Our Secret By Susan Griffin Summary

Marie Beatrice Umutesi, the author of Surviving the Slaughter: The Ordeal of a Rwandan Refugee in Zaire, and Susan Griffin, the author of “Our Secret”, are two females who explore the world around them and express their thoughts through their writing. Both women try to answer their own questions that have occurred to them, and these questions emerge throughout their works of literature. One such question is, “But is one ever really free of the fates of others?” (Griffin 235). Whereas, Umutesi asks, “What had led us to this extremity? What are the reasons behind the tragedy of the Rwandan refugees, whose existence has been forgotten and denied by the international community?” (4). However, these questions remain unanswered.
These questions appear to be open-ended, provoking the reader to interpret and answer them on their own; they serve a purpose. They cause us to think, to look at things in ways which are new to us. So, just as Marie Umutesi and Susan Griffin pose questions in their writing, so shall I. I am going to take their questions and incorporate them into one overall question: Where does violence stem from and who is involved and why? First, let us explore events that have recently been occurring on our planet. Many of us are familiar with

These distinctions make people different. These two words, among many, can be the boundary between the perpetrator and the victim. According to the perpetrator, these words determine who is different and who does not deserve equal treatment. What I find interesting is that people can sometimes forget something: everyone is different from everyone else. Our own DNA sequence is proof of that (with the exception of identical twins, but even they have their differences). So why can we not just be considered those unique human beings we are? If it were as simples as that, violence would probably not exist. Yet, because nobody is perfect, just as everyone is different, our world will never be