The posts below are new territory. I strongly hesitate to post the following. There could be copyright issues, ethical mistakes, and the most raw result of sheer hatred I’ve ever seen.
We traveled to a Church yesterday where 26,000 were massacred. We had read about this church in Phillip Gourevitch’s We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (the best piece of journalism on the Genocide that I’ve come across, I strongly recommend it. So we traveled out to the church to do just what Gourevitch did: to be stuck with the experience of seeing the murdered Tutsis.
I don’t think I can yet face personal reflection or prayer alone on what I saw. I don’t know if I’m ready. I am not yet at the point where I can write about my experience, so I give you the opening pages of Gourevitch’s great work.
Perhaps where I really cross the line is what follows the 4 page excerpt from the book: images of evidence. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. These nullify that proverb. You will have no words.
Posting the pages probably is not legal. Displaying the photos may take the dignity away from the murdered. But perhaps the rules must be broken. It is the same government that enforces copyright laws that not only sat by and did nothing in 1994, but prevented other countries from intervening.
But maybe with the photos, the bubble of your world and my world will slowly start to dissolve, like a soap bubble that swirls with an array of colors right before it can’t take the oxygen any more and it pops. Maybe the photos will expose the genocide that happened, and the genocide that happens (savedarfur.org). I hope that for me these images tear down my comfortable limits that suburbia, America, consumerism, and Gnostic Christianity impose on me.
I hate that these images exist, but if we don’t look, then the hate will surely still exist.
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