When I was in school I had a Rwandan-Tutsi friend whose family survived the genocide and escaped to Belgium. Hearing her story sparked my curiosity and interest in the history of the war and the genocide, but it had been mostly at an intellectual level.

Then, flying home this weekend, I picked up a copy of The Economist (SIR — I rather enjoy your publication) and read an article about Rwanda, 15 years after the genocide. The article illuminated for me the reality of the 1994 atrocities: it was a tangible event with real, even mundane complications and consequences. I felt the impact of surviving such an event. I began to consider the terrible, mostly unknown stories of the people who lived through this time. After reading about the dean at the university in Butare who actually murdered students as part of the massacre, I wanted to explore what a Tutsi student at that school would have felt.

I wrote this story in a single eight hour sitting that night, from 10 pm to 5 am: a session driven equally out of a commitment to the subject and a commitment to completion. I wrote it not just to tell the untold stories of the victims in Rwanda. It was a challenge to push myself to go beyond starting projects and actually complete them. I feel driven to manifest this project in a way that people can be moved by it.

Génocidaire is a short story hyper-focused on one family’s sudden awareness of the danger facing their lives and their attempt to escape Rwanda. The word génocidaire is defined as a person who is involved in a genocide; its English cognate would be “genocider,” if that were a word. The title applies in two ways: first, that the victims are génocidaires in that they too are involved in a genocide, and second, the story is also about the making of the titular entity.

This project is to be a short comic, perhaps part of a series of stories focused on Africa or another theme. I have completed the first draft of the script for this project. Watch this space for progress updates.

Update

Friday January 29th, 2010

I spent several months trying to find an artist whose style I felt was polished, professional and appropriate for the story. And affordable. Unfortunately a professional art production would cost upward of $250 per page, which is outside of my budget. So this script is sitting on the shelf for a while.

Category » Comics • Génocidaire • Projects
Tags » fiction • genocide • rwanda • writing

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