I came across Torgovnik’s name in this fantastic article in Guernica, “Living with the Enemy,” which argues that the reconciliation movement that’s so in fashion these days is pretty much horseshit. This from the article:

No group of Rwandans—perhaps no contemporary group of people in the world—epitomize this kind of suffering more than the Tutsi women who were raped and gang-raped during the genocide. Numbers are hard to come by, since many of these women have remained silent, but Human Rights Watch estimates that up to half a million women were raped. Seventy percent of those who survived are HIV-positive, according to UNICEF, and it is thought that ten thousand to twenty-five thousand children were born of these rapes. Their mothers are often ostracized by their communities and live, therefore, in marginalization and immiseration (some have been forced to turn to prostitution); the children are reviled by other Tutsis as “children of bad memories,” “children of hate,” or “little killers.”

In 2006, the Israeli photographer Jonathan Torgovnik traveled to Rwanda and interviewed thirty of these women in their homes; for many, it was the first time they had spoken of their travails. (Talking was difficult but, as a woman named Beata explained, “I think keeping quiet breaks me more.”) His photographs of these mothers and children are hard to look at and hard to look away from. The bright colors of the women’s clothes and the lush greenery of the surrounding fauna explode; there is beauty here, and life. And yet the beauty and life seem to mock the photographs’ human subjects, who look, somehow, frozen in their sorrow. Torgovnik’s photographs resonate with silence, as if the pain they document is beyond lamentation.

Reading their testimonies, it is hard to know how these women survived. Many were passed, for weeks, from man to man, and were raped continuously. They were raped until they bled, until they passed out, until they could not move or walk or talk; often they were forced to witness murders of others in between the rapes. Some were beaten and clubbed; or had nails driven into their bodies or their teeth knocked out; or were forced to drink stones, or urine, or the blood of their families; or had corn stems, wood, or sharp metal shoved into their vaginas. Some begged to be killed; many more contemplated killing themselves (“I…didn’t have money to buy a rope,” Esperance explains) or, later, their infants. Many of the rape victims were young teenagers at the time of the genocide, which means that they were in their late twenties or early thirties when Torgovnik photographed them; it is a shock to realize this, for some now look like old women. Equally shocking is the preternaturally aged, worried solemnity of their children, which refutes everything we like to associate with childhood.

For these women (who are identified only by their first names), the fathers of their children were not only their rapists but also, often, the killers of their families. Needless to say, the women’s emotions are a complicated maelstrom, at which Torgovnik’s interviews can only hint. “There is no reason whatsoever for me to love this girl,” a woman named Marie says of her daughter, Mary. (Marie is the only woman Torgovnik photographs whose eyes fill with tears.) “She reminds me of…the first rape and the second rape and all the rapes that followed… I can’t say that I love her, but I can’t say that I hate her either.” Yvette recalls: “After around six months, I thought I was probably pregnant. This is when I started wishing to die… But I feared suicide and thought instead that I should give birth to that kid and kill it. But…he was so beautiful that I developed love immediately.” Her son, Isaac, who is barefoot and wears a torn shirt, stares at us: he has beautiful almond-shaped eyes, the slightest furrow on his brow, and not a hint of a smile. A woman named Winnie explains of her daughter, Athanse: “I love her so much, even more so because she is the result of suffering.” But Isabelle, mother of Jean-Paul, says, “I feel trauma every time I look at this boy… I regret that I didn’t die in the genocide.” Some of these women grapple not with their hatred per se, but with where to place it. “They say we are leftovers of the militia’s sexual appetite,” Delphine says. “And whenever I think about it, I hate myself.” Philomena says, more simply, “For a long time, I really hated God.”

The wonderful thing—if there is any wonderful thing—that emerges from these photographs and interviews is the stubborn singularity of each woman. Despite their shared history of horror—and despite the génocidaires’ attempt to kill their human-ness—each has defiantly remained an individual. And each struggles, in her own way, with how she and her children might face the future. (“Be friendly. Love one another,” advises Josephine, somewhat miraculously.) Yet in another, decidedly un-wonderful sense, all these women are the sisters of Améry. In their incomprehension, their shame, their scars, their losses, their dislocation, their impotent fury, their bleak loneliness, their irretrievable lack of trust… The worlds of the Rwandan peasant and of the Viennese intellectual are not, it turns out, far apart: whoever was tortured, stays tortured.

The rest.

Back in the fall of 1993, the Denver Metro klavern of the Ku Klux Klan was casting about rather frantically for a means to redeem the humiliation of having been publicly routed by a surging mass of irate black teenagers amidst an attempt to commemorate Adolf Hitler’s birthday on the steps of the Colorado Capitol.

Their solution, brilliant in its way, was to have Thom Robb, fundamentalist minister cum Grand Dragon of the Arkansas-based Knights of the KKK (subsequently retitled “Christian Concepts, Inc.”), to observe the 1994 Martin Luther King holiday by giving a speech in front of the old courthouse adorning Boulder’s Pearl Street Mall.

Predictably  –  at least it can be said with certainty that Robb predicted it – a host of the more purportedly enlightened denizens of the People’s Republic sallied forth at the designated time to denounce the pastor’s unabashed celebration of white supremacist values with chants and placards demanding the utmost “tolerance” of racial/ethnic “diversity.”

Unfortunately – or not, depending on one’s point of view – things didn’t go quite as those on the “antiracist” side of the confrontation anticipated.

