The Bone Woman: A Forensic Anthropologist's Search for Truth in the Mass Graves of Rwanda, Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo
- Book Review,
by Clea Koff
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
An unusual combination of character traits led 31-year-old Clea Koff to her profession. She is hard-working, physically strong and emotionally resilient; she has a capacity for stoicism, a desire for justice, and the ability to respond with equanimity to the sight and smell of maggot-ridden, decomposing flesh. As a child, Koff buried dead birds in plastic bags in her yard so that she could dig them up later and examine their state of decay. By age 23, she was an anthropologist serving in Rwanda on the first forensic team ever dispatched to assemble evidence of war crimes. There, she and her colleagues extracted some 500 bodies from the largest mass grave ever exhumed. For Koff, it was only the beginning. She would serve on six more missions in Rwanda, Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo. What drives a person to devote her life to studying the dead? How can such work come to feel normal -- even exhilarating -- rather than soul-crushing, tragic or horrifying? Such questions stalk Koff throughout The Bone Woman, a memoir of her work on mass graves for the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia. She says she is driven in large part by idealism. "I find it inordinately satisfying to lift bodies I've excavated out of the grave," she writes. "These are people whom someone attempted to expunge from the record, the very bodies perpetrators sought to hide." When a reporter asks Koff what she's thinking as she probes the earth to determine the dimensions of a mass grave, Koff replies, "I'm thinking, 'We're coming. We're coming to take you out.' " (Koff's colleagues teased her mercilessly for the earnestness of this remark. Her boss liked to say that Koff was thinking, "We're coming . . . we're coming to take you out to dinner.") Confronted with a prodigious pile of corpses, Koff does not feel helpless: She feels constructively engaged. Indeed, Koff sees herself bound to the victims and survivors of genocide by "silvery threads"; to surviving relatives, she hopes to offer closure, in the form of a body for burial and an explanation of how and where a loved one died. To the dead, Koff imagines she offers release from the anonymity of mass burial and a sort of justice in the form of incontrovertible evidence that they were civilians killed in cold blood. Indeed, the forensic evidence Koff's team unearthed helped lead to numerous convictions at the international tribunals for Rwanda and Yugoslavia. Some Rwandan skeletons exhibited severed Achilles tendons that prevented victims from fleeing as they were slaughtered by blunt trauma to the skull. Yugoslavs had their hands wired behind their backs and their bodies riddled with bullets. In a mass grave in Ovcara, Croatia, Koff exhumed the bodies of hospital patients -- one with a set of X-rays hidden in his pajamas, as though he might need them where he was going. Nonetheless, the motivating sense of righteous mission can be a brittle thing in the face of so much death; and the truth Koff finds within the graves is a miserable truth of limited comfort to the living. In Rwanda, a woman asked to see what she believed to be her uncle's remains. Koff set a skull atop a body bag. It was all she had to show the woman, and it was simply grotesque; the woman burst into tears at a distance and could not even bring herself to approach. In Vukovar, the wives and mothers of the dead resented the forensic team's mission to prove that their relatives had been mowed down by Serb fighters. They would have preferred to nurture the hope that their men were still alive, as prisoners of war. There were moments when Koff herself broke down -- while handling the bullet-ridden bones of a very young man in Srebrenica, for instance. In Rwanda she had nightmares that she shared her bed with a tangle of legs. In Croatia she found one man's body sunk vertically in a mass grave; it gave rise to a recurring dream in which his head was lodged in a table that she scrubbed, tugging his hair with the back and forth motion. But in general, when the human tragedy of it all intruded on her ability to exhume, clean, reconstruct, age and sex the bones, she pushed it firmly away. The emotional self-mastery required by her work was perhaps the greatest challenge for Koff, and she met it not with steeliness but with buoyancy of spirit. If at the start of The Bone Woman, Koff's fascination with bones and decomposition strikes the reader as macabre, by the end it's hard not to appreciate that something like a love of humanity, as well as simple acceptance of the mortality of our flesh, lies at its core. As a memoir, however, The Bone Woman is less than fully