Rwandan Genocide Survivor Quotes

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.

I myself would like to see more explicit attention paid to the losses experienced due to the Japanese occupation in the Pacific during World War II, and for this history to be as much in dialog with Western culture as the war in Europe and the Holocaust has been, both in film and art, as well as in classrooms and in literature. Not only do I think it's important for the Western survivors of the internment camps like my father to be acknowledged and their trauma addressed, but the vast majority of Japanese forces' victims in World War II were millions of Asians, and with the singular focus on the Nazi occupation, I think there's a great deal of Eurocentrism in our Western understanding of the Second World War. It's important that we address this, because an attitude in the West of regions we deem as less important can lead to events such as the Rwandan genocide in 1994, during which the Western world turned a blind eye and the United Nations refused to send aid as an estimated 800,000 people were slaughtered. As long as we continue to divide the world according to our "us and them" mentality, I believe these tragedies will continue. This is not just about politics, because when we talk about politics we are talking about people.