The horrors endured by 14 survivors of five modern genocides who now call Texas home are depicted in an educational exhibit at the Museum of Texas Tech University.
Aliza Wong, associate professor of history at Tech and associate dean of the university’s honors college, says the exhibit, “Narratives of Modern Genocide” will bring the survivors’ stories home for those who see genocide as a far-away happening.
“I think that oftentimes we think that the stories are so far away. This brings the stories to West Texas. This makes them not the stories of someone from Rwanda or Burundi or Sudan or Cambodia or Bosnia. This makes them stories of Texans, and that makes them our stories. I think that’s why it’s so important for us to go and see this, they are all our stories. It’s the story of Texas.”
The exhibition speaks to the experiences and shared humanity of the survivors, who never forget their homelands.
“Some have actually returned to their home countries, many in humanitarian missions and so many of them are now, have started philanthropic organizations for clean water, or organizations to help fund children who are displaced and are now orphaned because of the brutalities. Many of them are thinking about home and thinking about how they were fortunate and how they can spread their fortune to others and to give hope. It’s these fourteen who in some way were brought to the state of Texas, some by applying for asylum, some through a refugee campaign.”
A documentary of the same name has been produced KTTZ-TV, which is applying now to show it at various film festivals. Paul Hunton, Texas Tech Public Media’s general manager, directed it. The film and the exhibit are funded by an $80,000 grant from the Texas Holocaust and Genocide Commission. Texas Tech contributing about $62,000 in in-kind donations.
Those included in the film and exhibit were part of a project done by Baylor University’s Institute for Oral History.
Wong, who has done projects like this one before, says she’s surprised by what she learns about human nature.
“Every time I do a public history project like this, it surprises me the depths of human depravity and the heights of human resilience. I think that we forget, because we are so caught up in congratulating ourselves in our progress, in our civilization that we forget that it is a constant every day battle not to return to the injustices that were so prevalent and so pervasive and that so defined us as different nations and us as different peoples.”
The passage of decades, Wong says, doesn’t change the horrors of genocides.
“They borrow metaphors, they borrow tortures, they borrow terrors, I think the nightmares remain the same. I think that sexual assault is more spoken about than it was before, but I think that rape has always been a part of genocide and of mass murder; it is part of terror and is part of horror. When you go through these fourteen narratives, the majority of them talk about the fact that women are brutalized in front of their fathers, their husbands, their sons. It is a way of emasculating men and making women into objects.”
Wong says the exhibit does not contain any graphic photos of people killed in these genocides for a reason.
“They had been burying people and she didn’t want to move, she wanted them not to notice that she was still alive. She had fallen into this ditch, and she had stayed there still. When she woke up the bodies were bloated and they started to smell and she talks about this in very graphic detail. We don’t feel it is necessary to glorify that or to dramatize that because I think the words speak for what they saw. I think that we are a visual culture, we are a visual people but sometimes even more powerful is the storytelling, or the words.”
The exhibit runs through February.