The Book of Genocides Credit: Courtesy Humans are not genetically hardwired to kill other humans, despite centuries of seemingly overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Rather, our innate biological aversion to taking another human life, reinforced by religious and social mores, has to be deliber ately overridden in order to get people to commit murder en masse. Military trainers have known this for decades, as have perpetrators of genocide. It’s why the latter systematically portray their enemies as less than human and thus undeserving of compassion or sympathy. Dana Mashoian Walrath, an anthropologist, artist, writer and poet, has steeped herself in the bitter poison of such dehumanization and hatred to better understand it. Her home studio, in the Queen City Park neighborhood of South Burlington, is lined with her near-life-size pencil drawings of genocide victims, displayed beside those of the various creatures — flies, leeches, jackals, snakes — to which the victims were equated by their oppressors. In a perverse way, surrounding herself with such disturbing imagery inspires Walrath, 66, to press on with her work. Her ambitious goal is to stop ongoing genocides and prevent future ones. Walrath’s haunting new graphic narrative, or “disaster comic,” as she calls it, is The Book of Genocides, which traces the history of 10 mass exterminations of racial, ethnic and religious minorities in the past 500 years. Though the circumstances surrounding each genocide are unique, certain themes are timeless: “A line red from blood led from the Roman arena through the gallows of France to the pogrom of Bialystok,” wrote Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist who coined the term “genocide” in 1944. Lemkin, who lost 49 family members in the Holocaust including his parents, created a heuristic model for identifying the 10 stages of genocide that scholars and legal experts still use today. Though Walrath doesn’t specifically reference Lemkin’s stages of genocide, he appears in the book. Walrath’s work has been featured in the Lancet, the Irish Times, Slate and Foreign Policy, as well as on NPR. A Fulbright Scholar and Atlantic Fellow, she has written three previous books: the award-winning Aliceheimer’s: Alzheimer’s Through the Looking Glass, a graphic memoir about her experiences caring for her late mother after she developed dementia; I Am a Bird, a children’s picture book; and Like Water on Stone, a young adult novel in verse about the Armenian genocide in the early 20th century, which Walrath’s grandparents survived. Artwork from The Book of Genocides Credit: Courtesy The Book of Genocides unfolds chronologically, beginning with the extermination of the First Peoples of the Americas and running through the genocide of the Muslim Rohingya by the Myanmar military, whose persecution continues to the present day. The book also includes chapters on slavery in the Americas, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Cambodian Killing Fields, the Bosnian genocide, the Aboriginal genocide in Australia and the Torres Strait Islands, and the Nakba, or forced expulsion and killing of hundreds of thousands of Arabs in Palestine beginning in 1948. Walrath traveled to the sites of every genocide but Myanmar; instead, she visited Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh. Often, those trips made Walrath physically ill — not with nausea or vomiting, she said, but with respiratory ailments, as if the very air in those places was tainted with profound sadness and grief. One of Walrath’s favorite quotes in the book comes from Bruce Pascoe, a Bunurong, Yuin, Koori and Tasmanian scholar, who wrote about the 500 tribes of Australia. Pascoe noted that despite their 65,000 years of cultural continuity, Australia’s tribes never committed the atrocities that European settlers did: “The idea to pour boiling oil on enemies,” he wrote, “seems not to have occurred to anyone in Australia.” Some readers may assume that The Book of Genocides, out September 8, is a response to Israel’s war in Gaza, as Walrath includes a chapter called “The Palestinian Genocide.” Many international legal scholars, including a 2025 United Nations Commission of Inquiry, have concluded that Israel has committed genocidal acts there. In fact, Walrath began her project a decade ago, with an art installation she created for Studio Place Arts in Barre. “In my mind, it was genocide [starting] in 1948,” she said, referring to the Nakba. “It’s always been about land theft … and settler colonization.” Artwork from The Book of Genocides Credit: Courtesy In fall 2016, Walrath brought her exhibit to a predominantly Black high school in Philadelphia for its all-school read of her book Like Water on Stone. The exhibit featured nine genocides, positioning Black slavery alongside the Nazi extermination of Jews. “I wanted the Black students to see their [ancestors’] experience on an equal footing with the Holocaust,” Walrath explained. That art show, like The Book of Genocides it inspired, featured pages from a 1943 textbook titled General Zoology by Tracy Storer; Walrath’s mother used the book while a student at Duke University. Walrath excerpted pages of detailed descriptions of animal species, including humans, which she then repurposed to fit each mass extermination. For example, because enslaved Black people were treated like livestock, she chose text that described animal husbandry. Similarly, because the Nazis dehumanized the Jews by portraying them as parasites and vermin, Walrath drew illustrations of rats and bloodsucking worms juxtaposed with the textbook’s depictions of those creatures’ anatomy. Walrath