Photography In The Novels: “Genocide-My Stolen Rwanda” And “From Turkish Toils- An Armenians’s Family’s Escape”

Photography in the novels: “Genocide-My stolen Rwanda” and “From Turkish Toils- An Armenians’s Family’s Escape”

1. Introduction

History has been written as a documentation of battles, armies, leaders and usually by the winners. It is an endless conflict shaping and many times ending the lives of those involved.
History as we learned at school, as written or shown by medias it’s more of abattle of numbers and geography lessons with people playing the lesser role.
What remains though when these glorious details are stripped and man returns into focus? We have the horror of death and destruction irrespective of winners or losers, we can see people cut of from their surroundings, friends and relatives. People whose hearts have been tormented by what they have seen and felt. In shortwe have people in trauma.
After war comes peace and oblivion… and it is possibly why comes war again?
In order to hinder if not stop this vicious circle, we need documents. These documents have to be able to transfer the horrors of the past and act as experience donors to the future.
To accomplish this it is necessary to combine words and pictures as a joined description tool.
In a worlddictated by mass media there is a tendency in forming public opinion by expressing events in this combination of words and pictures.
Can words however reveal, can they make us really imagine what lies behind the surface of an image?
In truth there are no pictures that can fully be translated into feelings like there are no words that can in absolute describe a trauma.
When a description of apicture is given, it cannot be avoided that this will also be charged and/or modified by the emotions it has created in the describer, particularly if this describer is emotionally involved with this picture.
Photography however can help the memory retainment of the events or periods in someone’s life by functioning as a freeze in time mechanism. It can mentally replace what else already been stolen,whether that is an identity, way of life or even people you have been associated with.

Photography can also become an icon combining all love and affection lost.
What has irreversibly disturbed people’s life is not evidence by itself and can later be disputed. In these cases photography provides the proof for a historical truth to be established.
Finally Photography doesn’t have to fulfil oneof the above categories but can also contain some or all of them.
In the following chapters I will attempt to crosslink the role photography has played in two separate books written under different circumstances, different times, by different people but having one thing in common: the experiences of man under trauma caused by mass murder.

The first book “From Turkish Toils- An ArmeniansFamily’s Escape” is a letter written by an eyewitness of the Armenian Genocide (1915-1917).
In this letter the woman describes to her husband all cruelties and atrocities committed by the Turks and her ordeal as she tries to rescue herself and her family. A photograph of her whole family is included.
The second book “Genocide- My stolen Rwanda” refers to what took place in Rwanda during the 1994 civilwar between the two ethnic groups, the Hutus and the Tutsis.
The writer, a Tutsi, looks back at his experience when at the age of 15, he eye-witnessed the massacre of 43 members of his family by his Hutu neighbours. A description of a photograph of his whole family is included.






2.Photography as a freeze in time mechanism for the life of the traumatised


“Every photograph is acertificate of presence” as Roland Barthes, a French literary theorist and philosopher, once said.
“[…] Photography brings time to a standstill, and thus always refers to the past. Each photograph freezes the moment on which it was exposed, and captures a moment of time that is already a part of the past after it has been exposed. Therefore, the present that is at hand in a photograph due to its...