unforgettable journey to Rwanda twenty years after the devastating genocide, from the author of the modern classic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
His earthshatteringbook, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, opened our eyes to Rwandas genocide: In one hundred days nearly a million people were murdered by their fellow citizens, and the world refused to stop it.
Now, on the twentieth anniversary of the slaughter, Philip Gourevitch returns to Rwanda,
A fiercely beautiful literary reckoning, You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know explores with great insight and intimacy a society in which killers and survivors live again as neighbors, grappling with the burdens of memory and forgetting.
You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know plunges into the lives of a vast cast of characters: from perpetrators and victims in tiny peasant communities to street kids, businessmen, artists, judges, the national cycling team to the countrys revolutionary leaders and their opponents.
As Gourevitch weighs their accounts of Rwandas unexpected successes and its enduring weaknesses, he also revisits the wars of the genocides aftermath that continue in Congo.
And he takes critical stock of how Western conventional wisdomwith its selfexculpations and its tendency to view African politics through the reductive lenses of humanitarian pity or punitive human rights absolutismclashes with the defiant ethic of selfdetermination that has guided Rwandas reconstruction.
Does the West know what is best for a traumatized and impoverished postcolonial state, seeking to create itself as if from scratch Is it reasonable to judge such a state strictly by our own imperfectly achieved ideals Gourevitchs investigation of Rwandas unprecedented experiment in national reconstruction continually invites us to think again.
Combining travelogue and investigative reportage, personal narratives and political debates, Gourevitchs stories of life after genocide are at once as essential and as ultimate as classical myths.
“You hide that you hate me and I hide that I know” is a stark Rwandan adage that describes the formula by which barbarism becomes civilization, and it is now a book about the challenges of forging a sane and habitable history after near annihilation.
Gourevitch was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to painter Jacqueline Gourevitch and philosophy professor Victor Gourevitch, a translator of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
He and his brother Marc, a physician, spent most of their childhood in Middletown, Connecticut, where their father taught at Wesleyan University fromto.
Gourevitch graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut, Gourevitch knew that he wanted to be a writer by the time he went to college, He attended Cornell University. He took a break for three years in order to concentrate fully on writing, He eventually graduated in. Inhe received a Masters of Fine Arts in fiction from the Writing Program at Columbia University, Gourevitch went on to pu Gourevitch was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to painter Jacqueline Gourevitch and philosophy professor Victor Gourevitch, a translator of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
He and his brother Marc, a physician, spent most of their childhood
in Middletown, Connecticut, where their father taught at Wesleyan University fromto.
Gourevitch graduated from Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut, Gourevitch knew that he wanted to be a writer by the time he went to college, He attended Cornell University. He took a break for three years in order to concentrate fully on writing, He eventually graduated in. Inhe received a Masters of Fine Arts in fiction from the Writing Program at Columbia University, Gourevitch went on to publish some short fiction in literary magazines, before turning to non fiction, sitelink.