Understanding the Bearing of Witness
Philip Gourevitch is the son of Holocaust survivors, and that is partially the reason, he says, he wanted to explore why the Nuremburg promise of "never again" failed so utterly and completely during the murder of almost a million Rwandans in the spring of 1994, essentially without the world taking notice. Or to paraphrase the Western journalist in Hotel Rwanda (responding to the hope expressed by main character Hotelier Paul Rusesabagina that the shocking images of the massacre would bring the world's justice-makers to the doorstep): "You know what they'll do? They'll say, 'Oh, those poor people!' And then they'll go on eating their dinner."
So in 1997 Gourevitch went to Rwanda and interviewed hundreds of people: peasants, generals, bureaucrats, soldiers and doctors; foreigners and Rwandans. And he wrote "We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families," the title of which is taken from a letter written by doomed parishioners to a preacher who resolutely turned aside and let them die.
Gourevitch's book was my book club choice this month, and in preparation for it I delved into the broader current geopolitical situation in the Great Rift Valley today. I found, among other things, a graphical attempt to make sense of the military pressures and counterpressures resulting in part from the Rwandan genocide and in part from post-colonial Central African strife writ large.
It's impossible, isn't it? That graph is impossible to understand, even if you had some inkling of the nature of all the groups it attempts to interrelate. Gourevitch's book is difficult too, because even though he tells a story, and he starts at a 'beginning' and finds a way to come to an 'end,' he doesn't shrink from bringing the complexity of the place and the circumstances and the names and the peripheral affiliates into the tale. So it's hard to read and hard to grasp. The movie simplifies the equation to some fairly bare essentials (unlikely hero with imperiled wife and children, world gone mad, minimal success born of desperation and an unimpeachable moral core), and makes a brilliant job of it, but it brings no depth of understanding.
I lived in the Rift Valley for three years. I knew many of the places in Gourevitch's book well, including the Hotel des Mille Collines itself, and the lesser-known monastery of Mokoto (destroyed and all its people banished or killed in the tidal wave of hatred that spread out from the Rwandan disaster and is still consuming the Rift countries). I know what the people and places look like, sound like, smell like and feel like.
But I don't understand. I don't even understand the intricacies of the relationships between cultures and lifestyles in the region, let alone begin to grasp, on a broader philosophical level, why individuals make the choices they do and how those choices burgeon into unstoppable mass movements. In trying to collect my thoughts for a discourse at my book club, I'm utterly stymied for any simple summary statement, even one so banal as "that was evil," because to name something 'evil' is to claim the ability to judge it on its merits. And in all that complexity; in the turmoil of history, geography, politics and indistinct choices on all sides, one's ability to judge is whittled to nothingness.
Perhaps I can say only this: in response to such events, simplicity is vanquished under the overwhelming burden of our all-too-human complexities, and it is only through the long passage of time that any understanding -- or ability to avoid its repetition -- can be derived.
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