The Bone Woman

by Clea Koff

I ended up skipping the rest of the status updates I'd initially planned, if only because I ended up just reading the book and enjoying myself leisurely.  Aside from that, I found I couldn't really find anything thoughtful to add to discussion anyway, outside of highlighting three or four passages in each of the books's parts that stood out to me.  If I were going to do that, then I might as well just tell everyone to just read the book.  After all, despite a few moments where I felt the book dragged a little, I feel like The Bone Woman is a very worthwhile read.

There is a lot more detail in the first parts devoted to the Rwandan genocide, and the latter parts of Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo were more heavy in detailing site management, with more anthropological findings (which I DID actually enjoy reading about).  There were moments where I thought that the author maybe should have chosen not to harp on mean teammates and team disharmony, too much.  Mentioning it once or twice was fine, and I can only imagine just how stressed and emotionally taxed everyone on these missions were becoming.  But after a while, it just started sounding like complaining, and kind of distracted from the bigger picture of the book.

As I've already mentioned, I don't have a lot to say about this book, and will gladly direct anyone to Themis-Athena's book updates, that give a lot of extra information, as complementary reading to this book, on each of the mentioned missions that Koff was involved in.  In truth, this is probably one of those books that I would have read and simply stated that it was compelling and thought-provoking, and left it at that.  I'm no good at reviewing these kinds of books anyway, the kind where you liked it, but didn't really love it, but still feel like it's a book you'd highly recommend to others.

So that's what I will do.  I've always found nonfictional works a bit more difficult to read, but The Bone Woman never felt like a chore to me.  So overall, I found that I quite enjoyed the book and found it quite inspiring.

Meanwhile, with her permission, I've included the links to Themis-Athena's reading updates, and her review below.  I highly recommend reading these, as they really add to the reading experience of The Bone Woman.

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The Bone Woman

by Clea Koff

Part Two:  Kigali

I'm a bit behind on my updates (as well as reading this book as part of the buddy read with Themis and Elentarri), but I tend to take nonfiction slowly anyway, so I'm not sweating it.  But here's the next, though I wasn't really sure I had much to contribute to discussion.


Part Two: Kigali, is a bit shorter than the first, Kibuye, and feels almost like an extension of the Kibuye mission, since it is still within the scope of the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

This part also has a few things that I would have liked to have seen in the previous part in Kibuye.  There is a short lesson about the terms "Hutu" and "Tutsi" and how they came to be about, as Koff explains about the way in which identity cards were checked for an individual's "ethnicity" during the 1994 killings.  I found this section pretty interesting.

Meanwhile, the scientist in me couldn't help but be drawn to the following passage:

Children present more age indicators than adults because, in addition to all the postcranial indicators, teeth form and erupt in the mouth at generally predictable ages (except for the third molars, or "wisdom teeth").  The formation of crowns and roots can generate an age range, which can be further informed by the state of fusion on the long bones, pelvis, hands, feet, and even fingers and toes.  So where forensic anthropologists often give five- or ten-year age ranges on adults who appear to be over the age of thirty-five years, for children a narrower age range can usually be assigned.  You might find one indicator that a child is no younger than five, for example, and then another three indicators that put him under eight.  With this information, you can safely record an age range of between five and eight years at death.  Similarly, for a young adult male, you might find that the sternal epiphysis of the clavicle is unfused, putting him roughly under twenty-five years, but under nineteen.  Now you can begin to form an age estimate, one that does not have to be as broad--perhaps sixteen to twenty years.  Then you look at the other bones to refine or adjust the age range further.  The goal is to improve the chances of finding a match with a missing person, and the forensic anthropologist must take into account the variation he or she has seen in cases where the actual age of the decedent became known after a positive identification.

This is kind of what I'd been looking for in terms of Koff showing us how forensic anthropology and osteology can be used to identify a skeleton.  This is stuff I recall spending a semester trying to learn, all those years ago in college.  Something that I, admittedly, never excelled at, but always found extremely interesting.

The rest of the Kigali part also has Koff mentioning the importance of team morale and team togetherness, as she feels, for the first time, what happens when their lead anthropologists are called away, and the small group left in Kigali kind of just start breaking apart.

This is still a very nerve-wracking time for Koff, as she still remembers the gunfire and killings of the two men in the lake, just feet away from where she and her teammates had been dining one night.  The bullet holes and bloody hand prints on walls continue to remind her that the places she is currently staying had recently been desperate places of refuge for the victims.

We also get to see a glimpse of an orphanage that Koff visits, with children, orphaned from the genocide.  It's a nice touch to end off this part of the book, I think, and I'm glad she included it.

The second half of this book deals with Clea Hoffs missions is Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo.  The field work is in some ways similar and other ways different to that in Rwanda.  Koff is also more involved in management than in field work, which provides a different perspective.  I found that she focused less on her work in the second half of the book and that her whole experience in Europe wasn't as detailed as the experiences in Rwanda.  The Mothers of Vukovar also provide a different perspective on those left behind.

The Bone Woman

by Clea Koff

Intro:  Before
Part One:  Kibuye


I hadn't expected to run through as much of this book as I ended up reading.  My relationship with nonfictional work typically tends toward the "~20 pages read per sitting."  But as I started into The Bone Woman, I found myself readily pulled into Clea Koff's accounts of her first mission in Kibuye to help exhume and autopsy, and hopefully to help survivors identify as many victims of the Rwandan Genocide as could be possible.

