rights violations committed in the aftermath of genocide given the highly complex and inflammatory political context? Gourevitch comments:

According to the human rights orthodoxy of our age, [comparisons of killings] are taboo. In the words of Amnesty International: “Whatever the scale of atrocities committed by one side they can never justify similar atrocities by the other.” But what does the word “similar” mean in the context of a genocide? An atrocity is an atrocity and is by definition unjustifiable, isn’t it? The more useful question is whether atrocity is the whole story.

([1998] 2000: 187)

In asking “whether atrocity is the whole story,” Gourevitch makes an important intervention in the debate about the importance of overarching legal principles as opposed to events located within specific social and political contexts (for more on the tensions between legal descriptions of genocide and the specificities of testimonial narratives see Norridge 2011: 243–46; 2012: 158–64). The example of Kibeho opens up a space for exploring further.

Camps for IDPs (internally displaced persons) were set up by the French as they left Rwanda in late August 1994 (Gourevitch [1998] 2000: 188). The Rwandan government sought to close them as swiftly as possible, asserting it was safe for people to return home and believing that the concentration of génocidaires in these camps, both within and on the border with Rwanda, posed a threat to national security. Gourevitch details the problems encountered by the government, the UN, and relief agencies in closing these temporary homes and the descent into violence at Kibeho, where several thousand were killed through crushing by crowds under fire from the Rwandan Army. He discusses events with NGO workers who were present, unable to assist those being trampled underfoot ([1998] 2000: 196), and later with (then) Vice-President Paul Kagame, who acknowledged mistakes but insisted there was no organized use of excessive force ([1998] 2000: 208). In doing so, We Wish to Inform You paints a picture of unplanned human fallibility that contrasts starkly with the planned acts of genocide committed in 1994.

Gourevitch juxtaposes his description of Kibeho with several pages remembering and reflecting on his visit to the genocide site at Nyarubuye, a visit first introduced at the opening of the book. He describes the corpses of genocide victims that were still on display in Nyarubuye a year after the genocide, compelling evidence of the horror of the crimes that took place within this church and school compound. In doing so, he implicitly asks to what extent the thousands dead at Nyarubuye can be compared with those thousands who died in the closing of the IDP camp in Kibeho. Both were sites of religious significance. The former was a place where local Tutsis were rounded up and then killed en masse, deliberately, with machetes and grenades, in an attempt to remove an ethnic group from Rwanda. The latter he describes as a site where people were crushed accidentally and shot by soldiers during a failed operation to close the camp.

Gourevitch’s genius lies in presenting the context and human detail for these stories, alongside probing questions and observations, but without spelling out any simplistic interpretation. Instead, he looks for the “whole story” and this he finds through locally grounded narratives, told by specific witnesses. Such narratives, such testimony, opens up a space peculiar to literary texts in which the reader is invited to consider both the human rights principle (security of the person) alongside the complexities of historical events. Whilst some might argue such relativism is dangerous, in a country like Rwanda surely this localizing and indeed personalizing of events is necessary if we are to have any holistic appreciation of the nature of the offense. Ultimately, Gourevitch, in the human rights context at least, is an excellent reader. Where Amnesty asserts “whatever the scale of atrocities committed by one side they can never justify similar atrocities by the other,” Gourevitch invites us to consider whether “similar” can have any meaning at all.

Enduring (post)colonial frames?

Whilst Gourevitch’s discussion of the politics of violence encompasses both the global and the local, his appreciation of culture is more definitively grounded within a Euro-American frame. In the very first descriptive passage of the book, Gourevitch evokes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and reflects, “I took Marlow’s condition on returning from Africa as my point of departure” ([1998] 2000: 7). Conrad’s classic anti-imperial late-nineteenth-century novel of discovery traces Marlow’s journey up the river Congo into what is now the DRC. Whilst Marlow began on Congo’s west coast, Rwanda shares borders with this vast nation thousands of miles to the east where each country clasps half of Lake Kivu in its arms. Perhaps because of this loose regional association (although in practice the area of Congo described by Conrad is as far away from the Rwandan border as London is from Marrakech) and certainly because of the evocation of Africa as a dark and incomprehensibly cruel place, Heart of Darkness is, unfortunately, a recurring intertext for writing about Rwanda (Norridge 2011: 250). What is problematic about this cultural framing is not only the century of change and political maneuvering that has elapsed since Conrad put pen to paper, but also Gourevitch and other writers’ apparent obliviousness to the incendiary debates about racism and dehumanizing descriptions of Africans in the novel, most famously articulated by Chinua Achebe in his essay “An Image of Africa” (1989).

