Reading Elie Wiesel after fleeing Rwanda
You cannot bear witness with a single word like genocide. Yet Night describes exactly what happened to me.
Photographs of some of the 800,000 people killed in 1994 on display at the Genocide Memorial Centre in Kigali, Rwanda. Some rights reserved by Adam Jones, Ph.D.
My eighth-grade English teacher put the word genocide on a vocabulary list. I hated it immediately.
The word is tidy and efficient. It holds no true emotion. It is impersonal when it needs to be intimate; cool and sterile when it needs to be gruesome. The word is hollow, true but disingenuous, a performance, the worst kind of lie. It cannot do justice—it is not meant to do justice—to the thing it describes.
The word genocide cannot tell you, cannot make you feel, the way I felt as a child in Rwanda. The way I felt in Burundi. The way I wished to be invisible because I knew someone wanted me dead at a point in my life when I did not yet understand what death was.
