by Rob Spillman
“Good luck,” I say, averting my eyes from hers.
We were supposed to go to Lucienne’s wedding the following Saturday, and she had thick and magnificent braids on her head.
“Jessie, they’ll never be able to do anything, knowing that God can see them.”
I hug her to me without replying.
On the way back everything is all right.
The weather is mild in Kigali. The streets are deserted and suddenly look wider. I realize that without noticing—and probably like every one of us—I had certain reference points in the city. A little shop at the street corner. Motorcycle repairers in the vicinity of a Perowanda gas station. Little things like that. Since the news of the assassination broke, all these tableaux have disappeared from the scene. The occasional people who dare leave their house are foreigners or, of course, Hutus. Or those IDs say they are. That’s my case. The others are all hiding wherever they can.
In the city there’s an excitement that’s both joyful and solemn. Groups of Interahamwe militia in white outfits covered with banana leaves walk around singing. Standing in their tanks, the military and the police are keeping an eye on everything. Everyone has a transistor radio glued to his ear. The radio says: “My friends, they have dared to kill our good president Habyarimana. The hour of truth is at hand!” Then there’re some music and games. The host of the program, in brilliant form, quizzes his listeners: “How do you recognize an Inyenzi?” The listeners call in. Some of the answers are really funny, so we have a good laugh. Everyone gives a description. The host becomes serious again, almost severe: “Have fun, my friends, but don’t forget the work that’s waiting for you!”
At Camp Kigali ten Belgian UN soldiers have been killed. Belgium is pulling out. They don’t want to know anything else. Even their civilians are feeling threatened and they try to pass for French at the barricades. Somewhere in Paris some sinister civil servants are rubbing their hands together: the situation is under control in Kigali, the RPF won’t get in. Their straw men got the army generals and commanders together. They uttered the terrible words: Muhere iruhande. Literally, “Begin with one side.” Neighborhood by neighborhood. House by house. Don’t spread your forces out in disorderly killings. All of them must die. Lists had been drawn up. The prime minister. Agathe Uwilingiyimana, and hundreds of other moderate Hutu politicians have already fallen to the bullets of the presidential guard. To tell what they did to Agathe Uwilingiyimana is beyond me. A woman’s body profaned. After so-called Ibyitso, the collaborators, it’ll be the Tutsis’ turn. What they’re guilty of is just being themselves: they’re barred from innocence for all eternity.
If only by the way people are walking, you can see that tension is mounting by the minute. I can feel it almost physically. Everyone is running or at least hurrying about. I meet more and more passersby who seem to be walking around in circles. There seems to be another light in their eyes. I think of the fathers who have to face the anguished eyes of their children and who can’t tell them anything. For them, the country has become an immense trap in the space of a few hours. Death is on the prowl. They can’t even dream of defending themselves. Everything has been meticulously prepared for a long time: the administration, the army, the Interahamwe are going to combine forces to kill, if possible, every last one of them.
I’ve chosen to be here. The resistance leaders at Mulindi placed their trust in me and I accepted. They explained to us that the Arusha peace treaty could produce either the best or the worst of results and that the RFP needed people in all the big cities and towns.
On the eve of our departure I thought a lot about my father. In my brothers and sisters’ opinion I was his favorite. Even he didn’t attempt to hide it. When we were in Bujumbura sometimes he would say, “Of all my children, Jessica is the one who is most like me.” A funny character, Jonas Sibomana. He would show us his torso, furrowed with scars, and would promise to leave all his goods to the one of us who could reproduce the same scars on his own body. My brother Georges, who didn’t take anything seriously, answered him, “You’re so broke, old Jonas, that it’s not even worth it to try.” Then both of them would pretend to fight and we had so much fun watching them run all over the house. My father had been a member of Pierre Mulele’s resistance movement in Kwilu. Oh, he wasn’t one of the important people in the group. He was just one of those peasants they give weapons to, explaining to them quickly who the enemies are. They could lose their lives in all that, but they wouldn’t make a name for themselves. Jonas told me that he saw Che Guevara when the Cuban came to organize the resistance in the Congo. He also knew Kabila, and didn’t have a good word to say about him. When he felt very ill, in Bujumbura, he called for me: “Go to the house where we used to live in the neighborhood of Buyenzi, and tell the owner that it’s your father, Jonas Sibomana, who sent you. He’ll understand.” The owner and I found a big package in a hole next to a spigot. I opened it. It contained three old guns, already half rusted. When I went back to see him we had a good laugh at his joke.
