Our book club just read the book, Sandcastle Girls by Chris Bohjalian. The novel talks about families affected by the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the genocide of the Armenians after that. In our discussion, we tried to name the periods of genocide in various countries. Our question was: Would this kind of horrendous actions take place if women were the countries' leaders?
What are the motivations to kill innocent people just because they belong to a group, race, or religion? Power, turfism, supremacy seem to be some of the reasons to eliminate a particular group of people from the face of the earth. Are these motivations gender specific? Would women kill for the same reasons?
Despite the fact that we all share in the horror of genocide, we have seen it occur again and again in our history. Why? What was accomplished? What was lost? How were the survivors able to persevere? What have we learned about the resilience of people? What have we learned about the fiendish minds of men who perpetrated such acts of murder?
Can we prevent genocide from happening again in the future? If Bohjalian wanted to provoke our thinking, I would say he was successful in doing that in this novel.
