THE
PAST
AHEAD
GLOBAL AFRICAN VOICES
Dominic Thomas, editor
THE
PAST
AHEAD
A NOVEL
GILBERT GATORE
TRANSLATED BY
MARJOLIJN DE JAGER
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
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Bloomington, Indiana 47404-3797 USA
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© 2012 by Indiana University Press
First published in French as Le passé devant soi © Éditions Phébus, Paris, 2008
This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gatore, Gilbert, [date]
[Passé devant soi. English]
The past ahead : a novel / Gilbert Gatore ; translated by Marjolijn de Jager.
p. cm. — (Global African voices)
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-0-253-00665-3 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00666-0 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-253-00950-0 (eb)
I. De Jager, Marjolijn. II. Title.
PQ2707.A86P3713 2012
843′.92—dc23
2012015756
1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12
To my parents,
to Pierre and Maddy Le Bas,
thank you.
I have broken an order, and the guilty are never bored.
—J.-M. COETZEE, IN THE HEART OF THIS LAND
What better is there to be done when there’s no doubt whatsoever that it’s too late?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The translator wishes to express her sincere gratitude to Dee Mortensen, senior editor at Indiana University Press, and to Dominic Thomas, professor of French & Francophone studies at University of California, Los Angeles, for their unswerving encouragement and support for the translation of Gilbert Gatore’s novel. Without such enthusiasm for and faith in the importance of francophone African literature, works such as these would remain unknown to the large audience that is waiting to discover these voices.
I am equally grateful to the French Embassy’s program of French Voices, which has supported this publication with the generosity of its funding.
And, as always, warm gratitude goes to David Vita, my first and acutely critical reader, without whose daily presence and support my work would be much more difficult.
INTRODUCTION
While working on the translation of Gilbert Gatore’s novel, I kept asking myself two questions. First, why had he written this particular novel? It is a story in which Niko, one of the two protagonists, is developed in such a way that the reader comes to have great empathy for him, feeling increasing compassion for Niko and even anger with those around him, since all but one of the villagers cast him aside. Then, when we learn much later in the novel that Niko is also the perpetrator of horrendous crimes, I wondered how, despite the horror of his character’s actions, the author had made it possible for me to continue feeling some sort of compassion for him. The answer came just recently when in an interview on Art Beat1 the author and journalist Roger Rosenblatt was asked why writers write. He gave four reasons: “to make suffering endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable, and love possible.” Whether Gilbert Gatore would agree with this response I cannot and do not know, but for me, his reader, he has succeeded on all four fronts.
Phébus, his French publisher, provides us with the following biographical information: “Gilbert Gatore was born in Rwanda in 1981. On the eve of the civil war, his father gave him The Diary of Anne Frank to read. Profoundly moved, the young boy decided, like the heroine, to keep a diary throughout the conflict. When he fled the country with his family in 1997, Zairian customs officers took everything they had, including the precious notebooks. Ever since, he has tried to recover the strength and truth of those emotions in his writing.” By keeping a diary, suffering was made endurable both for Anne Frank and, generations later, for Gilbert Gatore. (On a personal level, for a woman whose origin is Dutch and who herself has rather vivid childhood memories of World War II, it is particularly moving to learn that Gatore’s earliest inspiration came from Anne Frank.)
The novel’s two characters, Isaro and Niko, are mirror images of one another, even though at first they appear to be each other’s most extreme opposites: a beautiful, talented, smart young woman, raised with all the comforts of a middle class family, and an ugly, handicapped, ostracized young man, victim and executioner, self-seeker and self-concealer. Everything each of them embodies is wholly lacking in the other. However, as the story progresses it becomes clear that they are two sides of what is essentially the same person, especially as we realize that it is also a novel within a novel, since Niko is the protagonist in the tale that Isaro is in the process of writing. Gatore has explained in an on-line interview that “the contrast is . . . inside themselves as well as between the two characters; . . . Isaro is the reverse of Niko” (le contraste . . . est à l’intérieur d’eux-mêmes