I suppose that’s what made me decide to interrupt my studies when I was eighteen to join the guerrillas in Mulindi.
I remember everything as if it were yesterday. There were fifteen of us young people making the road trip by night from Bujumbura to the Mushiha refugee camp. Departure the next day already, at dusk—because we always had to move about in the dark—for Mwanza in Tanzania where we had to wait for the boat—the Victoria—for a week. After that, it was Bukoba. There we were supposed to locate a red truck parked at the port. The leader of our group, Patrick Nagera—he was to fall later in the front line of our October 1990 offensive—started looking all around him, his nose in the air. A large man in a hat, with a scarf around his neck, passed close to him and said very quickly without stopping, “Is it you?” Later on it was in Mutukura and Kampala where we stopped seeing each other. I was staying with a family in the Natete neighborhood. In the evening, when I took a stroll in the street to stretch my legs a bit, I was puzzled to see cars driving on the left-hand side of the road. It’s strange, but that’s my strongest memory of Natete, cars driving on the wrong side. All I had to do was to wait for the signal for my departure. I had understood that I was not to ask questions of my hosts.
If we were recounting all this today, one might think that I was bragging. That’s not the case. Ever since 1959, every young Rwandan, at one moment or another in his life, has to answer the same question: Should we just sit back and wait for the killers, or try to do something so that our country can go back to being normal? Between our futures and ourselves, unknown people had planted a sort of giant machete. Try as you might, you couldn’t ignore it. The tragedy would always end up catching you. Because people came to your house one night and massacred all your family. Because in the country where you live in exile, you always end up feeling in the way. Besides, what could I, Jessica Kamanzi, possibly brag about? Others have given their lives for the success of our struggle. I have never held a gun nor participated in the military actions of the guerrillas. I stayed almost the whole time at Mulindi to take care of the cultural activities of the resistance. Sure, I was at Arusha during the negotiations. I typed or photocopied documents and sometimes I was called on to give summaries to our delegates. But those were only humble tasks. It’s true that my presence in Kigali today is not without danger. It’s maybe the first time that I’ve risked my life. In this country, where all the citizens are watched night and day, my false ID card probably won’t protect me for very long. I have to move all the time. But sooner or later there’ll be someone who’ll ask me some very precise questions that I’ll have a hard time answering.
While I’m walking I think back on our night watches. We used to sing, “If three fall in combat, the two who are left will free Rwanda.” Very simple words. We didn’t have time for poetic tricks. These words come back to me like an echo and give me strength. The moment of liberation is at hand. Since this morning our units have been moving on Kigali. But will t
hey arrive everywhere in time? Unfortunately, no. In certain places, the butchery has already started.
Near Kyovu I see hundreds of corpses a few yards from the barricade. While his colleagues are slitting the throats of their victims or hacking them to bits with machetes close to the barricade, an Interahamwe militiaman is checking ID cards. The visor of his helmet is turned backwards, a cigarette dangles from his mouth, and he is sweating profusely. He asks to see my papers. As I take them out of my bag he doesn’t take his eyes off me. The slightest sign of panic, and I’m done for. I manage to keep my composure. All around me there are screams coming from everywhere. In these first hours of massacre the Interahamwe surprise me with the assiduity and even a certain discipline. They are really set on giving the best of themselves, if it is possible to speak this way of the bloody brutes. A woman they’ve wounded but are waiting to finish off a bit later comes toward me, the right part of her jaw and chest covered with blood. She swears that she’s not a Tutsi and begs me to explain to the man in charge of the barrier. I move away from her very quickly. She insists. I tell her dryly to leave me alone. Seeing this, the Interahamwe militiaman is convinced that I’m on his side. He blurts out in a joyful peal of laughter:
“Ah! You’re hard-hearted, my sister, so you are! Come on, you should take pity on her!”
