I have just finished Machete Season (Saison de machettes, 2003) by Jean Hatzfeld and I need to talk about it. It is an amazing and disturbing piece of writing. The second in a trilogy about the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, Machete is essentially a series of interviews with a group of perpetrators who all come from the same small region of Rwanda. The interviews take place in a prison where the men are being held for perpetrating genocide.
After interviewing the survivors from the area of Nyamata and writing a book about it (Dans le nue de la vie, 2000), Hatzfeld finds himself drawn to the perpetrators to try to understand how they lived the experience of systematically hunting and killing their neighbours everyday for over a month.
The answer is not pretty. The killers, who are at times grotesquely honest, show little insight into their actions. They are egotistical, self-centred and show no remorse, regret or sadness for the lives they have taken. They don't have nightmares. They are not mentally unstable. They are a group of men, sitting in prison, feeling bad for themselves, unwilling to explore within themselves the reality of the horror they have perpetrated. Disturbing stuff. I feel that in reading Machete, I have looked right into the darkest corners of the human soul. And what is most disturbing is how banal and normal killing can become.
I have been staring at people on the bus. We are all potential killers. I am feeling protective of my son.
I have started to read the third in the trilogy, La strategie des antilopes (2007, I don't think it has been translated into English yet), which is about life on the small hill community of Nyamata after the perpetrators are released from prison. The survivors and perpetrators are neighbours. This makes me want to scream yet I can't put it down.
Now, I want to read Eichmann in Jerusalem (Hannah Arendt, 1963) and Hatzfeld's earlier work on the war in Bosnia, L'Air de la guerre (1994).
I can't seem to get enough of this stuff. Why?
After interviewing the survivors from the area of Nyamata and writing a book about it (Dans le nue de la vie, 2000), Hatzfeld finds himself drawn to the perpetrators to try to understand how they lived the experience of systematically hunting and killing their neighbours everyday for over a month.
The answer is not pretty. The killers, who are at times grotesquely honest, show little insight into their actions. They are egotistical, self-centred and show no remorse, regret or sadness for the lives they have taken. They don't have nightmares. They are not mentally unstable. They are a group of men, sitting in prison, feeling bad for themselves, unwilling to explore within themselves the reality of the horror they have perpetrated. Disturbing stuff. I feel that in reading Machete, I have looked right into the darkest corners of the human soul. And what is most disturbing is how banal and normal killing can become.
I have been staring at people on the bus. We are all potential killers. I am feeling protective of my son.
I have started to read the third in the trilogy, La strategie des antilopes (2007, I don't think it has been translated into English yet), which is about life on the small hill community of Nyamata after the perpetrators are released from prison. The survivors and perpetrators are neighbours. This makes me want to scream yet I can't put it down.
Now, I want to read Eichmann in Jerusalem (Hannah Arendt, 1963) and Hatzfeld's earlier work on the war in Bosnia, L'Air de la guerre (1994).
I can't seem to get enough of this stuff. Why?
No comments:
Post a Comment