We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

by Philip Gourevitch

I said that I was resistant to the very idea of leaving bodies like that, forever in their state of violation—on display as monuments to the crime against them, and to the armies that had stopped the killing, as much as to the lives they had lost. Such places contradicted the spirit of the popular Rwandan T-shirt: “Genocide. Bury the dead, not the truth.” I thought that was a good slogan, and I doubted the necessity of seeing the victims in order fully to confront the crime. The aesthetic assault of the macabre creates excitement and emotion, but does the spectacle really serve our understanding of the wrong? Judging from my own response to cruel images and to what I had seen in the hospital ward of Kibeho wounded, I wondered whether people aren’t wired to resist assimilating too much horror. Even as we look at atrocity, we find ways to regard it as unreal. And the more we look, the more we become inured to—not informed by—what we are seeing. I said these things, and Alexandre said, “I totally disagree. I experienced Kibeho as a movie. It was unreal. Only afterward, looking at my photographs—then it became real.”