Harvest of Skulls

Given the failure of the international community to timely report genocide, in 1998, ten African authors visited Rwanda in a writing initiative that was an attempt to make partial amends. Abdourahman A. Waberi’s contribution to the project was guided by Theodore Adorno’s famous dictumon ＂the impossibility of writing after Auschwitz.＂ In Harvest of Skulls—a multidimensional novel, travel narrative, short story, and essay—Waberi claims, ＂Language remains inadequate in accounting for the world and all its turpitudes, words can never be more than unstable crutches, staggering along... And yet, if we want to hold on to a glimmer of hope in the world, the only miraculous weapons we have at our disposal are these same clumsy supports.＂ Shaped by his own experiences in Rwanda and by the stories shared by survivors, Harvest of Skulls stands twenty years after the genocide as an indisputable resource for discussions on testimony and witnessing, the complex relationship between victims and perpetrators, the power of the moral imagination, and how survivors can rebuild a society haunted by the ghost of its history.