One of the most depressing books I’ve ever read …
Aperture Foundation publishes beautiful photography books. I can’t remember the last time they produced anything without a memorable picture or striking design on its cover. But Jonathan Torgovnik’s heart-stopping volume, Intended Consequences: Rwandan Children Born of Rape, is something different. Though it includes page after page of heartbreaking and yes, beautiful photographs, it is more important for the story that it tells. It is entirely appropriate then that its cover is starkly verbal.
This is the story of the hundreds of thousands of Tutsi women who, during and immediately after the Rwandan genocide of 1994, were victims of rapes that were not only the result of individual lechery and callousness, but of a deliberate policy of subjugation and racial defilement. They were raped amid the carnage of their own family members; or chased into the forest and raped there. They were repeatedly beaten, gang-raped, imprisoned, and beaten and raped again. Then, once they had borne their “children of hate” they were almost always stigmatized and abandoned by any family members and neighbors who had survived the killing. Often destitute, crippled by injury or disease, failed by the prejudice and incompetence of government and aid agencies, and in many cases struggling with the horror of being unable to love their own children because of the memories that they evoke, these women are the subject of this very important book.
Jonathan Torgovnik, "Valentine with her daughters, Amelie and Inez" (2009)
Intended Consequences does its job with a simple and repetitive formula. A photograph of mother and child is followed by a transcript of the mother’s words, and a tight-framed portrait shot of the child. They tend to be beautiful-looking kids, but their expressions are perplexing and filled with incomprehension. Their mother’s statements are the stuff of genuine horror. Olivia, for example, recalls the slaughter in a church compound where “about ten thousand people” had taken refuge. “After killing people for about eight hours,” she says, “[the militias] said they were tired, that they needed something to help them regain their energy. So they picked girls who were still alive and raped them. Since the dead bodies were not removed, we had to sleep in the church next to them, even when they began to rot. On the third day, they did not kill but spent the entire day just raping women from different corners of the church. I am a victim of that day; they raped me with all of my children watching. I can only remember the first five men. After that I started losing my understanding …” It goes on and on inexorably, and this is where the book’s repetitiveness pays off. Each story is incomprehensibly horrible, but they follow one another with a dull thudding inevitability.
Jonathan Torgovnik, "Thomas" (2009)
Through the involvement of MediaStorm, the book comes complete with a DVD, which not only presses home the book’s message even more forcefully, it includes an interview with Mr Torgovnik himself. Still visibly upset by his experiences, and close to tears at times, he is clearly occasionally unable to believe what he has seen and heard. More than that, his experiences have caused him to realize the shortcomings of photojournalism: he has established the charitable organization Foundation Rwanda to provide these women and their children with direct assistance more immediately than even his most forthright photojournalism can bring about. Worst of all, it falls to him to articulate the most dispiriting aspect of his book’s message. Not that these events happened in the first place, not that they continue in other parts of Africa today, not that the rest of the world mostly turns a blind eye, but the fact that, as he puts it, “many people cannot explain why [these atrocities occurred]. But I think that deep, deep inside of all of us there is something that could bring us to do [the same things.] I don’t think that a Hutu militiaman, in the basic DNA, is any different from me.”
Aperture Foundation opens the exhibition that accompanies Mr Torgovnik’s book on Friday (February 20) at their West 27th Street gallery. There’s a reception and book signing on Thursday, March 5. A percentage of the proceeds of sales of the book go to Foundation Rwanda. Perhaps you should buy a copy: Jonathan Torgovnik: Intended Consequences
