The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 119

ExtraBooks 7 THE AGE SATURDAY 10 JULY 1999 Despite the lessons of the past, the West failed victims of tlie Rwandan genocide POSTscript 1 Tales of love and obsession iffriiii nii niMiiri-TTiM iMf- i ii m-j'1 The art of death: Philip Gourevitch has A terrible beauty By TERRY LANE THE GUARDIAN WEfiAXVbringsnews from Cairo that the famous Egyptian belly dance has fallen foul of the fundamentalist Islamic wowsers. Too naughty, they say. And it would be a brave woman who would defy a Muslim censor. Down in Rio they are more broadminded. The Washington Post reports that Brazil's "hottest new phenomenon in adolescent entertainment" isTiazinha, a dominatrix in a "black leather teddy, spike heels and a mask.

Five thousand frantic fans, from awed five-year-olds to their even more awestruck fathers, cry out proclamations of love to their Tiazinha. "A perspiring 12-year-old boy in silk boxers, chosen from the crowd, is about to find out. First, a love tap with Tiazinha's leather switch. Whack! Ouch! Now she has cellophane in hand, ready to rip peach fuzz off her victim's baby fat with hot wax." For the young fans there is a Tiazinha Sticker Book, where kids can collect and paste all outfits. Which got me thinking: eroticism must be culturally conditioned.

Belly dancers make me laugh. Tiazinha sounds a little weird. And as for penis gourds. On SBS telly the other night a deputation of Irian Jayan natives was complaining to the Indonesian Government. I can't remember what about because I was transfixed by one chap's penis gourd.

It reached up to his chin. It dwarfed all the others round about. What did it mean? Was it meant to impress the ladies, or the other nose-boned, arse-grassed chaps? Was it the Irian Jayan equivalent of a Zegna suit or was he just suffering from delusions of grandeur? It would certainly get in the way when he rides his bike. In Esprit de Battuta, Pamela Watson tells of cycling across Africa. She has a lot of complaints.

There's the heat. The mud. The wars. The men. The dreaded tsetse flies.

But above all she complains about being stared at wherever she rode. And the fact that every man she met asked her to marry him. She didn't care for it one little bit. Well, it occurs to me that different cultures are erotically amused by different things. Perhaps a solitary white woman on a bike looks to your average African a lot like an Irian Jayan riding his bike across Australia clad in nothing but his Nikes and penis gourd would look to us.

There is no moral to this story, except.that sex makes us do some funny things, and not all races and cultures are weird in the same way. There's a lot of variety in erotic folly. Lane on the Web: www. listen, toterry addition, studded throughout' her book are numerous reproductions of the very familiar Dutch paintings of this period. As well as the still lifes, these include those paintings set' in luminously simple domestic interiors that give us intimate glimpses of people frequently women engaged in homely activities such as reading a letter.

These are paintings where the light through a window or a pattern of flagstones is so palpably present that it transports the viewer across centuries. Moggach's take on these wonderful images is to gaze into them and speculate about the lives of the people we view to wonder who the woman is, and what is in the letter. And this is genuinely interesting not least because so many of these scenes are quite paradoxical. How did these painters contrive to make the most invisible domestic moments so timelessly satisfying? Sadly, her answer is to create a woodenly predictable scenario: beautiful young woman, talented artist, desiccated old man, heart-of-oak servant etc. After a time the heavy-handedness of all this makes it hard to look those reproductions in the eye.

They deserve better, and doubtless the best of all is not to feed off them so exploitatively. Nevertheless, Moggach does have one genuine surprise up her sleeve. Much of the justification for her story is based around the repeated image of the unknown woman in the paintings of Ian Van Loos and her late ruminations about these paintings is the best chapter in her book. The problem is that none of the standard references lists Jan Van Loos and I left this novel thinking that Moggach's invention of him and her subsequent play with his non-existent paintings was the most entertaining and original fiction in the entire book. Brenda Walker's Poe's Cat is a more allusive and poetic treatment of the past.

