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description: An unforgettable journey to Rwanda twenty years after the devastating genocide from the author of the modern classic We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our FamiliesHis earth-shattering 1998 book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families  opened our eyes to Rwandas In one hundred days nearly a million people were murdered by their fellow citizens and the world refused to stop it. Now on the twentieth anniversary of the slaughter Philip Gourevitch returns to Rwanda.A fiercely beautiful literary reckoning You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know explores with great insight and intimacy a society in which killers and survivors live again as neighbors grappling with the burdens of memory and forgetting. You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know plunges into the lives of a vast cast of from perpetrators and victims in tiny peasant communities to street kids businessmen artists judges the national cycling team to the countrys revolutionary leaders and their opponents. As Gourevitch weighs their accounts of Rwandas unexpected successes and its enduring weaknesses he also revisits the wars of the genocides aftermath that continue in Congo. And he takes critical stock of how Western conventional wisdomwith its self-exculpations and its tendency to view African politics through the reductive lenses of humanitarian pity or punitive human rights absolutismclashes with the defiant ethic of self-determination that has guided Rwandas reconstruction. Does the West know what is best for a traumatized and impoverished postcolonial state seeking to create itself as if from scratch? Is it reasonable to judge such a state strictly by our own imperfectly achieved ideals? Gourevitchs investigation of Rwandas unprecedented experiment in national reconstruction continually invites us to think again.Combining travelogue and investigative reportage personal narratives and political debates Gourevitchs stories of life after genocide are at once as essential and as ultimate as classical myths. You hide that you hate me and I hide that I know is a stark Rwandan adage that describes the formula by which barbarism becomes civilization and it is now a book about the challenges of forging a sane and habitable history after near annihilation.
language: English
title: You Hide That You Hate Me and I Hide That I Know: Living with It in Rwanda
publisher: Penguin Press HC, The