20 years ago, by the end of July, the genocide in Rwanda had ground slowly to a

halt as the Rwandan Patriotic Front took control of all but a small margin of the
country. I was only 12 years old, but had followed the news coming out of the tiny
east African country with an interest bordering on obsession. The images were
appalling: row after row of hastily constructed huts and tents, children not much
older than me carrying water down dusty roads for miles, a rail-thin mother
nursing her baby among piles of cloth. The piles of cloth resolved into humanshaped forms, but they didnt move. These stood in stark contrast to the bright
floral dresses and poufy hair of Christine Shelley, the Clinton administrations
State Department Spokesman, as she awkwardly avoided the g-word. Video
crews passed through filthy camps, and on occasion, the news anchor warned
viewers of upcoming graphic footage, usually a wide keloid scar, sometimes
spread across a handsome young mans cheek. It wasnt until years later that I
realized how ambivalent these images were: reporters had largely been
dispatched to refugee camps in bordering Uganda and Zaire, where survivors
were forced to live alongside those who had tried to kill them.
My experience of horror and pained sympathy was retrospectively unmoored
from my ethical stance. I had no idea for whom I had felt, which felt very
ominous. This prompted a more critical eye: Who is being shown here? Where
is their suffering coming from? To what end? It also provoked suspicion of my
emotions: Who am I feeling for? And what is the point of feeling anyways?

During my graduate program, I was reminded of the source of these questions

during two key events. I was invited by my advisor and mentor Gary Weissman
to TA a Literature of the Holocaust class, and rather than giving me the job most
TAs are tasked with (grading mounds of papers), he insisted I co-teach the
course. It was an honor I didnt take lightly, and I spent weeks researching, trying
to better understand how to frame debates about the representation of the
Holocaust in an advanced classroom. The course went through works like Elie
Weisels Night and Primo Levis Survival in Auschwitz, as well as Art
SpieglmansMaus. By the time we hit Maus, both Gary and I were frustrated (and
occasionally unnerved) by some of the responses from students. As we plowed
through midterm papers, we kept coming across a phrase again and again:
walking a mile in their shoes. Ill return to that in a moment.
The other key event, not long after TAing for Gary, was when the man who would
become my husband handed me J.P. Stassens Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda, a
fictional graphic novel following the title character through his lives in the pre- and

post-genocide landscapes. In the era before the genocide, he is depicted as a

normal young man: going to school, working, getting drunk, and attempting to
woo two sisters. In the era afterward, he resembles the images of the refugees I
had seen so many years before: torn, dirty shirt, dull, haunted eyes, slouching
towards the hope of a bender. His search for urwagwa, a banana beer, is
relentless, and only 26 pages into this 79 page work, Deogratias is rendered
bestial, becoming a dog as he creeps on all fours through the landscape back to
an open tin-roofed shack not quite the width of a bed. Moving back and forth
between the present and the past with the title characters memories as a sort of
frame, readers are introduced to a small cast of characters. Deogratias is in love
with two Tutsi sisters, Apollinaria and Benina, who are the daughters of Venetia,
a local woman and sometime-prostitute. Apollinaria is the product of Venetias
affair with Father Prior, a Catholic missionary, who is a mentor to Brother Philip.
Brother Philip is new to Rwanda, and earnest in his desire to help. The French
Sergeant is a more cynical character, as is Julius, an Interahamwe leader
(the Interahamwe were the Hutu youth militias responsible for the bulk of killing
during the genocide). More minor characters include Augustine, a man of the
Twa ethnic group, and Bosco, a Rwandan Patriotic Front officer who has become
a drunk after his work to help stop the genocide. Much of the graphic novel is
devoted to slices of life, brief moments and short conversations that would be
casual in any other context.
The Rwandan Genocide took place over 100 days in 1994, starting in April the
day after a plane carrying President Habyarimana was shot down. While there
was a plan in place in the government to slaughter all Tutsis, this was not a topdown genocide. As Mahmoud Mamdani discusses in When Victims Become
Killers, the Rwandan Genocide was distinct from the Holocaust in part because a
large proportion of the population took part in the killing. Between 600,000 and a
million Tutsis were killed by a minimum of 200,000 genocidaires in a country of
11 million. While the differences are significant, it is also worth remarking on the
similarities. The Rwandan Genocide was as efficient as the Holocaust. Unlike
Western media representations of the violence, this was not Africa as usual. It
was a tragedy that was the combined result of decades of colonial rule, Western
reluctance to intervene in an area with few natural resources, racial enmities
manipulated through the use of propaganda, French support of the genocidal
government, a toothless U.N. Peacekeeping force, and many, many other
factors.

