Lumumba

Lumumba
directed by Raoul Peck, 2002

“This film is not an ‘adaptation,’ it aims to be a true story. I want to extract the cinematic narrative from reality by remaining as true to the facts as possible,” so said Raoul Peck. Using archival images of official history (many of film’s pivotal scenes are moving recreations of famous still photographs and newsreel footage from Lumumba’s short political life and assassination), Peck crafted a documentary-style recreation and meditation for what might have been in the events surrounding Lumumba’s assasination.

The Periodic Table

The Periodic Table
by Primo Levi
translated from the Italian by Raymond Rosenthal
Schocken; Reissue edition (April 4, 1995)

One itty-bitty superfluous whine: back when I was assigned The Diary of Anne Frank as a compulsory reading in secondary school, with all due respect to Frank, I remember thinking, “Why can’t we be given The Periodic Table instead?!”

Moments of Reprieve

Moments of Reprieve
by Primo Levi
translated from the Italian by Ruth Feldman

Written unplanned at different times and on different ocassions, Moments of Reprieve is a collection of fifteen short stories, each centred on one character only. There was Eddy, a self-absorbed green-triangle juggler and a thief, Tischler, a carpenter who recounts the story of Lilith. Bandi, a mild Hungarian whose name was Endre Szántó (reinforcing in Levi “the vague impression that a halo seemed to encircle his shaved head” to which Bandi explained laughingly: “Szántó means plowman, or more generically, peasant”), whom Levi taught to steal and cheat.

A Time for Machetes

A Time for Machetes: The Rwandan Genocide: The Killers Speak
by Jean Hatzfeld
translated from the French by Linda Coverdale
Serpents Tail (June 30, 2005)

Shying away from close analysis of the big picture, Hatzfeld instead focuses on the hands and foot of the genocide, i.e. common men and a few local leaders. The interviews are compiled into chapters, each focusing on specific aspects, interspersed with some overviews and notes by Hatzfeld.

Rwandan genocide

I’ve promised to write more on this, and Shun asked me about Hotel Rwanda sometime ago where I had only given him a very sketchy, garbled reply (the movie itself I haven’t yet seen). In a world where the word “genocide” has penetrated popular propagandastic vocabulary the way the word “fascism” does (let’s not even go there), and where genocides and sexual scandals are plastered next to each other in screaming headlines, I didn’t want to further add the confusion and misinformations. My intention here is merely to add bits and pieces from a number of books and essays that I’m familiar with in an easily-read fashion and to (hopefully) avoid oversimplified generalisations.