"If you went home empty-handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children"
"The most difficult part of all of this is to comprehend the moment when men become killers. The Hutus claimed not to have been forced to kill, though they did fear the consequences of not joining in at the beginning. By the time of the interviews, killing strikes them as quite normal. It's not as though their first kill is particularly memorable. Still, they attempt to recall it:
Fulgence: "First I cracked an old mama's head with a club."
Alphonse: "I was quite surprised by the speed of death, and also by the softness of the blow."
Adalbert didn't remember the "precise details" of his first kill: "Therefore the true first time worth telling from a lasting memory, for me, is when I killed two children, April 17."
They meditate on murder like this throughout the book.
Elie: "The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural. The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood. Grab a machete - that is what we do every morning."
Alphonse: "Saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away."
Indeed, especially for farmers, slicing at things was routine. The men use the word "cut" to describe their murders, as if what they did was akin to dragging a paper edge across a thumb. Obviously it's a callous way of distancing themselves from their deeds, but it also signals the parallel they saw between hacking Tutsis and working in the fields.
Yet, there were differences. "Killing was a demanding but more gratifying activity," said Pio. "The proof: none ever asked permission to go clear brush on his field, not even for a half-day." Soon it became addictive, and there were rewards: "We could no longer stop ourselves from wielding the machete, it brought us so much profit." The looting that accompanied the killing was dazzling for the poor farmers, and it offered a way for the women to pitch in (though some women and children did kill). They stole everything - some even grabbed the bloodstained clothing of the dead. "If you went home empty-handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children," one man said. And despite knowing that their husbands were out raping women and then killing them, most wives still made love to their husbands at night."
Suzy Hansen on Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, by Jean Hatzfeld (The Guardian)
Fulgence: "First I cracked an old mama's head with a club."
Alphonse: "I was quite surprised by the speed of death, and also by the softness of the blow."
Adalbert didn't remember the "precise details" of his first kill: "Therefore the true first time worth telling from a lasting memory, for me, is when I killed two children, April 17."
They meditate on murder like this throughout the book.
Elie: "The club is more crushing, but the machete is more natural. The Rwandan is accustomed to the machete from childhood. Grab a machete - that is what we do every morning."
Alphonse: "Saving the babies, that was not practical. They were whacked against walls and trees or they were cut right away."
Indeed, especially for farmers, slicing at things was routine. The men use the word "cut" to describe their murders, as if what they did was akin to dragging a paper edge across a thumb. Obviously it's a callous way of distancing themselves from their deeds, but it also signals the parallel they saw between hacking Tutsis and working in the fields.
Yet, there were differences. "Killing was a demanding but more gratifying activity," said Pio. "The proof: none ever asked permission to go clear brush on his field, not even for a half-day." Soon it became addictive, and there were rewards: "We could no longer stop ourselves from wielding the machete, it brought us so much profit." The looting that accompanied the killing was dazzling for the poor farmers, and it offered a way for the women to pitch in (though some women and children did kill). They stole everything - some even grabbed the bloodstained clothing of the dead. "If you went home empty-handed, you might even be scolded by your wife or your children," one man said. And despite knowing that their husbands were out raping women and then killing them, most wives still made love to their husbands at night."
Suzy Hansen on Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak, by Jean Hatzfeld (The Guardian)
