Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds by Mondiant Dogon

White blocks concealing thousands of stalled lives.”

“Rows and rows of white tents as far as you could see.

“For so long, all I saw were hundreds of white tents,” Dogon writes of the refugee camps that were his home for years. This book beautifully captures the colossal waste that the refugee experience - essentially a state of suspended animation - represents. The last few years have witnessed an outpouring of refugee memoirs and stories, which is as it should be: How prosperous, stable societies respond to those fleeing conflict in Syria and Myanmar, Haiti and Afghanistan is one of the thorniest questions of our era. Scrupulously recorded, these are the moments that restore his - and his readers’ - faith in mankind. During yet another massacre, in a scene that is the stuff of screaming nightmares, he saves himself by hiding in a latrine, burrowing into the sewage and bodies of slaughtered fellow refugees.Īs he reminds himself, for every neighbor who used the post-genocide turmoil as an opportunity to loot and rape, there was a local villager, a stranger on the road, who warned his family members of approaching danger, hid them at great personal risk and treated their wounds. A few years later he watches as Hutu extremists, attacking a supposedly protected Rwandan refugee camp, gang-rape a family friend. His baby sister dies in his mother’s arms as they trek toward the frontier. As ethnic hatred spills out across the border, the Bagogwe, who belong to the targeted Tutsi minority, are transformed into strangers in their own land.ĭogon is 3 when he sees his uncle beheaded by a militiaman. Dogon’s family, members of eastern Congo’s Bagogwe community, has become collateral in neighboring Rwanda’s ongoing genocide. There’s a certain irony to the complaint, for those who have felt misgivings about the country of Dogon’s birth will finish this book with many of their prejudices confirmed.ĭogon’s story begins in 1995, when his family hits the road running, warned that local villagers - neighbors they laughed, chatted and drank with - are headed their way, bent on slaughter. THOSE WE THROW AWAY ARE DIAMONDS A Refugee’s Search for Home By Mondiant Dogon with Jenna KrajeskiĪt one point in Mondiant Dogon’s poignant memoir, “Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds,” the author takes issue with the negative associations that cling, cobweb-like, to the Democratic Republic of Congo, which he remembers as “the most alive place in the world,” a fertile Garden of Eden.

Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds by Mondiant Dogon