“Pleasantly Easy”: Discourses of the Suffering Child in Rwanda Postgenocide

“For me, it was strange to see the children drop without a sound. It was almost pleasantly easy. . . . Now too often, I am seized by the memory of those children shot straight out, like a joke.”¹ It is with these words that convicted Rwandan killer Adalbert Muzingura remembers his first kills of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. He is surprised by the pleasant, almost playful, ease of killing with a gun rather than slaughtering with a machete; now, post facto, he claims to feel regret when remembering the fate of these child victims. Unlike Adalbert, I am ashamed to confess that I was not “seized” by this image of child victims, nor did I find it “strange” that dying children would figure in the opening passages of Jean Hatzfeld’s seminal collection of interviews with genocidal perpetrators, Machete Season: The Killers of Rwanda Speak.² As a scholar of postcolonial literatures and human rights in the humanities, I am perhaps desensitized by the oversaturation of sentimentalized and sensationalized images of suffering children; perhaps, like many, I experience compassion fatigue or, as I prefer to term it, “compassion avoidance,” exhibiting symptoms of indifference and skepticism.³ In media and literary representations, it is certainly convenient and even, “almost pleasantly easy,” to draw on the figure of the suffering child to evoke emotions and, in so doing, also invoke ethical responses, be they charitable donations, humanitarian appeals, or rights claims. In this article, however, I seek to move beyond this pleasant ease, so as to delve into the problematic discourse circumscribing the figure of the suffering child, by examining its possibilities and limitations, specifically as related to my current work on postgenocide Rwanda.

For a long time, I did not take the representation of the suffering child seriously enough. Rather, I considered it to be somewhat axiomatic that the suffering child figured at the apex of the hierarchy of victimization, there being so many compelling reasons to draw on this figure to elicit caring, sympathy, or advocacy. From a biological perspective, caring for human offspring, be they weak or wounded, represents a key evolutionary strategy that enabled our species to develop.⁴ From a representational and ethical perspective, children have long been considered “ideal victims,” to cite Nils Christie’s celebrated stereotype or to echo Aristotle’s venerable formulation of pathos as pity.⁵ Drawing on Aristotle, it may be argued that children are usually blameless for the wrongs perpetrated against them, weak in relation to their offender or circumstances, and in no way threatening to dominant, countervailing vested interests in status, power, and influence. Child victims thus elicit much more sympathy than adult victims and make the wrongs perpetrated against them seem even more grievous. The observer’s response to child victims—ranging from pity to righteous indignation—therefore seems morally and politically uncomplicated. After all, children are in no way responsible for starting wars or for the atrocities perpetrated against them. Thus, when considering abuses against children, observers can easily dismiss thorny political or historic-cultural concerns and instead readily occupy a superior position of judging and caring for a disenfranchised, albeit sentimentalized and infantilized, other. From this comfortable position—one that is emotionally and morally satisfying, to allude to Karen Lury—it is relatively easy to develop some form of propaedeutic ethics or politics.⁶ To quote Jyotsna Kapur, “Fighting for children can provide a vantage point from which we can develop a politics that guides how we live and what we live for.”⁷

As a scholar of human rights, I’m manifestly aware that the figure of the suffering child has long been the emotional currency of rights claims. Looking back historically, one might cite the role of abducted children in eighteenth-century slave narratives, of exploited children in nineteenth-century social problem novels, or of oppressed children in early anticolonial texts. Today child victims have come to represent a whole host of post-Holocaust rights abuses: as children soldiers, hiv/aids orphans, child laborers, child sex slaves, or casualties of poverty, famine, disease, war, or injustice...