The Value of Life in "The Merchant of Venice" and "Stories from Rwanda"

The Value of Life in The Merchant of Venice and Stories from Rwanda William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and Phillip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda are very similar in the fact that both address the value of human life. In The Merchant of Venice, one of the main characters is intent on murdering a man for money. In Stories from Rwanda, people are killed mainly because of their appearances. Throughout both works, The Merchant of Venice and Stories from Rwanda, deal with the way that people lose the sense of how to value a human life. In Tales from Rwanda, all of the Hutu people were taught to kill any Tutsi they met with little explanation. Gourevitch explains that there was reasoning that made sense to the Hutu leaders, like issues in their history and familial pasts, but often, the Hutus were not taught all of those reasons, they were just told to kill. The Hutus had always been jealous of the Tutsis, as they had had easier, better lives. They had typically been richer with more fulfilling lives. To outsiders who didn’t know the history, the killings appeared as racism. Even though the genocide was not only a race issue, it appears that there was racism between the Hutus and Tutsis because of the way Gourevitch’s interviewees describe events during the genocide. The Tutsis were made to carry around race identifier cards much like the Jews were made to carry during the Holocaust. Gourevitch points out that in Rwanda, people value human lives very little, if at all. In one part of the book, he states that "killing Tutsis was a political tradition in postcolonial Rwanda; it brought people together"(Gourevitch 96). People were willing to kill without question because it was what they were taught. Another example of the way that there is little value for human life is the way the killings were carried out. The Hutu people brutally murdered, and in some cases raped,

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