Then he brutally pushes the woman back toward the throat slitters before checking the ID cards again.
• North Africa •
LAILA LALAMI
• Morocco •
THE POLITICS OF READING
I GREW UP in a house full of books. One of my earliest and fondest memories is of my parents curled up on opposite corners of the divan, with a novel or a memoir in their hands. I suppose it was only natural that I became a voracious reader myself. Yet I didn’t begin to read the literature of my own country until later in life—not because of lack of taste or laziness, but because of the vagaries of history.
When the French colonized Morocco in 1912, they did not simply engage in the systematic plunder of its natural and human resources, they also renamed towns and villages, replaced the symbol on the national flag, and imposed French as the language of business and administration. A small number of Moroccans were trained in French schools, and groomed to become clerks, people who could help run the empire without threatening it. After independence in 1956, the Moroccan government embarked on a large-scale effort to open up education to everyone, but it failed to smoothly, or completely, replace French with Arabic and Berber. By the mid-1970s, nearly all the children’s books available in my hometown of Rabat were still in French. So it was that, while an American child might start her reading life with E. B. White and Beverly Cleary, and a British child might be given the stories of Roald Dahl and Enid Blyton, I, though a Moroccan, was weaned on Hergé and Jules Verne, Théophile Gautier and Alexandre Dumas.
Over time, the school curriculum began to include novels, stories, and poems from North Africa. Starting in the sixth grade, we were assigned works such as Le Fils du Pauvre (The Poor Man’s Son) by the Algerian Mouloud Feraoun, Iradat Al-Hayat (The Will to Live) by the Tunisian Aboul-Qacem Echchebi, Al-Ayyam (The Days) by the Egyptian Taha Hussein, and many of Naguib Mahfouz’s novels, including Bayn Al-Qasrayn (Palace Walk). These books hit me with a strange, revelatory power, so deeply did I identify with the characters. Their names, their languages, their customs were recognizable to me; their families’ concerns were similar to mine; their society’s troubles were those of mine. As a small child, literature had been exclusively the realm of the foreign and the unusual, but in my adolescence I discovered that it also included the close and the mundane. There were many people, many lives, many stories in books—things were delightfully more complicated.
With a few exceptions, the school curriculum stayed away from contemporary Moroccan authors. This might have had something to do with the fact that some of our writers were directly or indirectly critical of the government, and had occasionally been censored. Driss Chraïbi’s Le Passé Simple (The Simple Past) was banned for a few years, presumably because the tale of an angry, French-educated young man constantly at odds with his traditionalist Moroccan father (who is referred to only as “Le Seigneur” or “The Lord” in the book) was deemed transgressive in a country still reeling from the struggle and sacrifices that led to independence from France. Mohamed Choukri’s powerful and autobiographical Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (For Bread Alone) was also censored for many years, while the English-language translation, by Paul Bowles, sold more than 100,000 copies in America. Abdellatif Laabi, the poet who founded the seminal literary magazine Anfas/Souffles, spent time in a Kenitra prison for his political activities. Tahar Ben Jelloun’s frank treatment of sexual identity in novels such as L’Enfant de Sable (The Sand Child ) and its sequel, La Nuit Sacrée (The Sacred Night), ensured he would never be assigned at the junior or high school level.
But, through recommendations from teachers, parents, or older siblings, my friends and I read all these writers. I remember how we passed around copies of Choukri’s book to each other (the authorities were, thankfully, never very good at enforcing their own bans, and Al-Khubz Al-Hafi could still be found at used-book stores, or in French translation). I remember reading Tahar Ben Jelloun’s Harrouda with as much trepidation as I had felt when I first laid my hands on a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I remember falling in love with the mother in La Civilisation, Ma Mère, because I had at last met a Muslim heroine who was more than a sad, helpless victim. So I managed.
