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Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak

Amazon.com Price:  $17.82 (as of 15/04/2019 02:53 PST- Details)

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“To take the time to understand what happened in Rwanda is a painful task that we haven’t any right to shirk–it is a part of being a moral adult.”
–Susan Sontag

In the late 1990s, French creator and journalist Jean Hatzfeld made several journeys into the hilly, marshy region of the Bugesera, probably the most 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 friends and family in the churches and marshes to which they fled, and they attempt to account for the reasons at the back of the Tutsi extermination. For many of the survivors “life has broken down,” whilst 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 disregard what can come to pass again. Winner of the Prix France Culture and the Prix Pierre Mille, Life Laid Bare allows us, in the creator’s own words, “to draw as close as we will be able to get to the Rwandan genocide.”

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