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[tiamatschild]

I finished rereading Clea Koff's The Bone Woman today. That's a really, really, really good book.

This entry was originally posted at http://tiamatschild.dreamwidth.org/136863.html. Please feel free to comment there using OpenID. Or here! It'll be read either way, is what I'm saying.

Comments

[tainry]

Noted!

[tiamatschild]

I like a good memoir, and this is a good memoir! She's got a really great narrative voice.

Also the epilogue has good points about genocide cross culturally.

[tainry]

Am reading this now! It is very very good! Fascinating and horrifying and I've found I need to stop reading a few hours before bed and very determinedly think of/do something else. u.u;

[tainry]

Oh gosh I'm glad it's being valuable to you! And uh yeeeeeeaaaah that. Is probably a good idea. (I am terrible at gauging disturbing levels with... anything. Really.)

~tiamatschild

Huh. I got the email notif, but your comment isn't here. o.O
Anyway! I'm about halfway through and yes, oh my, it is valuable, even if I don't know the extent of it yet. But I'm already thinking about forensic anthropologists and Autobots... u.u
Heh. I finished off the first volume of The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl last night, so that worked. I'm tempted to read a little later, as Koff's passion to help and bring justice, and her spare but vivid descriptions of people and landscapes are wonderfully tempering. And maybe I'm getting used to reading about mass graves. o.o (IDK, I've had a ...thing... about mummies since childhood - as do we all, right? - but found out I shouldn't read picture books about them very late either...oops. .......Actually it was just the one of the person they thought might have been entombed alive that was disconcerting.) (And then

[playswithworms]

Hmmm! Does look interesting! I was just listening to a podcast about Rwanda, and how it beats the US in measures of gender equality due to government mandates about 50% women in parliament, etc., but this sudden leap forward in women's rights has some interesting contradictions since it was so fast, and top down, rather than grassroots and bottom up: in the home women who hold these powerful government positions are expected to serve their husbands and be "good Rwandan wives" - domestic abuse is a big problem.

[tiamatschild]

Oooh yeeeeessssss.

Koff talks about that a little bit - since the situation is partly the result of the genocide. Unlike in, say, Kosovo or Serbia or a lot of other places, men were not preferentially targeted by perpetrators, but even so, in Rwanda a lot more women survived than men did. That means there's a big gender imbalance in Rwanda, more women than there are men, but that's not really good for women. Koff mentions that some men feel they can behave any way they want to women they're in a relationship with, because there are so many more men than women that their partner can't just find herself some other man.

(Gender imbalances are, in a patriarchal setting like the US or India or China or Rwanda or the DRC or well. most places. Always bad for women. It doesn't matter if the imbalance is more women than men or more men than women - gender imbalances seem to correlate with increased incidence and intensity of violence against women.)