Spiritual Damage

• “Through roadblock after roadblock manned by drunken Hutu militiamen“ 


  “drunken” - shows the murderers were not of their senses and were even more dangerous

  “militiamen” - militia are not regular army and do not have to uphold military law
• “machete-wielding thugs“ 


  “thugs” - they are not warriors fighting for a just cause. Thugs has connotations of someone engaging in criminal activity for joy/pleasure
• “The smell of the dead would drift out.”


  evokes the senses to develop the impact this event had on him. Smell is the most important trigger we have for memory and by not being able to forget the smell, Keane cannot get over this experience.
• “This was not something I could convey with words or photographs or film.”


  recurrent idea that words cannot do justice when discussing what he had witnessed. By trying to structure his response coherently, he is limiting the impression it made on him.
• “Journalism was at best a limited vehicle of expression, at worst a crude and inadequate tool.”


  “Crude and inadequate” This suggests Keane feels as though words are too embellished and not accurate. Crude has connotations of being unskilled, unsophisticated.
• “To walk at night across an overgrown courtyard strewn with the rotting dead, to have to watch every step because in the long grass there is the decapitated heads of the murdered.”


  Grotesque image, clear anecdote. Allows the reader to fully understand how emotionally challenging it would’ve been to be there.
• “Some dangled their grenades through the open windows of our vehicles.” 


  it is clear here that the militiamen have little if any respect for life, as ‘dangled’ suggests that they are toying with Keane and his colleagues’ lives.
• “Most of these people had been involved in the murder of their Tutsi neighbours.”


  Designed to shock the reader with the listing sentence emphasising the fact that these militiamen had been indiscriminate in their actions towards the Tutsi – all had been killed regardless of their innocence.
• “Only we reached the other side of the border and stopped to check the vehicles did I notice that my hands were shaking.” 


  Sums up the fear felt by Keane as he attempted to escape from Rwanda and suggests that he was so afraid he was, in a way, numb. The fact that it was only when they had reached safety that he realised what his own body was doing clearly demonstrates his emotions during this time.
• “Some bloody place – I mean, can you believe the place? Unreal. Bloody Rwanda.”


  Adds to the sense that the group simply could not comprehend what they had seen.
• “To this day I am at a loss to describe what it was really like. That smell. On your clothes, on your skin.” 


  Highlights his inability to adequately express the reality of what he saw, drawing our attention instead to his strong sensory memory of the experience. Just like in the first paragraph this reference to ‘smell’ demonstrates that the events witnessed by Keane were too awful to be understood, but too shocking to be forgotten. Anaphora is used to suggest the idea of the smell being everywhere and inescapable, even more than year after the experience itself.