If Gourevitch drew on Conrad in order to cast European imperialism in a problematic light as he does with his references to other incidences of mass killing, then the reference would be understandable, provided it was countered with other passages that examined the specificities of Rwandan culture. However, whilst Gourevitch is fascinated by the social fabric of Rwandan life, in this early text he is problematically dismissive of the arts in the country, commenting: “Rwanda had a few spectacular costume dances, some traditional songs, and an oral literature of poems and tales that followed archaic forms from precolonial times, but no arts to compete with its neighbors” ([1998] 2000: 257). This assertion ignores the extraordinary complexity and beauty of Rwandan traditional dance, the richness of oral Kingdom poetry recorded by Alexis Kagame for posterity (1969), the dynamism of verse as a continually evolving form at the heart of Rwandan cultural life, and the metaphorical and allusive complexity of Kinyarwanda, itself an art form of linguistic expression.

Gourevitch’s dismissal of Rwandan artistic practices reflects both the devastating effects of the genocide (many artists were dead or in exile) and enduring assumptions about the absence of culture in Africa when familiar art forms are not immediately apparent. The richness of Kinyarwandan verbal culture is inaccessible for an outsider without extensive grounding in the language, the sophistication and stylized nature of Rwandan movement vocabularies are understood only through learning or at the very least being coached in observing Rwandan dance in detail. Such myopia has been established and supported through centuries of writing about the continent and, more poignantly, through the ways in which African cultural forms have been denied prominence and a share of international space. Gourevitch repeatedly cites great European authors, from Plato to Levi, Milton to Conrad. No African writers find their way onto these pages, although Naipaul, himself an inflammatory commentator on Africa, makes a fleeting appearance (Gourevitch [1998] 2000: 61). This seems to reflect what Abiola Irele, in The African Imagination, commenting on the portrayal of Africans in European-authored narratives, refers to as “the absence of imaginative sympathy with the continent or its people as bearers of culture” (Irele 2001: 14).

Humanizing individuals

Even here, however, We Wish to Inform You is more complex than it might at first appear. Whilst the dismissal of the richness of Rwandan cultural forms is a significant problem, Gourevitch does not fall into the other trap identified by Irele in which Europeans (and by extension, in our case, Americans) exclude Africans as human beings from their narratives. Instead, Gourevitch has spent extended periods of time in Rwanda, conducting lengthy interviews with Rwandans in English and with translators. These conversations then find their way onto the pages of his text through mixtures of quoted dialogue, reported exchanges, and descriptions of meaningful characteristics – mannerisms, tone of voice. In an interview I conducted with Gourevitch in Kigali in Summer 2012, he referred to his writing as “call and response” – a key question calls up a story, which calls up a key question, which calls up a story.

Odette Nyiramilimo is one of Gourevitch’s interviewees whose story resurfaces throughout the narrative on at least 16 separate occasions, in response to particular issues. Her voice first appears after a chapter about Cain and Abel and the polarization of ethnic identities in Rwanda. In that chapter, the fourth of the book, Gourevitch pays careful attention to the politics of colonial legacies, citing the Ugandan academic Mahmood Mamdani and critiquing John Hanning Speke’s Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile for the damage caused by his formulation of the racist Hamitic hypothesis, that would go on to prove so ethnically divisive in Rwanda (Gourevitch [1998] 2000: 51). Observing that “colonization is violence,” Gourevitch here appears acutely aware of the reductive and destructive nature of such colonial discourse ([1998] 2000: 52). As if to counter these colonial tendencies, this chapter is followed by the first in-depth examination of a specific survivor story.

Odette asks, at the opening of Chapter 5, “My story from birth? … Do you really have time for that?” Gourevitch responds that he does ([1998] 2000: 63). Born in 1956, Odette’s narrative is framed by the roots of genocide and memories of the violence that began in 1959. This is perhaps why Odette’s voice returns so often: she is of an age to have significant adult memories of the years leading up to genocide, the Hutu identity of her husband and her Hutu friends demonstrate the interconnectedness of social relations in Rwanda, and her elite status means that she personally recalls meetings with key figures such as Dallaire, Rusesabagina, and Sindikubwabo. It is also the story of a sympathetic, intelligent woman who moves in the same circles as Gourevitch himself in Kigali. It is a relationship in which both partners are aware of the power dynamics of journalism but in which there is a strong sense of equality.

I have written elsewhere about how literary responses to Rwanda repeatedly aim to rehumanize those Rwandan Tutsis who were systematically dehumanized during the genocide. This is often achieved through detailed descriptions of nuanced emotions – emotions that ground us in the human capacity to feel at difficult moments when the stark, often visually gripping, horror might otherwise obscure the person living through the violence (Norridge 2011: 245). We Wish to Inform You both engages in such humanizing detail and, in the case of Odette, offers glimpses of the lives beyond tragedy, of the flaws and idiosyncrasies of human beings. So, for example, Odette recalls that she and her husband were happily drinking whisky with a visitor on the evening they heard the presidential plane had been shot down. The visitor was “handicapped,” and her husband had assisted him with finding the money to buy a television. She remembers how he used to say, “I’m going to die if I don’t have a TV to watch.” Then she adds, wryly: “Unfortunately he never got to watch his TV. He was killed that night” ([1998] 2000: 111). The drama of the desperation for television resonates cruelly against the man’s actual death. The strength of his characterization renders him real.

