Ani's Book Abyss

The Bone Woman

by Clea Koff

Intro:  Before
Part One:  Kibuye


I hadn't expected to run through as much of this book as I ended up reading.  My relationship with nonfictional work typically tends toward the "~20 pages read per sitting."  But as I started into The Bone Woman, I found myself readily pulled into Clea Koff's accounts of her first mission in Kibuye to help exhume and autopsy, and hopefully to help survivors identify as many victims of the Rwandan Genocide as could be possible.

This section reads more like a journal, or a memoir (as Elentarri's reading update mentions), of Koff's time in Kibuye, detailing each moment from arrival in Kigali, heading toward Kibuye, trading stories and jokes and experiences with her colleagues, and also of the grueling task of unearthing the grave.  The telling is also interspersed with a lot of personal history and experience outside of the current exhumation, a running joke about Koff's "bride price," and Koff shares a lot of her emotional reactions and self-revelations.

As for the scientific aspects of forensic anthropology, she doesn't go very in-depth into the work, but what she DOES share is still interesting.  There are a lot of parts that present a certain amount of detail, such as when she talks about finding the grave's perimeters, probing the ground to find anything that could be significant, or the setup of work areas, or even the process of going through clothing and other material items after each autopsy.

To be honest, I had really been expecting more detail in the forensic anthropology aspects in this telling.  Because while I found myself immersed in Koff's day-to-day activities during her time in Kibuye, enjoying some of her side tangents, and just generally loving her style of presentation, there were moments where I felt like she had yet to get to the point of the story.  Then she'd start talking about unearthing a skeleton, skim over some details and characteristics of said skeleton, and then we'd be moving right along into the rest of the not so scientific parts of her work.

I guess I'd been expecting a bit more about how forensic anthropology, specifically osteology, plays into identifying a skeleton than what she has given so far--how to use length of leg bones to determine height and mass, how to determine sex via the pubic of the pelvis (which she does briefly bring up a time or two, but hardly tells us how it works), or how to age a skeleton based on cranial development.  Maybe some people might not have found this stuff interesting, but I had totally been expecting at least some osteology.

While this was a slight disappointment for me, it didn't really deter how easily I started becoming intrigued by other aspects of her work, and how other aspects of forensic anthropology can help in the identification of an unknown victim.  Needless to say, the first thing I'd obviously been expecting had been osteology, which DID in fact feature as a very prominent part of my own Forensic Anthropology class years ago when the university I studied at had tried to adopt a Forensic Science program.  And so the other aspects of anthropology--clothing, accessories, the surroundings of the grave, and other human connections--always seem to get forgotten in my mind when I think about dig sites.

Of course, it has been well over ten years since I studied this field, and I don't even use it in my current career, and so my own knowledge could be quite lacking compared to someone who lives the life that I, once upon a time, dreamed of.

I'm eager to continue reading the rest of this book, and can hopefully keep up with my updates.

Meanwhile, here are a couple passages I found that particularly stood out:

The way the bones fueled my awareness of my job assured me that the fears engendered by reading the Kibuye witness accounts would not come to fruition while I was working on these bones.  Strangely, what affected me more than the skeletons were the bloody handprints (tiny hands) in the priests' rooms, the machete cuts in the doors of the outdoor privies, the blood splatters on the ceilings--the ceilings--of the church anterooms, the machete slash to the middle of the clay Virgin Mary statue, and the lower extremity of an angel lying on the windowsill.  Those remnants of violence were evocative in a different way than the bones.

I was finding it hard to work in a crouched position because of the heat and the stench: normally I would be alternately standing and crouching, picking and troweling.  But I forgot my discomfort when I found pink necklaces around the skeleton's neck vertebrae and some hair.  Now I was totally focused.  This woman had been alive once, not so long ago, and had fastened the necklaces herself.

[...]

... when Kaban asked me what I was thinking about when I was in the grave, the pink-necklace woman was foremost in my mind, particularly the way she had given the grave character by individualizing its "contents."

One of the things I did find about this 'Kibuye' section was that there still felt like there wasn't much of a sense of completion in the mission.  I mean, yes, they exhumed a lot of bodies, autopsied a lot of the victims, and there was a "Clothing Day" for survivors to come and try to identify clothing that belonged to someone who might have been in the center of the massacre.  But even as she writes about getting on the plane and going back home after all the work done, you don't really get a sense that there was closure for everyone, and there's little talk about the aftermath of the entire mission--that there still seemed to be a lot left unfinished.

Of course, that's probably because this is reality, and even after all the work and progress made, a lot of the victims will still remain unidentified.  After all, as she mentions at the end of the section, it seemed like the chief purpose of this mission was to prove that a genocide happened so that the proper people could be put on trial for the crime.