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Writing Genocide, A Discussion at the PEN World Voices Festival

by Bud Parr on May 03, 2008

Writing Genocide: a discussion between Christian Jungersen and Lieve Joris took place Thursday, May 1st at CUNY’s Elebash Recital Hall.


Genocide is as vast a topic as it is an intractable problem, yet fortunately, our two speakers on Thursday’s “Writing Genocide” panel brought a particular viewpoint that is not often enough discussed: the psychology of the perpetrators.

Lieve Joris’s novel, The Rebels’ Hour, traces the life of Assani, a young cowherd who “learns that he is ethnically Tutsi; though uninterested in politics or military life, he is forced to take sides in the bloody conflict rocking the Congo in the wake of the Rwandan genocide.... he becomes a fearsome rebel leader. With his cadre of child soldiers he traverses the war-ravaged country...”

The approach for this discussion was for each author to begin by commenting on the other’s book. Christian Jungersen, the Danish author most recently of The Exception, was a bit shocked, it seems, at the empathy he felt with this character Assani, and with good reason. How can we feel anything for murderers? “When I read this book,” he said, “I thought, this could be me!” A nuanced view is important, but sympathy is dangerous territory where we “risk not condeming as we should.”

But it turns out this is territory Jungersen is familiar with. His novel explorers the ironic position of employees of a think tank who, while researching and writing about genocide, turn against one another, thus exposing the potential for multiplicity and evil that all of us may have within. In fact, later in response to a question about those normal people who resist the pressure of becoming someone like Assani, Jungersen asserted that it’s not the sweet-hearted people you might think; those are the very ones that the genocidal process nourishes because of its emphasis on emotion in order to motivate people. It is often, according to what he found researching his novel, those people on the margins, a little off of society who are most apt to not fall into the trap.

An underlying issue in the emotional tug towards violence is racism, and while not addressed here by name it was certainly a theme in the discussion. In Joris’s book, the character Assani grew up in an area where tribes were kept apart because of their marriage practices. It is this sort of exclusion (racism in my vocabulary) that creates an environment that can lead to violence, in part, Ms. Joris explains, because it makes perpetrators feel like victims. This is a particular emphasis of hers as she felt it was important to go back in her character’s life to when he was innocent.

Jungersen’s novel, while set in the workplace and not in the killing fields, explores similar terrain where one’s environment can change them. He said that with this novel he wanted to explore how the dynamic of the office “makes me mean.”

These complexity of emotions are probably best conveyed in art, which is why this discussion, spilling into an extra half-hour from schedule, was so intelligent: both writers knew their topic from research, yet if there were “experts” on the panel we would have been wrapped in definition rather than exploration. At one point, Jungersen demurred from answering the question of just what genocide is by pointing out the specificity and legality surrounding the term (issues that probably don’t serve the problem very well anyway).

There was also some discussion of writing. Joris, who characterized her book as a baby, spent years (6, I believe) researching the novel, yet found it very difficult to write. She ended up spending 9 months working in a monastery to get it finished. Jungersen was very curious about whether or not Joris was exhausted from such arduous research and if she’d be writing more about the Congo (about which this is her third book). She’s moved on, it turns out, to Asia, but still exploring similar topics.

Jungersen, for his part, declared that he was done writing about Genocide. While admiring greatly those who devote their lives to making the world a better place, he, as he said early on, is driven to write.

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