realized. Koff's self-knowledge comes in flickers, rather than driving her narrative. Her emotional responses to the work careen from repression to unfettered sorrow to an almost sentimentalized idealism. She veers off for whole chapters on what amounts to office politics: her irritation with her boss's macho attitude, the day the head pathologist yelled at her in front of a journalist. At times like these, Koff seems to be narrating an ordinary tale of a young woman's first work experiences, rather than the truly extraordinary story that's hers alone to tell. The beauty and significance of Koff's work and of her drive to do it come through most powerfully when she is crouching over a mass grave, untangling limbs, scraping dirt from a corpse's clothes and finding, within what most of us would see as horror, something human that speaks. Fortunately, that alone is enough to make this book surprising, compelling and worth reading. Reviewed by Laura SecorCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From Booklist
Any title containing the words mass graves portends some tough reading, and Koff's unblinking, direct memoir is not lacking in ghastliness. One of her aims, however, is to contrast her interior reactions to her work of exhuming and examining the victims of the Balkan and Rwandan massacres of the early 1990s with the meticulous professionalism needed to conduct it. Koff's observation that "when I analyze human remains I am interested, not repulsed" is shown in her objective descriptive writing about particular victims' physical characteristics and traumas. Away from the grave or autopsy table, however, Koff allows glimpses of the mental effort her professionalism requires by relating her numerous nightmares and manifestations of stress. She accepts this burden out of a deeply idealistic motivation--her hope that her career in forensic anthropology will reduce human rights violations in the world. Koff also writes about incidents of her field experiences such as privations, the dangers of gunfire and mines, and the interpersonal relations with her colleagues and UN guards. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“The beauty and significance of Koff’s work and of her drive to do it come through most powerfully when she is crouching over a mass grave, untangling limbs, scraping dirt from a corpse’s clothes and finding, within what most of us would see as horror, something human that speaks. . . . Surprising, compelling, and worth reading.”
–The Washington Post Book World
“Only Koff herself can explain what happens in the heart when the living meet the dead. . . . [The Bone Woman relives] what a good many people cannot imagine ever enduring. . . . Koff’s seven ‘missions’ into fields of death erase all qualitative differences between horrors dreamed and horrors unearthed.”
–Los Angeles Times
Koff knows that bones talk, and she simply lets the bones she exhumes give testimony. . . . In descriptions free of sensationalism or sentimentality, [this] emotional distance gives The Bone Woman its pared-down power.”
–MAUREEN CORRIGAN, NPR’s Fresh Air
“A highly personal account written in an engaging [style] . . . An accomplished writer . . . Koff speaks of her work with an irrepressible enthusiasm, and the kind of conviction that she believes she was born to do the job.”
–The New York Times
“Every detail — the marbles in a dead boy's pocket — seems to tell the same story, of human suffering on a scale nearly too awful to contemplate. But with each Body that Koff can prove belonged to a non-combatant, it becomes easier to successfully prosecute charges of war crimes. Her work is the place where science, idealism and humanism most intersect.”
—The Independent on Sunday
“Thomas Keneally wrote about the awkwardness of "good" as a literary subject. It is harder to make interesting than evil ... but sometimes he concluded, you find yourself staring at good in the face and just have to recognise it. So it is with The Bone Woman.”
—The Times (London)
“Her book — indeed, her life — is a testament to an idealism that shines through a grim, bloody reality.”
—The Glasgow Herald
“Part science, part expose, part personal narrative, The Bone Woman offers a rare insight into both the role of a forensic anthropologist, and the role of the UN tribunal's forensic team ... Yet, for all its forensic detail, it is Koff's deep sense of connection to the bodies she came to exhume, her unflinching sense of obligation to them, and her willingness to look at what they represent, that renders The Bone Woman compelling reading.”
—Sunday Times (Perth)
“It is a highly personal account written in an engaging I-was-there-style ... she gives a sense of the survivors and the guilt and grief they live with ... an accomplished writer ...”
—Jane Perlez, The New York Times 'Saturday Profile'
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