She uses the curiously unresolved relationship between two Australian cousins, Thea and Finn, to explore what is known of Edgar Allan Poe's relationship with his own cousin and wife, Virginia. Walker can write a fine sentence and she is good at capturing the single trembling moment but where Moggach is doggedly literal Walker is maddeningly vague, presenting us with a confabulation of hints and suggestions, especially about Thea and Finn, which ultimately leads nowhere. She also embarks on rewriting an established author's stories from a fresh point of view. Usually, of course, it is the woman's, the implication being that the fiction hasn't done her justice. While it is obvious that women aren't always treated fairly the logic doesn't translate directly to fiction.

In fiction it's art we want, not earnest reconstructions the service of equity. Nor was recasting Virginia Poe as writer manque a good move. She is altogether more interesting as the doomed young consumptive of historical record. Walker and Moggach, in paying their oblique tribute to great art, focus too much on what is going on in those paintings and stories, forgetting that the reason we still care for these things is less the literal surface than how that material is conveyed to us. While both read like writers who must write, I was less 'convinced that either had something uniquely her own to say to the reader.

Brenda Walker will be a guest oThe AgeMelbourne Writers Festival. Tulip Fever By Deborah Moggach William Heinemann, $29.95 Poe'sCat By Brenda Walker Ming, $22.95 JANET CHIMONYO NOVELISTS may dream of immortality but reality is tougher and most novels wear their season I as treacherously as last season's tie-width. So here is yet another I title yoking the famous dead to some unlikely possession. We've already had someone's trousers, i someone's parrot, someone's I button. What's next Shakes-, peare's Thimble? Another remarkably sturdy trend are the novels that revisit historical events.

But why all this fossicking around in the attic? Is the over-heated present too Unsettling to be grasped by the novelist? Goodness knows, the frantic blur of change we call life these days needs fiction's powers of revelation, its role as the mirror of its time, throwing the age right back in its face. Of this is hard to do, and it's risky yet it also marks one crucial boundary between a few hours' distracting fiction and what we think of as literature and art. Poe's Cat and Tulip Fever, the new novels from Brenda Walker and Deborah Moggach, are cases in point. Both are stories of love and obsession, and both are anchored in the past, padded out with sufficient research to provide the required air of serious intent. The question remains: does either have anything to say that reverberates with contemporary experience? Deborah Moggach sets Tulip Fever in the early 17th century Amsterdam, when the tidy, industrious Dutch lost heart and purse in the mad speculation on tulip bulbs.

From this unlikely conjunction, Moggach concocts a tangled melodrama centred on the handsome, talented but poor young artist, Jan Van Loos (1600-1661), who falls hopelessly in love with the young wife of a wealthy merchant while painting the couple's portrait. What subsequently happens more nearly approximates life on day-time television than real life or real time, but leaving aside the issue of credibility, what is Interesting about Moggach's novel is the conceit on which it is built. The tulip stuff is simply bait. Moggach's real interest is those paintings and in two or three brief, diverting chapters she leaves her panting, plotting lovers and digresses into some loose summarising remarks about the art of Rembrandt and others. In Edgar Allan Po: Brenda Walker explores Poe and his wife.

if LjbrJ days of the Rwandan genocide. suits who spoke three languages, and administered by a population imbued with the same culture of obedience as Hitler's Nazis. And who, like the Nazis and the soldiers of Pol Pot, were able to be convinced that they were acting for the common good. The Tutsis were a pest to be eliminated. Yet, once, Hutus and Tutsis lived together peacefully enough, before the German and Belgian colonisers decided that the tall, thin, fairer-skinned Tutsis were a more noble people than the stockier, darker Hutu, and promoted them as such.

