This very lovely book takes up the challenge of writing the story of the Tutsi genocide from a child’s point of view. In it we see and hear the description of a collective experience from a unique perspective, as close as possible to a child’s language, as close as possible to its source.
A historiographical effort which also puts the historian to the test emotionally and morally in the face of a source saturated with violence and suffering.
Far from abstract postulates on the unspeakable, here we have a reflection on the situation which allows us to hear the dreadful stories of such an experience of dereliction in the twilight of our tragic 20th-century.
Hélène Dumas is a historian, a research fellow at the CNRS attached to the Institut d’histoire du temps présent (IHTP). She has previously published Le Génocide au village. Le massacre desTutsi au Rwanda (Genocide in the village. The massacre of Tutsis in Rwanda) (Seuil, 2014).