Fixing his gaze upon the small sea of hecklers neatly ensconced behind rows of metal barriers erected by the ever-growing overburden of Boulder’s finest – this, it was claimed, was to “ensure his safety,” although it would’ve taken someone a lot less canny than Thom Robb to worry that whatever protestors might turn out in the veritable buckle of the granola belt would so much as sip a cup of herbal tea without first reciting the Pledge of Nonviolence – the pastor seemed downright amused.

Then, having to all appearances extracted a full measure of mirth from the spectacle, and making even fuller use of his PA system, he delivered an utterly devastating blow (albeit, sadly, I can only repeat it in paraphrase). “What’s all this yapping about ‘diversity’?” he wanted to know.

“The town we’re standing in is 94 percent white. That’s why I’m here. This place is exactly what [the Klan] is trying to duplicate all across the country. If it’s racial diversity you’re looking for, you might want to consider moving to Newark or Detroit. But, hey, you’re not about to do that, are you? Ever wonder why that might be?”

Sometimes the effects produced by a little dose of reality can be amazing.

A queasy silence settled over the crowd even before Robb’s verbal roundhouse was complete. People shifted from foot to foot, not-so-figuratively squirming in place, the message boards they’d been holding lowering steadily, as if the signs themselves were wilting.

By ones and twos, then in somewhat larger clots, they began, almost furtively, to slink away.

The rest.

Y’know, it’s not very often I cheer for the klan.

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Tarantino vs Coen Brothers from Leandro Copperfield on Vimeo.

From The Denver Post:

A $5.9 million settlement reached Tuesday between the city of Fort Collins and Timothy Masters means his legal fight against those who pushed for his murder conviction is over.

In February, Larimer County agreed to a $4.1 million settlement with Masters, bringing his total settlement package to a tax-free $10 million.

Masters can now financially restart a life that was dramatically detoured during the 10 years he served in prison for the 1987 slaying of Peggy Hettrick.

That murder conviction was overturned in 2008 by DNA evidence, leading to a civil-rights lawsuit in federal court against Larimer County and Fort Collins officials for wrongful imprisonment.

“He can finally get his life back together and be financially secure for the rest of his life,” said Masters lawyer David Lane. “He can decompress and move forward.”

In their case against Masters, prosecutors Terry Gilmore and Jolene Blair, both now Larimer County judges, used a psychological theory in the absence of any physical evidence to persuade a jury to convict Masters.

Masters’ lawsuit sought damages under civil-rights law, saying Gilmore and Blair violated his constitutional rights by using selected and manufactured evidence to falsely accuse him. The two denied the accusations.

Masters was released in 2008 after advanced DNA testing found no trace of his genetic material, but did uncover DNA that may point to another suspect. There has been no new arrest in the case.

Masters’ attorneys also discovered that the prosecutors and then-Detective Jim Broderick concealed evidence that would have aided Masters at his 1998 trial.

The rest.

And from my favorite locals on the beat, West Denver CopWatch, something you may not know about the case (I sure as hell didn’t):

In 1987 a thirty-seven year old Peggy Hettrick’s sexually mutilated body was found in a field next to fifteen year old Masters’ trailer.  What then ensued was such a shit storm that in 1999, twelve years after the sexual homicide occurred, Masters was convicted to first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison.  Lt. Jim Broderick and the County Prosecutors, Blair and Gilmore, conspired to convict Masters on fabricated, falsified, and counterfeit evidence, while at the same time failing to disclose exculpatory evidence that would prove that Mr. Masters had nothing to do with the murder.

Tim Masters only true crime was that he was a poor kid growing up in a city and country that doesn’t give two shits about those who ain’t got.  You think Masters would have had to endure this had he lived in a McMansion.  No, in fact the most probable suspect, Richard Hammond, who committed suicide after it was discovered that he had been video tapping his wife, daughter, and other females vagina’s through a hidden camera he installed in his house did reside in a McMansion right next to where her body was discovered.  Hammond was an eye surgeon and experts believe that precision cutting was required in extracting the  labia and nipple of Ms. Hettrick , skills which Hammond clearly had and Masters clearly did not.  Upon discovering the voyeuristic and despicable habits of Hammond, the Fort Collins PD and Larimer County DA office destroyed an entire storage units worth of video tapes and pornographic material that may have contained the very footage of Ms. Hettrick’s murder.

The rest.

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Dear WTF,

My father’s father made me jack him off when I was three and four and five. I wasn’t any good at it. My hands were too small and I couldn’t get the rhythm right and I didn’t understand what I was doing. I only knew I didn’t want to do it. Knew that it made me feel miserable and anxious in a way so sickeningly particular that I can feel that same particular sickness rising this very minute in my throat. I hated having to rub my grandfather’s cock, but there was nothing I could do. I had to do it. My grandfather babysat my older sister and me a couple times a week in that era of my life and most of the days that I was trapped in his house with him he would pull his already-getting-hard penis out of his pants and say come here and that was that.

I moved far away from him when I was nearly six and soon after that my parents split up and my father left my life and I never saw my grandfather again. He died of black lung disease when he was 66 and I was 15, the same as his father had, both of them coal miners.

When I learned that my grandfather died, I wasn’t sad. I wasn’t happy either. He was no one to me and yet he was always there, the force of him and what he’d made me do moving through me like a dark river.

“Do you remember how we used to have to jack him off?” I asked my sister one day shortly after he died. We’d never spoken of it. I’d never said a word about it to anyone. I was ready for my sister to say no, for everything I remembered about my grandfather and his cock to be an ugly invention of my nasty little mind.

But she said, “Yeah.” She said, “Wow.” She said, “What the fuck was up with that?”

The rest.