Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide [Hardcover]

Robert Lyons (Author), Scott Straus (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 10, 2006

In 1994, an interim government in Rwanda orchestrated one of the world's worst mass crimes: a 100-day extermination campaign that took half a million lives. At the time, Rwanda's genocide went largely unnoticed by the outside world. Today there is growing interest in the Rwandan experience as many discover the horror that took place and seek to understand how and why violence of this character and magnitude could have happened in our time.Intimate Enemy is a rare entrée into the logic, language, and imagery of Rwanda's violence. The book presents perpetrator testimony along with photographs of Rwandans, both perpetrators and survivors. The images and words are raw and unanalyzed; the reader is left to make sense of the killers and their would-be victims. Intimate Enemy challenges our assumptions about the genocide and about those who perpetrated it. It also prods us to consider how to represent and imagine violence on the scale of Rwanda's.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If the perpetrators of the 1994 Rwandan genocide interviewed by political science professor Straus are to be believed, virtually none of them acted voluntarily; it was only because their own lives were threatened that they shot, stabbed and bludgeoned to death thousands of Tutsis. The plausibility of their stories is left up to the reader. "The book's purpose," writes Straus, "is not to interpret or analyze... but to present largely unmediated narratives and images." Fair enough. If intended purely as a primary source on the genocide, Straus's text may indeed be useful. It is the book's second section, comprising unremarkable portraits of Rwandans by Lyons, which is more problematic. "I felt that condemning those responsible for the genocide too easily makes them into the 'other,' " writes Lyons, who therefore alternates images of perpetrators with victims to emphasize their similarities. Would such sensitivity to criminals be contemplated if they were not African? Would Lyons present side-by-side photos of Holocaust victims and Nazis? Lynching victims and KKK members? Lyons, in making the point that we are all capable of cruelty, conflates a generalized potential for evil with actual acts of genocide. In the process, he takes moral relativism to a mushy-headed extreme. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

Much has been written about the genocide against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1994. This collection of interviews and photographs brings a more intimate dimension to attempts to understand the personal and cultural issues surrounding the genocide, in which neighbor slaughtered neighbor using rudimentary weapons. This collection departs from scholarly analysis and judicial investigations. Between 1998 and 2001, Straus conducted interviews with survivors, perpetrators, and suspects, to allow individuals in their own words--accompanied by their faces and other images--to talk about what happened in the largest genocide campaign in the twentieth century. A farmer who participated in the slaughter characterizes Rwandans as cowlike, unable to resist orders from authorities; an army reservist explains that unless women and children were killed, there would be no complete extermination; a man who killed his brother, who had a Tutsi wife, describes how he was forced, at gunpoint, to commit the murder. The testimony, preceded by only the briefest explanations, is often chilling, and the photos are poignant in this stirring look at the Rwandan genocide. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Zone (February 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890951633
• ISBN-13: 978-1890951634
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,197,028 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars deserves a wider audience, March 7, 2006

By 

A. Kapahi "photographer" (Seattle, Wa) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide (Hardcover)

Not as well known as some of his contemporaries, Robert Lyons deserves a wider audience. Having previously published two other books on Africa, with Intimate Enemy he has published his most mature work. Composed of mostly square format black and white portraits, the book is spare simple and without judgement.. It shows again how the larger forces of history and politics can make the best of people do the worst of things. Not an easy book to look at but well worth having.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Title says it all., February 27, 2007

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide (Hardcover)

Robert Lyons and Scott Straus, Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices from the Rwandan Genocide (Zone, 2006)

By now, pretty much every one is aware of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, almost invisible while it was going on but the subject of a great deal of media exposure since. As with all such things, though, there's always another angle from which to approach it. Robert Lyons and Scott Straus find one (two, actually) with Intimate Enemy; show the genocide from the point of view of those who participated (in Lyons' case), or from every point of view there is to be had in Rwanda (in Straus').

After two introductions in which the author and photographer explain their methodologies in collecting the material presented here, we get into the edited transcripts of a number of interviews Lyons did with genocidaires-- those convicted of genocidal behavior who freely confessed to their crimes. Simply put, they're fascinating. Reading them, one has to wonder how much of what's said needs to be taken with how much salt; there's a lot of language that sounds suspiciously like "I was only following orders," but with a dash of "if I hadn't, I'd have been just as dead" added to it. Straus' photographs, presented with no context whatsoever (notes on the photos are presented in a separate section afterwards), are even more intriguing, since he juxtaposes mass murderers with innocent bystanders, judges, victims' families. (Despite what you read in some of the interviews, you won't be able to tell them apart.)

Thought-provoking. Recommended. *** ½

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Intimate Enemy, Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide, August 28, 2006

By 

Bill Arnold (Florence, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide (Hardcover)

This very illuminating book shows us, through the descriptions of participants, what it was like during the Rwanda genocide. Photographic portraits made later show us other participants. Together they make a picture of yet another holocaust.
The analysis of political scientist Scott Straus and the photographs of Robert Lyons exemplify the belief that objectivity is the key to understanding human affairs, social science. With it there is the hope that dispassionate, systematic analysis, like in the physical sciences, will provide understanding of and divergence from the destructive courses of the past. Straus uses the random sample; Lyons the straight-on shot. By striping away context, there is the promise that essences will be revealed. If Straus and Lyons had been able to observe the killings, instead of asking questions third hand, instead of photographing after the fact, would we better understand why people kill people? Terrorist videos with their fixed focus views are the closest we have to being present at horror. Yet when that wildly passionate, unprofessional radio announcer at the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937 says "This is terrible', we understand. But what kind of understanding is that?

Bill Arnold BA political science, MFA photography