Journeying into Rwanda

This chapter argues that Philip Gourevitch, through his extraordinary ability to personalize and question dominant narratives, makes a unique contribution to complicating human rights debates in a manner that continues to shape both literary and scholarly representations of Rwanda. Literary accounts of the genocide in Rwanda repeatedly place the violence within a global context. Gourevitch, who dedicates We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families to his parents, themselves refugees from Nazi Europe, opens his narrative with an italicized paragraph reflecting on the "decimation" of the Rwandan population. Gourevitch goes to great lengths to explore the complicity of the international community in the Rwanda genocide. He refers to Belgian colonial legacies, French support of Habyarimana&s;s genocidal army, US inaction and equivocation in the face of mounting evidence that genocide was taking place, the withdrawal of UN troops, ineffective international measures, misreadings of the refugee crisis in Zaire.

Geography · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts

• The revival of Rwandan culture

  Open Access•Gowsalya Paulraj, Jothi Chidambaram et al.•Humanities and Social Sciences…•2026

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