Deogratias, Jean-Paul Stassen,

When I first read the graphic novel Deogratias by Jean-Paul Stassen, it reminded me of the novel Night by Elie Wiesel. As I learned about both genocides, it was impossible to ignore the similarities in inhumane treatment, violence, and trauma inflicted upon people.

Deogratias is about the Rwanda genocide between 1994 and 1995 where the Hutus and Tutsis who were both nations of Rwanda started to kill each other to gain the whole control of the Rwandan territory and resources. Deogratias, our main character who is a Hutu man, wants to date the Tutsis girls Apollinaria and Benina. Shortly when he was with Benina, the war happened. The Hutus started to kill the Tutsis mainly because of the influences of the Belgium soldiers. Since Deogratias is one of the Hutus, he joined the group that went to search for the Tutsis. That was when Benina escaped to find Apollinaria and they ended up coming to the Hutus, because they had no food. When Deogratias came back from the hunt, he saw that the two girls were being eaten alive by the dogs.

In Night, the main theme is inhumanity toward other humans in the holocaust, which is also shown in Deogratias. The German soldiers burned the babies alive, just like how Apollinaria and Benina are being eaten alive. The German soldiers also made the Jews watch their family being hanged, beaten to death and tortured by the wound. Jews were also forced to lose their dignity, the pain of separation and despair when they survived the whole Holocaust and found out that they are the only ones left. At the end of WWII, Hitler and his soldiers received the punishment that they deserved just like the Belgium sergeant did. Deogratias was also forced to watch his loved ones die.

In Deogratias, we can make parallels between the character Deogratias and Ellie Wiesel. They have all watched their loved ones die. They have all been through despair when everything ended and they had no one. However, what makes Deogratias different from Elie Wiesel is that Deogratias couldn’t take all these traumatic events and he still feels guilty of indirectly killing his loved ones; he ended up going “crazy”. He needed drinks to numb his brain and to not think about the events because if he does think about them, then he mentally becomes a dog. Symbolically, this dog could represent him coming into consciousness about the guilt of the death of the sisters, and how this consciousness transforms him into a savage willing to act on revenge. In other words, they are planning on doing something, which is the case for Deogratias. Furthermore, one could interpret this dog as a manifestation of his guilt for the death of his two sisters.After the war ended, he felt that the fact he killed a lot of Tutsis and his lovers was as disgusting as the dogs, therefore he mentally transformed himself into a dog.

At the end of the book, Deogratias got punished by murdering a Belgium man, while no one talks about what that man did to the Tutsis. Deogratias put poison in the bottle that he brought to the Belgium sergeant and then murdered him. It is ironic that people have different moral constraints toward different victims when they are experiencing the same thing. It is the same case for the sisters and the Belgium sergeant. They all get murdered and no one thinks that it is a big deal to kill two Tutsis girls. However they all believed that Deogratias was immoral because he killed the sergeant. It is ironic how people

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