Another incident offers both such a humanizing lens through which to view Odette’s past and a way of framing and examining Gourevitch’s own position as a listener. Whilst remembering her medical training in Butare, Odette recalls a married professor who patted her bottom and made sexual overtures. The narrative is told in Odette’s voice as a direct quotation; Gourevitch then observes that the story “popped out of her like that,” apparently unconnected to the rest of her narrative, before she moved swiftly on. Despite the topic changing, the “image of her as a young student in an awkward moment of sexual surprise and discomfort” hangs between them. He comments: “It seemed to amuse Odette, and it reminded me of all that she wasn’t telling as she recited her life story. She was keeping everything that was not about Hutu and Tutsi to herself” ([1998] 2000: 70). Gourevitch is aware that during most of their meeting Odette “spoke as a genocide survivor to a foreign correspondent” ([1998] 2000: 71). But this incident is used to reveal to the author, and indeed the reader, the extent to which the people described in this text have a life of their own: they exist beyond the parameters of genocide and cannot be reduced to a historically framed caesura.

Gourevitch is well aware of the limitations of the outside observer. Reflecting on Odette’s narrative, he recalls the memoirs written by his paternal grandmother and maternal grandfather who fled Nazi Europe with his parents: “[B]oth ended their accounts of their lives right in the middle of those lives, with a full stop at the moment they arrived in America” ([1998] 2000: 71). In viewing Odette’s story alongside those of his grandparents, he acknowledges the memories that survivors keep for themselves, beyond the gaze of historians and reporters. Gourevitch’s glimpses of these memories and moments of intuition into the private mind of a person, through his conversations, are those that I find the most fascinating. In these passages he moves beyond the case study format of a human rights report where every detail of a testimony must tell a story, into a realm of literary world-creation where the evocation of complex humanity is the most profound act of resistance to the homogenization of mass violence.

Conclusion

One of the key questions examined by both postcolonial criticism and human rights theory is “who has the right to speak?” As a journalist fascinated by injustice and inequalities, Gourevitch has built a career upon speaking truth to power, be that through an examination of the incompetency and cruelty of American forces in Iraq (The Ballad of Abu Ghraib) or through this ambitious book detailing the causes, evolution, and human consequences of the genocide in Rwanda. Edward Said memorably argued that such a gesture involves “carefully weighing the alternatives, picking the right one, and then intelligently representing it where it can do the most good and cause the right change” (1993). Through his examination of the complexity of genocide in Rwanda and his reevaluation of criticisms of actions taken by the RPF forces and subsequent government after the genocide, Gourevitch uses the gift of extended research periods proffered by The New Yorker to speak back to the inaccuracies and simplifications of global media.

Twenty years after 1994, many of the key literary responses to genocide in Rwanda have been written by visiting writers, academics, and journalists, from French historian Gérard Prunier to Irish reporter Fergal Keane, from the Senegalese novelist Boubacar Boris Diop to the Australian transitional justice specialist Phil Clark. Their narratives are peopled with Rwandan voices, their texts grounded in conversations with Rwandan survivors, perpetrators, bystanders, and returnees. Gourevitch’s work is remarkable for the sheer scope and variety of the voices he animates and for those questions he raises that continue to resonate in Rwanda today. Many of the themes he examines have since been reexamined by Rwandan authors in testimony and fiction: Louise Mushikiwabo’s memoir of both her own life and her country, Rwanda Means the Universe (with Kramer 2006), Benjamin Séhène’s novel about Father Wenceslas, Le feu sous la soutane (2005), and Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel Notre-dame du nil (2012) exploring the effect of ethnic discrimination on life in boarding school, are just three out of many. These Rwandan authors demonstrate an intimate understanding of Rwandan culture that Gourevitch’s text may lack, but they also return to the debates he first articulated, time and again.

How then do we place Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You within the context of writing from Rwanda? As one of the earliest and most influential texts published about the genocide, I would argue that it set the tone for an exploration of human rights contraventions grounded in historical particularities, global responsibilities, individual stories, and the politics of international storytelling that would continue through into much subsequent writing. His work places human rights at the center of the discussion of genocide, but it does so with careful reflection on what global articulations of rights – particularly the failure of global articulations of rights – mean for the legitimacy of the discourse in a postconflict African country. Gourevitch’s careful research, foregrounding of Rwandan voices, and probing questions render We Wish to Inform You exemplary within the genre.