Deogratias, in contrast, is an intensely quiet graphic novel. The title character

rarely speaks, and while we see the pre-genocide world partially through his
memories, he never contextualizes them, or connects them to the silent, dirty

man we see in the post-genocide era. The characters who speak in the pregenocide era have relatively normal lives and normal concerns. The characters
who speak in the post-genocide era carefully avoid any reference to the events of
April-July 1994. What I find perhaps most important aboutDeogratias is the
extent to which Stassen emphasizes the unreliability of images and the emotional
responses they provoke in readers.

Deogratias, in contrast, is an intensely quiet graphic novel. The title character

rarely speaks, and while we see the pre-genocide world partially through his
memories, he never contextualizes them, or connects them to the silent, dirty
man we see in the post-genocide era. The characters who speak in the pregenocide era have relatively normal lives and normal concerns. The characters
who speak in the post-genocide era carefully avoid any reference to the events of
April-July 1994. What I find perhaps most important about Deogratias is the
extent to which Stassen emphasizes the unreliability of images and the emotional
responses they provoke in readers.
The comic opens with Deogratias staring blankly into an open-air caf set in a
hotel. A smiling white man hails him, inviting him to sit and drink. The man, later
identified as a French sergeant, attempts to show Deogratias pictures from his
recent tour of the gorilla preserves in Rwanda (among Rwandas only natural
resources). One panel is entirely filled with these vacation photographs, so
readers may assume that we are sharing Deogratiass point-of-view, but the
following panel reveals that in fact he is not looking at the photographs (see
Figure 1). He is staring intently at the beer he is pouring into the glass, while the
French sergeant looks briefly confused.
At first glance, this would appear to be a relatively minor event in a graphic
narrative about genocide, but in fact, it lays out the primary thesis: attempts to
see through the eyes of those who went through the genocide are always
partial, and are limited by the relative privilege of the reader.

This recalls what I found in the Literature of the Holocaust course while struggling
to explain to students why walking a mile in their shoes was perhaps an
inappropriate phrase. While we read novels and memoirs, the imaginative
closure students experienced while attempting to envision what was being
explained in the text prompted them to fantasize seeing the Holocaust. While
not the worst use of the imaginationafter all, we rely on texts to help us better

understand the worldit also underscores an often-overlooked issue: to what

extent is it ethical to create metaphors between ones own experiences and
situations of extremity?
Maus, because of its form, offered a corrective against the impulse to closely
identify with experiences distant from our own positions of relatively safe U.S.
citizens. When one looks at a panel, one is simultaneously invited to see through
a window into the world and reminded that what they are seeing is mediated.
Students were intensely interested in Maus, but were also able to see the
characters experiences as distinct from their own lives and emotions.

Deogratias takes the ethical self-reflexivity inherent in the graphic narrative form
and uses it to emphasize what the reader generally cannot see from their
vantage point in the Global North. The tourism photographs of gorillas are the
most common image out of Rwanda aside from those of the genocide, which, as
I mentioned above, are often not properly images of Rwanda at all.
Deogratias asks her if we could do the same things as in those stories? at
which point, Apollinaria rejects both the gift and the sentiment. The comic, meant
to communicate his love for her, reveals the opposite; the page Apollinaria views
shows abandonment and frustration. Immediately afterward, Deogratias is
approached by Apollinarias sister Benina. Deogratias hides his tears, and
promptly presents Benina with the same comic book. Unlike Apollinaria, Benina
sees a scene of passionate kissing, overlain by the same question Deogratias
had posed to her sister, which is more successful in this case.
Stassen narrows this distance when depicting the pre-genocide era by showing
scenes that could occur anywhere in the world. For example, Deogratias waits
for Apollinaria outside of school, eager to present her with a comic book as a
present. The large heart on the cover suggests its topic is romance, but when we
look at the panels through Apollinarias perspective, we see a lonely woman on a
couch, as well as the corner of a panel depicting an upset or disappointed man.
When readers in the Global North seek to walk a mile in someones shoes, it is
perhaps an honest desire to understand experiences of extremity, but we rarely
want to recognize where our paths lay in relation to the ones down which we
vicariously traipse. Deogratias is a powerful precisely because it exposes us not
to the subjective experiences of the victims, but to that of the perpetrator. I am
not asserting that victims stories are unimportant. I am asserting
that Deogratias reminds us that the object of our empathy may not be deserving
of it, and that, perhaps more importantly, from our vantage point in relation to the

