Gourevitch refers to the Holocaust , and at one point he relates an anecdote of standing outside the Holocaust Memorial Museum and looking at a newspaper image of dead Rwandans . Gourevitch ’ s intention here was to highlight the hypocrisy of statements like “ Never Again ” at the very moment another genocide was unfolding . But by forcing us to see the Rwandan genocide through the prism of the Holocaust , Gourevitch has framed the pain of black Africans in the context of ( predominantly ) white Europeans , and thus upheld a culturally Eurocentric perspective . An alternative approach has been offered by Rosenweig in her review of Murambi , another book on the Rwandan genocide by a foreign writer . Rosenweig argued that the author avoided the problems of representation by acknowledging their “ own biases and limitations ” in the novel .
So where does this leave us regarding the ability to communicate pain ? Sontag has addressed this issue in fairly definitive terms : “ We can never truly imagine what it was like … Can ’ t understand , can ’ t imagine .” And here we return to this word ‘ imagine ’. In place of definitive verification , it seems integral to bridging the gap in our understanding of pain yet is also ill-equipped to do so . Perhaps , despite his shortcomings , Gourevitch happened upon a solution in his portrayal of the hillside village and its “ system of communal obligation ”: “ If you cry out , where you live , can you expect to be heard ?” Ideologically , the answer must be yes . In place of a means of conclusively communicating and knowing pain ( ours and others ), we must instead resort to mutual faith in one another ’ s pain and suffering . Otherwise , we leave