The history of the Rwandan Genocide
This novel has a split premise. On one side, the reader sees the narrative value of the genocide, through the lens of Cornelius, a fiction author; on the other side, the reader sees the historical, academic facts of the matter, because the author writes himself in as a character, and he details the facts of the matter while his character learns them for his own writing project. The novel offers both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the genocide.
Tribalism and violence
The novel notices right away that such a genocide should never have occurred. The novel also points the reader toward considerations about what could bring about such horrific, wide-scale ethnic violence. The answer offered is tribalism, because belonging to a community near other communities allows for social paranoia to escalate in a "group think" kind of way. By blaming the "other" people, a tribe moves toward hatred, and by treating them as enemies, they dehumanize them. In this case, such tribalism led to the deaths of almost a million people.
Betrayal and injustice
The novel's protagonist is a writer named Cornelius whose journey is to appreciate the narrative arc of the Genocide, but the process takes him into seriously challenging territory, emotionally speaking, because he learns that his own father played a major role in the local genocide in Murambi, his own hometown. His father's violence inspired the killing there which eventually claimed the life of Cornelius's own mother. The portrait is of betrayal because Cornelius's father turned violent against the Tutsi half of his own family.
