"To make the effort to understand what happened in Rwanda is a painful
task that we have no right to shirk-it is part of being a moral
adult."
-Susan Sontag
In the late 1990s, French author and journalist Jean Hatzfeld made
several journeys into the hilly, marshy region of the Bugesera, one of
the areas most devastated by the Rwandan genocide of April 1994, where
an average of five out of six Tutsis were hacked to death with machete
and spear by their Hutu neighbors and militiamen. In the villages of
Nyamata and N'tarama, Hatzfeld interviewed fourteen survivors of the
genocide, from orphan teenage farmers to the local social worker. For
years the survivors had lived in a muteness as enigmatic as the silence
of those who survived the Nazi concentration camps. In Life Laid Bare,
they speak for those who are no longer alive to speak for themselves;
they tell of the deaths of family and friends in the churches and
marshes to which they fled, and they attempt to account for the reasons
behind the Tutsi extermination. For many of the survivors "life has
broken down," while for others, it has "stopped," and still others say
that it "absolutely must go on."
These horrific accounts of life at the very edge contrast with
Hatzfeld's own sensitive and vivid descriptions of Rwanda's villages and
countryside in peacetime. These voices of courage and resilience
exemplify the indomitable human spirit, and they remind us of our own
moral responsibility to bear witness to these atrocities and to never
forget what can come to pass again. Winner of the Prix France Culture
and the Prix Pierre Mille, Life Laid Bare allows us, in the author's own
words, "to draw as close as we can get to the Rwandan genocide."