And before they later, imbued with new ideas of democracy, decided that the majority Hutu ought to be promoted, instead. The book is also a (justifiably) angry polemic against the abject failure of the international community to intervene, despite having advanced warning and present knowledge of the massacres. France funnelled huge shipments of armaments to Rwanda right through the killings and after. Foreign aid, used to buy arms, kept arriving. In the Hotel des Milles Collines, one of the few buildings in Kigali left with a working telephone and fax machine, the manager, a Hutu, sheltered about 1000 Tutsis during the massacres.

All day and half the night, while the killings continued around the country, he telephoned and faxed overseas ministries, including the White House, to no response. When did the international community respond? When the Tutsi-led army of the Rwandan Patriotic Front succeeded in taking over the country and the Hutu killers fled into neighboring Zaire, to begin dying like flies from cholera and starvation on a volcanic mountainside. Remember those pictures, around July 1994? Poor refugees, said the international community, and mounted the world's biggest relief effort. They were not innocent victims but fugitives from justice, and the world sheltered and fed them while they re-armed, repopulated the birth rate in the camps neared the limits of human capability and plotted to Picture SANDY SCHELTEMA return and finish the job. Unfortunately, they were human beings, and had to be helped.

Take poverty, resentment, envy, overpopulation, massive indoctrination. Take fear of punishment for not taking part in the killing. Does this explain what happened in Rwanda? Not for this reader. I was in Rwanda in 1996, two years after the genocide, and felt contaminated as a human being by what I saw and heard there. I learnt things about the human capacity for cruelty that 1 wish I had not.

Like Gourevitch, I tried to reconcile the serene, verdant beauty of the country verdant perhaps, because fertilised by blood and the apparent kindness and decency of the people I met, with what had happened. AND FAILED. At least Gourevitch does not, as some do, argue that we are all capable, given similar circumstances, of such acts. We are not all capable of killing a child. Not all Hutus were capable of killing.

Plenty of Hutus risked their lives, and in many cases gave their lives, to protect Tutsis. You do not forget Rwanda. You look for hope, and find a little, in the last pages of the book, in an account of a massacre, as late as April 1997, in which 17 schoolgirls and a 62-year-old nun were killed by Hutu The students, Gourevitch writes, "teenage girls who had been roused from their sleep, were ordered to separate themselves Hutus from Tutsis. But the students had refused. The girls said they were simply Rwandans, so they were beaten and shot indiscriminately." Mightn't we all take some courage from those brave Hutu girls who could have chosen to live, but chose instead to call themselves Rwandans, asks Gourevitch.

Maybe we might. Ph Hip Gourevitch will be a guest of The AgeMelbourne Writers Festival. We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We will be Killed with all our Families. Stories from Rwanda By Philip Gourevitch Picador, $25 PAMELA BONE The dead at Nyanibaye were, I'm afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it.

The skeleton is a beautiful tiling. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquil-lily of their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. PHILIP GOUREVITCH'S story of the Rwandan genocide is also, I'm afraid, beautiful. One wonders, briefly, whether it is right that a work of art should emerge from such horror. But horror, as the old masters knew, is beautiful.

Countless works of art films, music, books have come out of the Holocaust. Half a century later, the world is still trying to understand how it came about. Will we be asking the same questions about the Rwandan genocide 50 years on? We should. Who knows how many Germans knew about what was happening to the Jews? How many of Rwanda's Hutu majority took an active part in the murders of the Tutsi minority? Some estimates have put it as high as one in three. What is certain is that it took a lot of people to kill one million people.

And all the time the state-controlled Rwandan radio was urging the Hutu population to work faster, to do their patriotic duty, to fill those Tutsi graves. And not by methods as sophisticated as gas chambers. Guns and grenades were used, but this killing was mostly done with machetes. This was work, hard work, Gourevitch reflected when, standing produced a moving account of the 100 in a marketplace in Rwanda a year after the genocide, he watched a man butchering a cow. It took many hacks.