This section reads more like a journal, or a memoir (as Elentarri's reading update mentions), of Koff's time in Kibuye, detailing each moment from arrival in Kigali, heading toward Kibuye, trading stories and jokes and experiences with her colleagues, and also of the grueling task of unearthing the grave.  The telling is also interspersed with a lot of personal history and experience outside of the current exhumation, a running joke about Koff's "bride price," and Koff shares a lot of her emotional reactions and self-revelations.

As for the scientific aspects of forensic anthropology, she doesn't go very in-depth into the work, but what she DOES share is still interesting.  There are a lot of parts that present a certain amount of detail, such as when she talks about finding the grave's perimeters, probing the ground to find anything that could be significant, or the setup of work areas, or even the process of going through clothing and other material items after each autopsy.

To be honest, I had really been expecting more detail in the forensic anthropology aspects in this telling.  Because while I found myself immersed in Koff's day-to-day activities during her time in Kibuye, enjoying some of her side tangents, and just generally loving her style of presentation, there were moments where I felt like she had yet to get to the point of the story.  Then she'd start talking about unearthing a skeleton, skim over some details and characteristics of said skeleton, and then we'd be moving right along into the rest of the not so scientific parts of her work.

I guess I'd been expecting a bit more about how forensic anthropology, specifically osteology, plays into identifying a skeleton than what she has given so far--how to use length of leg bones to determine height and mass, how to determine sex via the pubic of the pelvis (which she does briefly bring up a time or two, but hardly tells us how it works), or how to age a skeleton based on cranial development.  Maybe some people might not have found this stuff interesting, but I had totally been expecting at least some osteology.

While this was a slight disappointment for me, it didn't really deter how easily I started becoming intrigued by other aspects of her work, and how other aspects of forensic anthropology can help in the identification of an unknown victim.  Needless to say, the first thing I'd obviously been expecting had been osteology, which DID in fact feature as a very prominent part of my own Forensic Anthropology class years ago when the university I studied at had tried to adopt a Forensic Science program.  And so the other aspects of anthropology--clothing, accessories, the surroundings of the grave, and other human connections--always seem to get forgotten in my mind when I think about dig sites.

Of course, it has been well over ten years since I studied this field, and I don't even use it in my current career, and so my own knowledge could be quite lacking compared to someone who lives the life that I, once upon a time, dreamed of.

I'm eager to continue reading the rest of this book, and can hopefully keep up with my updates.

Meanwhile, here are a couple passages I found that particularly stood out:

The way the bones fueled my awareness of my job assured me that the fears engendered by reading the Kibuye witness accounts would not come to fruition while I was working on these bones.  Strangely, what affected me more than the skeletons were the bloody handprints (tiny hands) in the priests' rooms, the machete cuts in the doors of the outdoor privies, the blood splatters on the ceilings--the ceilings--of the church anterooms, the machete slash to the middle of the clay Virgin Mary statue, and the lower extremity of an angel lying on the windowsill.  Those remnants of violence were evocative in a different way than the bones.

I was finding it hard to work in a crouched position because of the heat and the stench: normally I would be alternately standing and crouching, picking and troweling.  But I forgot my discomfort when I found pink necklaces around the skeleton's neck vertebrae and some hair.  Now I was totally focused.  This woman had been alive once, not so long ago, and had fastened the necklaces herself.

[...]

... when Kaban asked me what I was thinking about when I was in the grave, the pink-necklace woman was foremost in my mind, particularly the way she had given the grave character by individualizing its "contents."

One of the things I did find about this 'Kibuye' section was that there still felt like there wasn't much of a sense of completion in the mission.  I mean, yes, they exhumed a lot of bodies, autopsied a lot of the victims, and there was a "Clothing Day" for survivors to come and try to identify clothing that belonged to someone who might have been in the center of the massacre.  But even as she writes about getting on the plane and going back home after all the work done, you don't really get a sense that there was closure for everyone, and there's little talk about the aftermath of the entire mission--that there still seemed to be a lot left unfinished.

Of course, that's probably because this is reality, and even after all the work and progress made, a lot of the victims will still remain unidentified.  After all, as she mentions at the end of the section, it seemed like the chief purpose of this mission was to prove that a genocide happened so that the proper people could be put on trial for the crime.

!!POSSIBLE SPOILER ALERT!!

I've read just under half of this book.  In this first "half", Koff details her experiences as a forensic anthropologist in the two missions she undertook as part of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.  Her job was to exhume victims of the genocide in Rwanda and find evidence to bring the perpetrators to trial, as well as help relatives identify their kin. 

This is a memoir detailing the author's experiences (driving around, digging up corpses, team dynamics, social functions), thoughts about everything and anything (her job, the victims, the survivors, the scenery, her co-workers, etc), things to complain about (team work is a bitch!), and emotional reactions, rather than a book that details the scientific aspects of forensic anthropology or this type of field work.  There is some detail on how the field work is organised, but nothing terribly specific.

She starts off the Rwanda section by providing a few sentences on the genocide.  I would have liked this part to be more detailed. I just feel if you are going to write half a book about the people you dug up and their remaining family members, you should write a bit more about why those people were rounded up and slaughtered in churches and stadiums in the first place.  Also, we never  find out (yet) what the end result of all her work was?  How did it help the tribunal?  It helped some of the locals with finding/identifying family, but what about the bigger picture?

It's quite obvious that Koff is doing her dream job (she keeps reminding the reader of this) - she absolutely loves being a forensic anthropologist and keeps letting us know that she was smiling while investigating mass graves.  I find this a bit creepy, but I suppose if it keeps you half-way sane...?

Anyway, the next section deals with her missions as part of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.