Recommendations #1: Human Disasters

 

I can't remember exactly how, but as a teenager I stumbled across Romeo Dallaire's memoir, Shake Hands with the Devil.  It's about his time as the force commander of the UN troops in Rwanda during the genocide of 1994. Initially deployed to keep peace and observe, the UN forces were soon caught up in the violence and mass murder.  But they were stunted by their orders, unable to act in any decisive way to prevent more killing.  Dallaire spent his time requesting more troops (instead some were withdrawn), sending urgent memos and basically doing anything he could to give his force the power to stop the genocide, but through a mixture of bureaucracy and lack of political will, he was forced to simply observe and attempt to negotiate.  And it would have been easy to stop - the perpetrators of the genocide were largely unorganised and armed only with machetes.  Shake Hands with the Devil is both an indictment of the world political community for turning their backs on Rwanda, and a surprisingly personal account of how it felt to be in the middle of something you are powerless to prevent, and the long term effects of being a witness.  As a side note, the documentary with the same name is really worth watching if you can get your hands on it too.

Rather naively, I was shocked at the way the world ignored the genocide in Rwanda, and this led me to Samantha Power's Pulitzer Prize winning book, A Problem from Hell.  Power takes as her starting point the dreams of the UN after the Holocaust, and then shows how systematically it has failed to act in a timely or effective manner in every single genocide since then.  No matter the country, the story is the same - too much bureaucracy, countries unwilling to risk their troops, leaders reluctant as they know they will not be pressurised by their constituents.  Power's research is impeccable, and even though this book makes for grim reading, it is important, as the only way we can make organisations take more action is by exerting political pressure on them.

 

It's hard to discuss modern genocides without thinking of the Holocaust.  I first read Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl when I was twelve or thirteen, and I instantly related to the way Anne wrote about growing up and life in her family.  Her diary is so vivid; her personality just comes off the page, and I felt as if I knew her, almost as if she was a friend.  I still remember the way the diary ends abruptly and how I felt as I read the afterword explaining what had happened to her.  It was one of the first times I came face to face with the cruelty of the world, and the unfairness of it all.  I've since read the diary many times, and it's still got that power to upset me.  Anne's experiences of growing up are so relatable, and this is what makes it such an emotional read.

Although I'm sure there are many histories of the Holocaust out there, Lyn Smith's Forgotten Voices of the Holocaust is probably one of the most powerful.  Smith visited the oral archive of interviews with survivors in London's imperial war museum, and the book consists of simply their own stories in their own words.  There's no editing and not much context, and this makes it all the more impacting.

 

One of the consequences of human disasters is the creation of refugees. In Human Cargo, Caroline Moorehead visits refugees around the world and asks them to share their experiences.  In doing so, she relates the inhumane ways they are sometimes treated, imprisoned in detention centres and subject to interrogations.  Moorehead offers no solution to the problem of states handling more refugees than they can deal with, but she does give the refugees themselves a voice.  Often in news reports and editorials, they are treated simply as numbers, but in this account they are humans, with often horrific pasts and simple hopes for the future.

I'm conscious of the fact that I've been recommending non-fiction books up until now.  Of course fiction can deal with human disasters beautifully, and one of the best examples of this is Stephen Galloway's The Cellist of Sarajevo.  Narrated by four different people living through the siege, it's a novel that captures the resilience of humans, and how hope can sometimes be found even in the worst circumstances.  You can read my full review of it here.

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This is my first time writing this kind of post, full of recommendations and not reviews, so please do let me know if you enjoyed it, and if you would like to see more like this in the future.