Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide - Hardcover

Lyons, Robert; Straus, Scott

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1890951633 ISBN 13: 9781890951634

Publisher: Zone Books, 2006

Synopsis

In 1994, an interim government in Rwanda orchestrated one of the world’s worst mass crimes: a hundred-day extermination campaign that took half a million lives. At the time, Rwanda’s genocide went largely unnoticed by the outside world. Today there is growing interest in Rwanda, as many discover the horror that took place and seek to understand how and why violence of this character and magnitude could have happened in our time.

Intimate Enemy is a rare entrée into the logic, language, and imagery of Rwanda’s violence. The book presents perpetrator testimony and photographs of both perpetrators and survivors. The images and words are raw and unanalyzed, leaving the reader to make sense of the killers and their would-be victims.

Intimate Enemy challenges our assumptions about the genocide and those who perpetrated it. The book also prods us to consider how to represent and imagine violence on the scale of Rwanda’s.

About this title

About the Author

Photographer Robert Lyons is the author of two notable books on Africa. Another Africa is an exploration, with writer Chinua Achebe, of the real Africa behind the stereotypes commonly held by Westerners; Egyptian Time is a collection of photographs of Egypt and its people, accompanied by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz's short story "The Cradle."

From the Inside Flap

"It would be appalling to think that the hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutu who participated in the 1994 genocide were all either evil or psychotic. But it's even more shocking to learn the real lesson of this riveting book: that most of them were completely ordinary men, who went along with the killings for the most mundane of reasons - conformity, grudges, small loot, indifference, ennui. It's impossible to read the text and view the photos and not think: 'There but for the grace of god go I.' This publication is a major contribution both to the study of the Rwandan genocide and to the larger study of human nature under pressure." --Gerald Caplan, author of *Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide* and founder of Remembering Rwanda

"Though it names the most monstrous of crimes, genocide appears a damnably abstract word, veiling humanity in the cold accretion of numbers. To most, 'Rwanda' means hundreds of thousands killed in a hundred days. *Intimate Enemy*, by its photographs and words, its faces and voices, begins to restore what is too often missing in accounts of this unimaginable crime: the terrible intimacy of felt life." --Mark Danner, author of *Torture and Truth: America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror*

Reviews

If the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide interviewed by political science professor Straus are to be believed, virtually none of them acted voluntarily; it was only because their own lives were threatened that they shot, stabbed and bludgeoned to death thousands of Tutsis. The plausibility of their stories is left up to the reader. "The book's purpose," writes Straus, "is not to interpret or analyze... but to present largely unmediated narratives and images." Fair enough. If intended purely as a primary source on the genocide, Straus's text may indeed be useful. It is the book's second section, comprising unremarkable portraits of Rwandans by Lyons, which is more problematic. "I felt that condemning those responsible for the genocide too easily makes them into the 'other,' " writes Lyons, who therefore alternates images of perpetrators with victims to emphasize their similarities. Would such sensitivity to criminals be contemplated if they were not African? Would Lyons present side-by-side photos of Holocaust victims and Nazis? Lynching victims and KKK members? Lyons, in making the point that we are all capable of cruelty, conflates a generalized potential for evil with actual acts of genocide. In the process, he takes moral relativism to a mushy-headed extreme. (Apr.)
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Much has been written about the genocide against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1994. This collection of interviews and photographs brings a more intimate dimension to attempts to understand the personal and cultural issues surrounding the genocide, in which neighbor slaughtered neighbor using rudimentary weapons. This collection departs from scholarly analysis and judicial investigations. Between 1998 and 2001, Straus conducted interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and suspects, to allow individuals in their own words--accompanied by their faces and other images--to talk about what happened in the largest genocide campaign in the twentieth century. A farmer who participated in the slaughter characterizes Rwandans as cowlike, unable to resist orders from authorities; an army reservist explains that unless women and children were killed, there would be no complete extermination; a man who killed his brother, who had a Tutsi wife, describes how he was forced, at gunpoint, to commit the murder. The testimony, preceded by only the briefest explanations, is often chilling, and the photos are poignant in this stirring look at the Rwandan genocide. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Zone Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1890951633
• ISBN 13: 9781890951634
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 188