From Israeli photographer Jonathan Torgovnik’s series of photographs documenting survivors of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide — pictures of women who were raped, or gang-raped, and the children that resulted.
I came across Torgovnik’s name in this fantastic article in Guernica, “Living with the Enemy,” which argues that the reconciliation movement that’s so in fashion these days is pretty much horseshit. This from the article:
No group of Rwandans—perhaps no contemporary group of people in the world—epitomize this kind of suffering more than the Tutsi women who were raped and gang-raped during the genocide. Numbers are hard to come by, since many of these women have remained silent, but Human Rights Watch estimates that up to half a million women were raped. Seventy percent of those who survived are HIV-positive, according to UNICEF, and it is thought that ten thousand to twenty-five thousand children were born of these rapes. Their mothers are often ostracized by their communities and live, therefore, in marginalization and immiseration (some have been forced to turn to prostitution); the children are reviled by other Tutsis as “children of bad memories,” “children of hate,” or “little killers.”
In 2006, the Israeli photographer Jonathan Torgovnik traveled to Rwanda and interviewed thirty of these women in their homes; for many, it was the first time they had spoken of their travails. (Talking was difficult but, as a woman named Beata explained, “I think keeping quiet breaks me more.”) His photographs of these mothers and children are hard to look at and hard to look away from. The bright colors of the women’s clothes and the lush greenery of the surrounding fauna explode; there is beauty here, and life. And yet the beauty and life seem to mock the photographs’ human subjects, who look, somehow, frozen in their sorrow. Torgovnik’s photographs resonate with silence, as if the pain they document is beyond lamentation.
Reading their testimonies, it is hard to know how these women survived. Many were passed, for weeks, from man to man, and were raped continuously. They were raped until they bled, until they passed out, until they could not move or walk or talk; often they were forced to witness murders of others in between the rapes. Some were beaten and clubbed; or had nails driven into their bodies or their teeth knocked out; or were forced to drink stones, or urine, or the blood of their families; or had corn stems, wood, or sharp metal shoved into their vaginas. Some begged to be killed; many more contemplated killing themselves (“I…didn’t have money to buy a rope,” Esperance explains) or, later, their infants. Many of the rape victims were young teenagers at the time of the genocide, which means that they were in their late twenties or early thirties when Torgovnik photographed them; it is a shock to realize this, for some now look like old women. Equally shocking is the preternaturally aged, worried solemnity of their children, which refutes everything we like to associate with childhood.
For these women (who are identified only by their first names), the fathers of their children were not only their rapists but also, often, the killers of their families. Needless to say, the women’s emotions are a complicated maelstrom, at which Torgovnik’s interviews can only hint. “There is no reason whatsoever for me to love this girl,” a woman named Marie says of her daughter, Mary. (Marie is the only woman Torgovnik photographs whose eyes fill with tears.) “She reminds me of…the first rape and the second rape and all the rapes that followed… I can’t say that I love her, but I can’t say that I hate her either.” Yvette recalls: “After around six months, I thought I was probably pregnant. This is when I started wishing to die… But I feared suicide and thought instead that I should give birth to that kid and kill it. But…he was so beautiful that I developed love immediately.” Her son, Isaac, who is barefoot and wears a torn shirt, stares at us: he has beautiful almond-shaped eyes, the slightest furrow on his brow, and not a hint of a smile. A woman named Winnie explains of her daughter, Athanse: “I love her so much, even more so because she is the result of suffering.” But Isabelle, mother of Jean-Paul, says, “I feel trauma every time I look at this boy… I regret that I didn’t die in the genocide.” Some of these women grapple not with their hatred per se, but with where to place it. “They say we are leftovers of the militia’s sexual appetite,” Delphine says. “And whenever I think about it, I hate myself.” Philomena says, more simply, “For a long time, I really hated God.”
The wonderful thing—if there is any wonderful thing—that emerges from these photographs and interviews is the stubborn singularity of each woman. Despite their shared history of horror—and despite the génocidaires’ attempt to kill their human-ness—each has defiantly remained an individual. And each struggles, in her own way, with how she and her children might face the future. (“Be friendly. Love one another,” advises Josephine, somewhat miraculously.) Yet in another, decidedly un-wonderful sense, all these women are the sisters of Améry. In their incomprehension, their shame, their scars, their losses, their dislocation, their impotent fury, their bleak loneliness, their irretrievable lack of trust… The worlds of the Rwandan peasant and of the Viennese intellectual are not, it turns out, far apart: whoever was tortured, stays tortured.
