Journey through Genocide
Stories of Survivors and the Dead
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Powerful accounts by genocide survivors, a journalist seeking to bear witness to their pain.
Darfuri refugee camps in Chad, Kigali in Rwanda, and the ruins of ancient villages in Turkey — all visited by genocide, all still reeling in its wake. In Journey through Genocide, Raffy Boudjikanian travels to communities that have survived genocide to understand the legacy of this most terrible of crimes against humanity.
In this era of ethnic and religious wars, mass displacements, and forced migrations, Boudjikanian looks back at three humanitarian crises. In Chad, meet families displaced by massacres in the Darfur region of neighbouring Sudan, their ordeal still raw. In Rwanda, meet a people struggling with justice and reconciliation. And in Turkey, explore what it means to still be afraid a century after the author’s own ancestors were caught in the Armenian Genocide of 1915.
Clear-eyed and compassionate, Boudjikanian breathes life into horrors that too often seem remote.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Boudjikanian's travelogue of his time spent in war-scarred nations is a slim book that nevertheless gets distracted on the way to the heart of its subject. Haunted by his family's experience in the 1915 Armenian genocide, Boudjikanian visits nations that have experienced similar traumas, hoping to address questions about collective guilt, the prospects of forgiveness, and the dynamics of post-conflict reconciliation. His digressions about petty bureaucrats, shopping challenges in the developing world, and the quirks of substandard hotels seem out of place alongside stories from refugee camps housing survivors of Darfur's killing fields and the Rwandan genocide. It's only when the author flies to the land of his ancestors that the story truly comes alive. There, Boudjikanian confronts his fears as an Armenian walking the streets of Turkey, where mere mention of the genocide can result in arrest. As he reckons with his family's history his great-grandfather's torture and murder and the family's exile he documents Turkey's disturbing efforts to disappear evidence of Armenian existence. He also considers, by comparison, Germany's honest and open approach to its shameful past. While this personal exploration of genocide asks important questions, it doesn't devote the necessary space to fully answer them.
