Poetry Through Metaphor
A sense of poetry can be conveyed in a scene otherwise lacking any such sense simply through the introduction of a metaphorical image which enlarges and expands upon the gravity of the moment:
“Despite his efforts, he could not find the front door. He stood still for a few minutes, turning his head this way and that as if to catch, in the heart of the silence, an echo of the past.”
The Aftermath
The aftermath of genocide is thing which can never leave an empathetic mind. This recollection of what happens is described using particularly powerful metaphorical imagery which makes it comes to life in a paradoxically literal manner:
“A long list of the world’s abominations almost always followed. He saw again, as if hallucinating, a thousand terrible scenes. Free-town. Streets where corpselike children wandered, their eyes bright and wild.”
Death of a Tutsi
A civil war is always a tenuous situation. The Hutu and the Tutsi represent opposing factions in Rwanda, a volatile situation which reached its peak with the genocide perpetrated by the former against the latter in the mid-1990’s. The full scale of tribal conflict need not be framed within the larger context of millions of deaths when just one metaphorically described moment can capture it so succinctly:
“A Tutsi that they’ve discovered by chance…came out from his hiding place too soon. They liquidate him as they go. Like a cockroach adventuring out into the middle of the courtyard and blinded by the light.”
The Secret History of Genocide
The genocide defines Rwandan history in a way like nothing else. But the book also strongly suggests that the full extent of the influence of the mass murder extends well beyond the obvious and into darkly lit channels of knowledge appreciated by very few:
“everything led him back to the killings of 1994. Even the scholarly speculations on Rwanda’s geologic layers led him there, via secret and tortuous paths. It was as if the genocide irradiated everything with its gloomy light, sucked toward itself the most ancient and insignificant facts to give them a tragic dimension, a different meaning from what they would have had elsewhere.”
Before Death, Life
Much of the novel reads like a hagiographic history of the death of a country. But before a country can die, it must come into being. A beautiful, simple metaphorical image is used to describe that moment as seen through the eyes of one character:
“Then Siméon listened to Cornelius tell him how twenty-nine years earlier he, Siméon, had driven him to Gasabo Hill and had said to him, as he showed him the shores of Lake Mohazi with a broad sweep of his hand, `This is where Rwanda was born.’”
