abdourahman waberi in the united states of africa

In his preface, Waberi asks, 'How many bodies are we talking about? Falling, stumbling, caught by the ends of the hair, finished off, emasculated, defiled, raped, incinerated?' The novel's fractured form lends the subject matter depth and scale while the stories are each personal and intimate, the collective pain is vast.

Divided into 'Fictions' and 'Stories,' the book is broadly categorized as fiction but maintains a heavy autobiographical bent. Waberi (In the United States of Africa), professor of French and Francophone literature at George Washington University, places this short, intricate novel in 1998 Rwanda, four years after the genocide, weaving horrific memories and allusions to the atrocity into stories of dealing with the trauma. And yet, if we want to hold on to a glimmer of hope in the world, the only miraculous weapons we have at our disposal are these same clumsy supports.' Shaped by the author's own experiences in Rwanda and by the stories shared by survivors, Harvest of Skulls stands twenty years after the genocide as an indisputable resource for discussions on testimony and witnessing, the complex relationship between victims and perpetrators, the power of the moral imagination, and how survivors can rebuild a society haunted by the ghost of its history. Waberi claims, 'Language remains inadequate in accounting for the world and all its turpitudes, words can never be more than unstable crutches, staggering along. In this multidimensional novel, Abdourahman A. Given the failure of the international community to acknowledge the genocide, in 1998, ten African authors visited Rwanda in a writing initiative that was an attempt to make partial amends.

In 1994, the akazu, Rwandan's political elite, planned the genocidal mass slaughter of 500,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi and Hutu who lived in the country.

Abdourahman waberi in the united states of africa