And yet the dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of Jewish dead during the Holocaust. One million in 100 hideous days. Using the stories of survivors and other research gathered over many visits to Rwanda, Gourevitch has produced an intensely moving account of what happened before, during and after those 100 days. But how to explain the inexplicable? How do you begin to understand what it takes to make neighbors kill neighbors, workmates kill workmates, husbands kill wives, teachers kill students, grandmothers kill their Tutsi grandchildren? What does it take to make a priest ordain the murder of half his parishioners? The chilling title of the book conies from a letter written by seven Tutsi pastors to their Hutu superior: "Our dear leader, How are you! We wish you to be strong in all these problems we are facing. We wish to inform you that we have heard that tomorrow we will be killed with our families.

We therefore request you intervene on our behalf and talk with the Mayor. We believe that, with the help of God who entrusted you to the leadership of this flock, which is going to be destroyed, your intervention will be highly appreciated, the same way as the Jews were saved by Esther. We give honor to you. The priest did not intervene. Instead, he betrayed them to their killers.

For a long time, the outside world insisted on portraying the killings in Rwanda as While genocide was carried out for similar reasons in Hitler's Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia, this was seen as something peculiarly African, something dark, savage, primaeval. In Tact, Gourevitch writes, "the genocide was the product of order, authoritarianism, decades of modern political theorising and indoctrination, and one of the most meticulously administered states in It was planned by men in n.owToNlakiTl $47,000 A Year I Writing for Kids This Free Information Kit.lrom the Australian College of Journalism shows you how. 252775 DYMOCKS www.dymocks.com.au Expand your PUBLICIST Do yott know how to connect books and writers with readers? riAscaWstr. Text Publishing requires a publicist SPARE PARTS by Sally Rogers-Davidson Kelty Is a grade citizen of the 21st century Greater Kathleen Pctyarre Utopia Artists Lucy Yukenbarri Helicopter Joey 8 July -30 July Alcaston Gallery Spring Street entrance, 2 Collins Street, Melbourne Mon-FriS-S, Sat 11-4 7279 a flair for generating publicity; the ability to work under pressure; and enviable communication, organisational and computer skills. Apply in writing to Tonl McSwceney, Human Resources Officer, Text Media, 171 La Trobo St, Melbourne VIC 3000, email: who has: a passion for books; or fax 03 9272 4780.

OFFICE 2000 toni.mcsweeneytextmedla.com.au, Applications dose Friday 16 Jtily. Melbourne Megalopolis, a city with towers that stretch hallway to the sky. A and grade citizens live charmed lives above the clouds while hifc- I Sport. It's compulsory. Kelty must dwell I streets below.

to avoid an appar-l 1 nst ft H8 3i Easy Office Teach Teach CIG Office CIG Access CIG Outlook MS Office Using MS Using Office Using Word PE Using SE Using SE Using SE Using 2000 $34.95 Yourself Word 2000 in 24 Hours $39.95 Yourself Excel 2000 in 24 Hours $39.95 2000 $29.95 2000 $29.95 2000 $29.95 8-inl $49.95 Access 2000 $49.95 2000 $49.95 2000 $49.95 Office 2000 $109.95 Outlook 2000 $89.95 PowerPoint 2Q00 $89.95 Access 2000 $89.95 pre-destined future, the unthinkable the hopelessness or a lonely the Space Corps. another catch -first must give up her transplant. subbies In the Desperate BpRDERSj HC I Hip like dark ently Kelty faces choice of of the streets career In But there's she body for Foundation Art Program Semester 2 commences July. A complete folk) development course. Prepare now for tertiary entry In 2000.

No Prerequisites for entry. All subjects are held early evenings and weekends. .1 'i Seize the day. in If'you're serious about sport, fym cant miss Sport; Gallery Call 9213 6600 for oourw brochuni and ftfOrfnont, SWINBUftNt UMVIRSITVOT TtCHNCHOaV TAFE Stimulating Fiction ran Young Ijvejy day. www.theagex iV- Australian Adults at Rimer's Feast lAAtT.