began reinterpreting the art exhibit as a book during the COVID-19 lockdown of 2020. Walrath designed The Book of Genocides to be interactive in an unusual way. Each illustration of an animal and genocide victim is divided into thirds, demarcated with dotted lines. She invites the reader to cut along those dotted lines to create a turn-the-flap book that lets the reader see, for example, a Rwandan’s face on the body of an insect, or a Bosnian with the head of a vampire bat. “The act of cutting is not an act of desecration,” Walrath writes. “Instead, I invite you to consider it a form of liberation.” The Book of Genocides, drawn in a folk-art style that eschews hyperrealism and polished graphics, reads like a chronicle of group violence rather than a single narrative. Each chapter stands on its own, though its constant references to General Zoology make it feel like an encyclopedia of the mass misery humans inflict upon each other. Born in North Carolina and raised in New York City, Walrath spent years as a teen living in Yemen, Brazil and Egypt as her family followed her father, a water engineer, on his various overseas work projects. Dana Mashoian Walrath Credit: Stephanie Kloss Like many descendants of state-sponsored violence, Walrath was told virtually nothing by her grandparents about the Armenian genocide; the Turkish government still refuses to acknowledge it. When such crimes and traumas go unacknowledged and unpunished, she said, victims often harbor lifelong feelings of shame and guilt, as though they were to blame for allowing the slaughter to happen. Walrath’s 10th-grade history teacher finally opened her eyes to the forced deportation and mass killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire beginning in 1915. “It was a watershed moment,” she said, linking her grandparents’ experience to those of enslaved Black people in America. At Barnard College, Walrath divided her undergraduate studies between the visual arts and biology, eventually earning a doctorate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. After moving to Vermont with her then-husband and three sons in 2000, she took a job at the University of Vermont’s Larner College of Medicine. Her role involved creating informational comics that were used to teach medical students. When it’s a really hard subject, you feel the presence of the comic artist through their hands.Dana Mashoian Walrath Graphic narratives, she explained, can make many subjects, especially disturbing ones, more palatable and accessible. That much was obvious in Walrath’s studio, where a large sketch of a lynched Black man stands on an easel. Had it been an actual photograph, the image would have been even more difficult to sit with for more than an hour, as this reporter did during a recent interview. Reading comics, Walrath said, is also more active than reading prose, as it stimulates many different parts of the brain simultaneously. It can tap into the subconscious — such as through the judicious use of the color red to represent blood, which can evoke a visceral response. “And when it’s a really hard subject, you feel the presence of the comic artist through their hands,” she added. For Walrath, traveling to the sites of genocides and speaking to survivors highlighted the common threads that run through all of them. She also witnessed the healing that can result when survivors recognize themselves in the experiences of others. When Walrath met with Tutsi survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, she handed out zine versions of her art exhibit, which portrayed the First Peoples of the Americas receiving blankets laced with smallpox. “They did that to us, too!” one Tutsi survivor told Walrath. “They put us all in the woods and released tsetse flies,” which cause the fatal sleeping sickness. Similarly, Walrath visited the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, which had previously been a prison camp where people were tortured before being sent to the Killing Fields. There, she encountered a man who was so thrilled to meet her that he ran home to bring his family there, too. Why? As Walrath explained, her success in life, despite being the grandchild of genocide survivors, gave him hope for the future of his own grandchildren. Artwork from The Book of Genocides Credit: Courtesy Walrath collaborated with South African director Dylan Valley and a South African team on animated and virtual reality versions of the book called “The Animated Book of Genocides: Girl Earth Fire Time” and “Between the Wall and the Sides.” Both animations will be on the festival circuit later this year. Walrath will also have an exhibit of her work on Saturday, September 12, at the South End Art Hop in Burlington, where people can buy copies of her book and cut it up together. Her next book, already in the works and tentatively titled Repair, is about her path toward healing and reconciliation, which she hopes will help others on their own journeys. “Every time I was right in the horror, I would just see the patterns [of genocide] again and again,” she said. “It’s taught, and it’s learned … which means we can change it. It doesn’t have to be this way.” ➆ Walrath displays her work during the South End Art Hop on Friday, September 11, 5-9 p.m., and gives a talk on Saturday, September 12, 4 p.m., at the Maltex Building in Burlington. Free. The original print version of this article was headlined “Dark Matters | A haunting new “disaster comic” turns an unflinching eye to the dehumanization that fuels genocides” The post New ‘Disaster Comic’ Depicts the Roots of Mass Extermination appeared first on Seven Days. ...read more read less