Machete Season

by Jean Hatzfeld

Book Overview

In April-May 1994, 800,000 Rwandan Tutsis were massacred by their Hutu fellow citizens--about 10,000 a day, mostly being hacked to death by machete. In Machete Season, the veteran foreign... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312425031
• Release Date: April 2006
• Publisher: Picador
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.58 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.3" x 0.7" x 5.5"

Customer Reviews

a heavy book

This is a hard book to rate because while it is an important one to put in ones personal library - if only as it offers valuable insight into the killers minds - it is a hard thing to fathom. It certainly shows how brutal people can be as a group, herd mentality, against others; and this is a scary thing indeed. This was well written and it is good to have insight from the author and his translator as well as the killers themselves. *The quality of the book itself when it arrived was utterly appalling. Inside thankfully was fine, though one paragraph had been underlined, but the outside was covered in stickers so much that I still have not been able to get them all off and it is a little sticky. I would not recommend buying from whoever this particular seller was.

Stunning

As a psychologist my goal is to read as many books as I can on stories like this. I really was looking to get into the minds of those who were willing to kill for no other reason than they wanted to. It really makes me think of "group think." I was intrigued and saddened by the unnecessary killings- and after all was done and said how the "killers" felt afterward and how their lives were now. A must read book- you will understand more about human beings than you ever thought you would.

Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak

Tough material. Well written and tactfully managed but the fact is that this was a terribly violent episode in African history thus is not an easy subject to read about. The author does a superb job of getting the convicted murderers to open up and gives a descriptive insight to the events that took place in April of '94. Gripping, hard to put down, even harder to comprehend.

"every one should read this book" (Sontag, in intro)

This is simply an AMAZING -- yet horrifingly stomach-churning --collection of testimonials by killers of Rwanda from the rural region of Nyamata. And like Sontag points out in her intro, "every one should read this book." There have been innumerable books and documentaries of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda -- a highly controversial, long-obfuscated and often-misunderstood atrocity... However, very few of these accounts relate the actual perspectives or testimonials by ordinary Rwandans. Though several survivors have actually written testimonials of their experience, not one of them has yet been translated into English!!(eg. Yolande Makagasana's memoir in French), once again revealing the shameful Western ethnocentric attitude to this atrocity (Imagine for example if available accounts of Holocaust survivors had never been translated from German!) Hatzfeld's collection of testimonials therefore offers us a perspective that is completely lacking in the morass of publications about Rwanda, many of them written by journalists, academics or political attachees, who spent less than a month in the field in Rwanda... (And of course, who stayed at fancy White accomodations like the revamped Hotel Milles Collines during their visit... ) It offers a crucial and critical intervention necessary for understanding the human impact of the genocide in Rwanda... Moreover, in this collection Hatzfeld presents us with the perspective of the KILLERS during the genocide. Imagine if the Holocaust was recounted from the perspective of the Gestapo or concentration camp personnel! Simply RIVETING reading. In the complementary reading "Into the Quick of Life," Hatzfeld offers us survivors' perspectives. Instead of focusing on great saviours (eg. Rusesabagina in Hotel Rwanda) it again concentrates on the perspective of ordinary people who survived incredible odds in the marshes. My only misgiving about this set of books is that from a scholarly perspective, I would have wanted to hear more from or about the translator/translation from kinyarwanda. And more about the actual collection of the testimonials, the ways the questions were asked, the interview sessions, the editing of testimonials etc. I caution readers who may not be familiar with the genocide in Rwanda, that this book is not a textbook that will explain the events moment by moment or analyze the UN, US role etc. Rather it is a collection of perspectives by ordinary people, as speculative and subjective as individual povs usually are... And extremely graphic and disturbing at that. I disagree that the book is "confusing" because of its thematic approach. Genocide is not a linear experience, nor is a person's traumatic narration a blow-by-blow account. Instead, with his thematic approach, Hatzfeld offers some of the complexity, nuance and critical analysis of these testimonials. I also disagree that these confessions seem specious, contrived or 'unreal.' This book is not CSI or Law and Order, where ge

The heart of darkness

I visited Rwanda twice after the genocide, and I've read quite a bit of the history behind the 1994 killings, but this is the first detailed account I've read from the killers' perspective. The author interviewed 10 Hutu men convicted for their involvement in the genocide--all friends from the same community. Hatzfeld organizes his short chapters by topic--such as How It Was Organized, The First Time (their first victims), Looting, etc--and devotes considerable space to verbatim transcripts from his interviews. Machete Season reveals how nearly every Hutu man in one community joined, either willingly or through coercion, in hunting down and killing every Tutsi man, woman and child. The book explores what the men were thinking and feeling at the time of the killings and how they feel now about guilt, repentance and forgiveness. The book is not as graphic as others I've read, but there are new horrors here, such as the fact that the men continually refer to the killings as "work," and even today they seem to have almost no empathy for their victims and survivors. For most, confession and seeking forgiveness from survivors seem to be merely the means to get out of prison as quickly as possible. One killer told Hatzfeld, "I think the possibility of genocide fell out as it did because it was lying in wait--for time's signal, like the plane crash, to nudge it at the last moment. There was never any need to talk about it among ourselves. ... We knew full well what had to be done, and we set to doing it without flinching, because it seemed like the perfect solution." After reading this book, I was left believing that all the evil that came out in 1994 is still there, lying dormant. I appreciated Hatzfeld's style of letting the killers speak for themselves and refraining from parceling out blame or otherwise injecting his own opinions. While giving the reader adequate background on the genocide, he focuses narrowly on one group's experience and as a result has put together an especially compelling narrative.