Orientalist Representations of Africa in Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families

While Rwanda is overwhelmingly Catholic, Protestants evangelized much of Kibuye, and Mugonero is the headquarters of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church. The place resembles the brick campus of an American community college more than an African village ... Once again, strange little Rwanda presented the world with a historically unprecedented, epic phenomenon. --- Philip Gourevitch The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. ---- Audre Lorde In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, Michel Foucault argues that, [t]o imagine another is to extend our participation in the present system (230). It seems what Foucault means is that we are so limited by the socialization we have received that we are unable to imagine or propose an alternative to the society we already have, let alone imagine the Other. A reading of Philip Gourevitch's highly-praised analysis of the Rwandan genocide in We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families seems to affirm Foucault's position which Audre Lord endorses with acuity in my second epigraph. Gourevitch's work would at best come under the category of what Soyinka describes in Of Africa as projection and part historical distillation (viii). On another level, it fits right into Edward Said's Orientalist discourse. While Gourevitch criticizes modern-day Western media for their exotic and negative representations of Africa, he himself cannot be absolved of blame is his hegemonization of Western culture in his work. The irony in Gourevitch's work is particularly disturbing in the epistemic violence it inflicts when one considers the fact that a major underlying cause of the Rwandan genocide was the Belgian colonizers' interpellation of the Tsutis as superior and the Hutus as inferior. This paper will use Sara Ahmed (Willful Subjects), Glen Sean Coulthard (Red Skin White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), and Frantz Fanon (Black Skin, Whit Masks & The Wretched of the Earth) to critique Gourevitch, and argue that his work seems to naturalize race and cultures. His work negatively interpellates Africa.

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