Remembering other people’s trauma

I’ve just landed back in Rwanda, where I’ll be living for the next year or so, and already an editorial dilemma looms: How should outsiders cover the upcoming genocide anniversary?

This is my fourth trip to Rwanda, my second in which tragic history and the rotation of the Earth on its axis conspire to offer me some great business opportunities, writing about Rwanda after the genocide. Everybody seems to love a good genocide survivor story.

The thing is, I’m not sure what trotting those stories — and people who lived them — out into public, to wear the badge of trauma, means any more. To employ Frank’s blessedly useful vocabulary, Rwanda coverage is stuck in Act II.

Every year, reporters come in and write what starts to feel like the same story.  I know because I did last year, in a pretty unimaginative three-part series for the Global Post.  So unimaginative, in fact, that I found out a friend of mine, whom I met two years ago when she was working on a doc about life after war around the world, had filmed the same “reconciliation association,” in the same village, with many of the same people I had talked to for my print article.

A journalist here recently pointed out to me that we all have to do things to eat (freelancers especially), and if that means a predictable three-parter at a marketable time of year, so be it.  Maybe I should cut myself, and a lot of other people, some slack.

But I have to wonder:  What did my predicable three-parter actually say that hadn’t been said?  (Don’t read it, just trust me.) Since we have so many stellar photojournalists in our ranks, let me also pose this question:  What do the images in this story say that hasn’t been said?  (Is it my print bias that I think the real stories are in the single line every individual is allotted to share, in their voice, some of their story?)

That story, in the NYT Lens blog, is more about the photographer than it is about the survivors.  And even work about the survivors seems to track the same well-worn path.  So do we really need to do more of that kind of work?

The other half of this question is whether and what people here want to share.  My experiences have been that many people are willing to talk.  In memorial week, some are eager — it’s all out there, consuming every bit of public space anyway.  But even with willing sources, I feel like we still need to figure out how to write stories that aren’t re-runs.

Maybe I’m being uncharitably critical.  But I also have to figure out what to do on April 7, and that’s an obligation that’s weighing pretty heavily at the moment.