Friday 21 August 2015

Falciparum Fiend

Nyamata Genocide Memorial, Rwanda

The dead at Nyarubuye were, I'm afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquillity of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there - these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I couldn't settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame, incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful. I just looked, and I took photographs, because I wondered whether I could really see what I was seeing while I saw it, and I wanted also an excuse to look a bit more closely. - Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

For more reading on Rwanda, check out Remembering Rwanda.

I know I haven't posted much about my writing lately. It's been a fairly intense few weeks hopping about the country, visiting genocide memorial sites and refugee camps.

Then went and got malaria, so feeling a bit poorly at the moment and desperately trying to pack so that I can catch my flight to the UK next week. 

Looking forward to sleeping, bathing, and returning to the less physically demanding role of writer.

The Fever by Sonia Shah
How Malaria Has Ruled Humankind for 500,000 Years
Picked this up a couple of months back.
How prophetic.

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