Crisis of the Utterable. Euphemisms and Diversions of the Human Face in Jean Hatzfeld’s Machete Season

After listening empathically to testimonies from surviving Tutsis (Into the Quick of Life, 2000), the French author and journalist Jean Hatzfeld reversed the perspective by gathering recollections of the events from Hutu murderers, in Machete Season (2003). This paper shows how the executioner stories are immersed in the unutterable, a posture marked by a calculating and reifying discourse that aims to remain silent about the event rather than to relate them, which divert and appropriate speech. The experience of the event is therefore reduced to its factual aspects, which evacuate any form of subjectivization. Such rhetorical posture, very direct and very crude at times, but more importantly forged with euphemisms and diversions, contribute to the depersonalization of the murderers, therefore normalizing extreme violence and concealing the face of the Tutsi.