Niko is “voicing the perpetrator’s perspective,”3 it is very different from the speech of Jean Hatzfeld’s real-life criminals. The latter remain incomprehensible to the listener. Although, as the French historian Gérard Prunier wrote about the genocide in Rwanda, “Understanding why they died is the best and most fitting memorial we can raise for the victims. Letting their deaths go unrecorded, or distorted by propaganda, or misunderstood through simple clichés, would in fact bring the last touch to the killers’ work in completing the victims’ dehumanization.”4
Niko, the fictional perpetrator, allows us to begin to find evil intelligible, no matter with how much hesitation and distaste we do so. By the time we discover what he has done once an adult, we know all about his wretched, motherless, and loveless childhood, we have come to care about him, and we know that he despises himself enough to vanish from society—and by so doing he begins to make evil intelligible for us. It is just one case, but it is an extremely compelling one.
“Write about what you want to know,” Rosenblatt says, and so Isaro does. But it is too late for her. She seeks to understand evil by writing Niko’s story. In Women Witnessing Terror,5 Anne Cu-bilie outlines that the vocation of “giving testimony is about being a witness to impossible storytelling, and also a performative act between the mute witnesses, the dead, the survivor witness and the witness to the survivor.” Trying to verbalize what in essence cannot be spoken is, indeed, impossible storytelling. Yet merely attempting to convey what is incomprehensible might be a way to survive tragedy. It is this urgency that leads Isaro to abandon her studies in Paris, leave France, and undertake a research project that entails interviewing perpetrators in her homeland while at the same time working on her own imaginary story of Niko. He is in a sense the witness to the survivor she has been so far, but, in her case, creating the monster who is the very embodiment of evil is not sufficient to keep her going. And it doesn’t. It cannot help her in her attempt to be part of a community again or to live an ordinary, everyday life. She realizes that justice is, indeed, desirable, but she is unable to find it anywhere or to help it materialize.
Finally, and only briefly, Isaro touches upon love, proving to herself—and to us—that love is possible, until she has the terrifying thought that the man she is in love with and, in fact, has been living with, might—just possibly might—be the very man who is guilty of the annihilation of her family. No matter how unlikely this may be, the thought will never leave her, and so she cannot go on. Ian Palmer tells us, “There is a saying in Rwanda that Rwandans must swallow their tears. They do. If they did not they would surely drown.”6 Isaro drowns.
Although the novel never mentions a specific country, Isaro’s native land where the horror takes place obviously refers to Rwanda. Yet a Vogue Italia (March 18, 2011) interview with Gatore tells us that “. . . even if his novel was written from the desire to reconstruct his lost diary, the author says he is bored with brutal stories: ‘My book isn’t a political tract—and it isn’t yet another book about the poor little Rwandan.’ ” Indeed, it is not. It is a true artist’s attempt to “comprehend the incomprehensible.”7 Like other artists, he has been if not accused of using art to do so, certainly questioned about whether and how art can possibly depict and explain genocide and, furthermore, whether this is ethically acceptable. A visitor to the virtual exhibition8 of Kofi Setordji’s memorial on the genocide in Rwanda wrote in the guest book, signing with the name Boo Friedman, “People will never voluntarily confront genocide or crimes against humanity—It is too harsh, too incomprehensible, too cruel. Genocide can only truly be comprehended through art, of any medium.” In an interview with Maarten Rens (in February 2002, in Accra), Setordji himself said, “After the genocide people lament. All they possess is what is inside them . . . You cannot break the spirit inside them and we see this spirit in the form of music and poetry.” And in the fiction of Gilbert Gatore.
MARJOLIJN DE JAGER
NOTES
1. Jeffrey Brown interview with Roger Rosenblatt on Art Beat—PBS News-hour, January 31, 2011.
2. On-line video interview: www.dailymotion.com—ina.fr, April 14, 2011.
3. Anneleen Spiessens, “Voicing the Perpetrator’s Perspective: Translation and Mediation in Jean Hatzfeld’s Une Saison de machetes,” Translator, 16.2 (2010), 315-336.
4. Gérard Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), xii.
5. Anne Cubilie, Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 3.
6. Ian Palmer, “Darkness in the Heart,” British Medical Journal (August 12, 1995), 459; Expanded Academic ASAP (online), September 13, 2011.
7. Rhoda Woets, “Comprehend the Incomprehensible: Kofi Setordji’s Travelling Memorial of the Rwanda Genocide,” African Arts, 43.3 (Autumn 2010): 52.
8. In 2002 the Dutch foundation Africaserver.nl created an online exhibition of the genocide memorial in their Virtual Museum of Contemporary African Art.
THE
PAST
AHEAD
1. “Dear stranger, welcome to this narrative. I should warn you that if, before you take one step, you feel the need to perceive the indistinct line that separates fact from fiction, memory from imagination; if logic and meaning seem one and the same thing to you; and, lastly, if anticipation is the basis for your interest, you may well find this journey unbearable.”
Your gaze falls on her, motionless yet alert. Unaware of the secret she hides you don’t censure your mocking thoughts. She looks like a giant bird, the kind that balances on one foot for days on end. You dare not laugh at the image. Your presence must remain circumspect, unnoticeable.
The silky darkness, at odds with the ray of light from the window, only allows you to discern her silhouette and the profile of her face.
Her silence begs you to stay with her, and somehow you know this is not the time to refuse her anything. So you stay, frozen in place and absorbed as she is. In the settling stillness it seems that your spirits meet. Nothing you discover about her (and how would you? you avoid the question) takes you by surprise.
She remembers the first words of the narrative she had no idea would so outstrip her when she began. “Dear stranger, welcome to this narrative, whose only survivor will be you,” she’d first jotted down in the corner of a sheet of paper. Then she’d hesitated. The introduction was too violent. “Don’t add any verbal violence to that of the facts,” she remembered. She ended up choosing words of caution that didn’t satisfy her. Too indirect. Even today she isn’t pleased, but she’s accepted the idea of letting the text stand.
She began to write a few days earlier,