Rwandan Genocide, we were considerably closer to the bystanders who did

nothing than to the victims who suffered.
Deogratiass transformation is symbolically representative of the trauma
undergone by the country. In his continued presence, he is a manifestation also
of what is absent in the present day. Over the course of the comic, it becomes
clear that not all of the characters we saw in the past have survived to today, but
it remains unclear how precisely Deogratias escaped their fates. As a
sympathetic Hutu who was intimately connected with a Tutsi family, he would
have surely been one of the targets for the Interahamwe. Occasional stray
references during the course of the comic suggest he may have been complicit,
but at those moments, he retreats into happy memories. It is not until Brother
Philip returns and sees Deogratias that the reader understands that Deogratias
has been systematically poisoning all of those complicit in the genocide, from the
French sergeant to Bosco to Julius.
As readers, we are prompted to connect with, if not identify with Deogratias. He
is the main character, and while his intentions are not always pure, his actions
are understandable; he is a teen trying to figure out his way in the world. In
addition to the scenes familiaritymany young men have struggled to woo
young women with giftsit is important to note the ambivalence of the images
received by each sister. Neither sees the whole picture, wherein the comic
depicts both suffering and passion, and only Benina sees the image that
Deogratias intends.
In the post-genocide era, however, the reader watches Deogratias as the
memories become too strong, and he physically transforms into a dog. The
transformation recalls one of the most ominous aspects of post-genocide
Rwanda. In Philip Gourevitchs We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will
Be Killed with Our Families, he recounts that The nights were eerily quiet in
Rwanda. After the birds fell silent, there were hardly even any animal sounds. I
couldnt understand it. Then I noticed the absence of dogs. What kind of country
had no dogs? (147). The RPF had killed them all because the dogs were eating
the corpses.
In addition, Deogratiass role in the genocide is revealed. In a scene from the
genocide itself, the Interhamwe are depicted retreating to the Turquoise Zone.
Augustine comes looking for Venetia, Apollinaria, and Benina, and Julius crudely
describes the sisters rape and murder at the hands of Deogratias and others.
The reader is left to wonder why he would be the protagonist.
The second aspect Deogratias expertly negotiates is the extent to which the

reader is allotted access to victim experience, and what victim

experiences can be emotionally legible. By invoking empathetic identification with
a perpetrator, to some extent Stassen is suggesting a broader complicity in the
genocide than simply those hundreds of thousands that did the killing. At the end
of the graphic novel, we see through Deogratiass eyes as the bodies of Benina
and Apollinaria are eaten by dogs. In this moment, we are both visually identified
with the culprit and are shown an image from the genocide itselfone
considerably more extreme than we saw during those months in 1994.
Herein lies two major aspects of why Deogratias is an essential work. In the first
place, it emphasizes how point-of-view in graphic narratives can provide
important insights for what it is to empathize with images. As readers, we exist
in a privileged space in relation to these characters: a space of safety wherein we
can choose not to look. Furthermore, what we are shown when we choose to
look is suspect as well, because what we see may be only partial. We may
misinterpret it. Both the provisional nature of images and the chance of
misinterpretation suggest that images can lead us to dangerous conclusions. In
the case of the Rwandan Genocide, we conflated perpetrators with victims. We
misrecognized the violence as something naturally African, something that
happens in those places.