I want to be so loud about the experience of killing each other. I want to tap into everyone’s senses, to touch on our human sensibility. - Clemantine Wamariya

We don’t write about the human emotions of conflicts; we write about the political and economic aftermath. I wanted to write about those feelings.

I work every day now to erase [the] language of ruin, to destroy it and replace it with language of my own. With konona (rape, ruin), you’re told, there is no antidote, no cleansing agent. […] You’re polluted, you’re worthless—that’s it.

I wanted to piece [the] world back together, but the idea of one group of people killing another group of people—people they lived with, people they knew—that chunk of knowledge could never fit itself in my mind. It was categorically, dimensionally, fundamentally wrong. It was like trying to store a tornado in a chest of drawers. That was not how the universe worked.