Later, when I went to college to study English, I was fortunate enough to take an African literature class that introduced me to African novelists who write in English, among whom were Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Ngūgī wa Thiong’o. I remember reading A Man of the People and thinking that Chief the Honorable M.A. Nanga, M.P., would have fit right into our Parliament in Rabat, and that Odili could have been one of our teachers. I was struck by the fact that, even though these characters lived in a culture that was as different in terms of language and religion as any European culture, we shared a common experience.
I had not come across Achebe’s work before, because of the terrible lack of translations into Arabic on the one hand, and the paucity of French translations of English-language African authors on the other. One legacy of colonialism is an artificial division of Africa between Francophone, Lusophone, and Anglophone regions, which is unfortunately carried through in publishing, distribution, and translation. Too often, readers have access only to writers from their own region, which is very limiting. Too often, Western critics who have read in one linguistic tradition make claims about all of Africa. I remember reading in more than one American newspaper that the magnificent Things Fall Apart was the first African novel—an absurd claim. We need more reading across regions.
If my experience is any indication, colonialism—and its love child, dictatorship—have had quite a bit to do with the way in which North African literature was read and taught from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s. Of course, things have changed somewhat since then, and nowadays these writers’ works, as well as children’s books in Arabic and Berber, are more widely available in bookstores. But now we are experiencing another great upheaval that is likely to affect our literature—globalization.
Large numbers of immigrants from Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and the Sudan now live abroad. Fleeing civil wars or dictatorship, or seeking greater economic opportunity, they have settled in Western Europe, America and even as far as Australia. The writers among them have begun to produce work written in the language of their host countries. Ahdaf Soueif, Hisham Matar, and Leila Aboulela write in English; Fouad Laroui and Edmond Amran el Maleh write in French; Abdelkader Benali and Hafid Bouazza write in Dutch; Amara Lakhouss writes in Italian; and the list goes on. Meanwhile, writers like Leila Abouzeid, Alaa Al-Aswany, Bahaa Taher, and Mohammed Berrada continue to live in their native countries and write in Arabic.
By and large, writers w
ho live in North Africa have to be mindful of state censors, while those in the diaspora need not fear being thrown in jail for their work. But diaspora writers face another cost: being viewed suspiciously by the representation mafia. At a reading in Kenitra last year, a Moroccan reader of my first book asked me whether it had been published in America because it depicted the corruption of Moroccan society. During the back and forth of the discussion, the argument was soon turned into its opposite: that I had depicted corruption in order to be published. Although I am frustrated by such comments, I also understand that they are rooted in a certain reality. It is infinitely easier for a North African novel to be published in Europe or America if it trades in clichés rather than in complex fictional realities.
In addition, diaspora writers, particularly those who work in English, have greater access to translations and to large audiences, while those who live in North Africa have a hard time finding a wider readership. There are also great differences in setting, style, and literary influences. I sometimes feel I can hear echoes of George Eliot and Jane Austen in Ahdaf Soueif’s work. Abdelkader Benali seems to me to owe a greater debt to Gabriel García Márquez than to his countryman Mohamed Choukri. Some of the younger writers, like Hafid Bouazza, might even resent being labeled as North African writers, rather than Dutch writers, or writers tout court.
Because of this huge diversity, I think it is quite difficult to speak of one North African literature. It is even harder to speak of one African literature. Africa is made up of 40 nations, whose people speak a multitude of languages and belong to many different religious traditions and ethnic groups. The continent is larger than China, Europe and the United States put together. Just as world maps often shrink the size of Africa to that of South America for representational purposes, speaking of one African literature risks giving the impression that it is a monolithic literature. It risks pointing to a unique literary tradition. It risks equating Africanness with blackness. I think, therefore, that it is more proper to speak of North African and African literatures.
