Amazon.co.uk
The Bone Woman is Koff's powerful, deeply personal account of her training in human rights forensic anthropology, her growing awareness of the human dimension of genocide, and her struggle to come to terms with her role in the reconciliation and healing process of a family--and a nation. Koff details, with a no-holds-barred frankness, what day-to-day life was like as part of a dedicated, multinational team of forensic anthropologists, archaeologists, pathologists, technicians, workers and soldiers: the harsh, sometimes terrifying and potentially violent conditions under which they lived and laboured, not to mention the old bugaboo of politics. She gives a clear, informed, insider's view of her work and her struggle to maintain the necessary professional distance while coming face-to-face with the obvious brutality of the victims' deaths and the pain of the survivors.
While there is much that is similar across these missions, Koff takes special care to emphasise what is distinct to each. Each killing field has its own story. Each victim is an individual whose personhood and personal history were to be erased and rendered anonymous. Yet at the same time, each story carries a universal warning that we all must heed, so as not to fall into the error of viewing what happened in a given place and time as an isolated incident that will never be repeated. --Diana Kuprel, Amazon.ca --Ce texte fait référence à une édition épuisée ou non disponible de ce titre.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
An unusual combination of character traits led 31-year-old Clea Koff to her profession. She is hard-working, physically strong and emotionally resilient; she has a capacity for stoicism, a desire for justice, and the ability to respond with equanimity to the sight and smell of maggot-ridden, decomposing flesh. As a child, Koff buried dead birds in plastic bags in her yard so that she could dig them up later and examine their state of decay. By age 23, she was an anthropologist serving in Rwanda on the first forensic team ever dispatched to assemble evidence of war crimes. There, she and her colleagues extracted some 500 bodies from the largest mass grave ever exhumed. For Koff, it was only the beginning. She would serve on six more missions in Rwanda, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.
What drives a person to devote her life to studying the dead? How can such work come to feel normal -- even exhilarating -- rather than soul-crushing, tragic or horrifying? Such questions stalk Koff throughout The Bone Woman, a memoir of her work on mass graves for the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia. She says she is driven in large part by idealism. "I find it inordinately satisfying to lift bodies I've excavated out of the grave," she writes. "These are people whom someone attempted to expunge from the record, the very bodies perpetrators sought to hide." When a reporter asks Koff what she's thinking as she probes the earth to determine the dimensions of a mass grave, Koff replies, "I'm thinking, 'We're coming. We're coming to take you out.' " (Koff's colleagues teased her mercilessly for the earnestness of this remark. Her boss liked to say that Koff was thinking, "We're coming . . . we're coming to take you out to dinner.") Confronted with a prodigious pile of corpses, Koff does not feel helpless: She feels constructively engaged. Indeed, Koff sees herself bound to the victims and survivors of genocide by "silvery threads"; to surviving relatives, she hopes to offer closure, in the form of a body for burial and an explanation of how and where a loved one died. To the dead, Koff imagines she offers release from the anonymity of mass burial and a sort of justice in the form of incontrovertible evidence that they were civilians killed in cold blood.
Indeed, the forensic evidence Koff's team unearthed helped lead to numerous convictions at the international tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia. Some Rwandan skeletons exhibited severed Achilles tendons that prevented victims from fleeing as they were slaughtered by blunt trauma to the skull. Yugoslavs had their hands wired behind their backs and their bodies riddled with bullets. In a mass grave in Ovcara, Croatia, Koff exhumed the bodies of hospital patients -- one with a set of X-rays hidden in his pajamas, as though he might need them where he was going.
Nonetheless, the motivating sense of righteous mission can be a brittle thing in the face of so much death; and the truth Koff finds within the graves is a miserable truth of limited comfort to the living. In Rwanda, a woman asked to see what she believed to be her uncle's remains. Koff set a skull atop a body bag. It was all she had to show the woman, and it was simply grotesque; the woman burst into tears at a distance and could not even bring herself to approach. In Vukovar, the wives and mothers of the dead resented the forensic team's mission to prove that their relatives had been mowed down by Serb fighters. They would have preferred to nurture the hope that their men were still alive, as prisoners of war.
There were moments when Koff herself broke down -- while handling the bullet-ridden bones of a very young man in Srebrenica, for instance. In Rwanda she had nightmares that she shared her bed with a tangle of legs. In Croatia she found one man's body sunk vertically in a mass grave; it gave rise to a recurring dream in which his head was lodged in a table that she scrubbed, tugging his hair with the back and forth motion. But in general, when the human tragedy of it all intruded on her ability to exhume, clean, reconstruct, age and sex the bones, she pushed it firmly away. The emotional self-mastery required by her work was perhaps the greatest challenge for Koff, and she met it not with steeliness but with buoyancy of spirit. If at the start of The Bone Woman, Koff's fascination with bones and decomposition strikes the reader as macabre, by the end it's hard not to appreciate that something like a love of humanity, as well as simple acceptance of the mortality of our flesh, lies at its core.
As a memoir, however, The Bone Woman is less than fully realized. Koff's self-knowledge comes in flickers, rather than driving her narrative. Her emotional responses to the work careen from repression to unfettered sorrow to an almost sentimentalized idealism. She veers off for whole chapters on what amounts to office politics: her irritation with her boss's macho attitude, the day the head pathologist yelled at her in front of a journalist. At times like these, Koff seems to be narrating an ordinary tale of a young woman's first work experiences, rather than the truly extraordinary story that's hers alone to tell. The beauty and significance of Koff's work and of her drive to do it come through most powerfully when she is crouching over a mass grave, untangling limbs, scraping dirt from a corpse's clothes and finding, within what most of us would see as horror, something human that speaks. Fortunately, that alone is enough to make this book surprising, compelling and worth reading.
Reviewed by Laura Secor
Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
