Book Essay: Rwanda

“We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families” is a devastating account of Rwanda’s genocide in the 1990s.

Philip Gourevitch writes with a graphic, yet calm style, almost like he is still in shock years after the fact when he wrote the book.

Early on Gourevitch said it all: “The dead looked like pictures of the dead. They did not smell. They did not buzz with flies. They had been killed thirteen months earlier, and they hadn’t been moved.”

Then he explained why he threw himself into this massacre over a year after the fact: “That was why I had felt compelled to come to Nyarubuye: to be stuck with them – not with their experience, but with the experience of looking at them.”

And isn’t that what we all should do as effective journalists? Whether our stories are about genocide or the local stockbroker downtown, our task is to remain object, yet to give the readers a true sense of realness. And that’s what Gourevitch attempted. He didn’t subject himself to physically suffering in the same massacres to somehow justify his existence, but he went to grasp the situation and relay it graphically to his readers.

As journalists we will be faced with many emotional stories throughout our careers, and we must learn to get deep inside the minds of our story subjects and tell the story as authentically as possible without tipping the balance of objectivity.