She sees the horrific images but not. She sees Henry Shepherd behind the lens of the camera. His hands are steady, but his heart is pounding wildly. A paste of dust and sweat coats his hands, and he prays that the camera still works. If the shutter doesn’t click, he and Nadine will also be murdered.
Eight…nine…ten…
She sees her father hiding these photos from Lillian, just as he buried the children’s bodies in the woods.
Fifteen…sixteen…seventeen…
She sees what it cost him to stay away from his family, to have Lillian believe he was a coward. He was protecting her.
Twenty-eight…twenty-nine…thirty…
She sees that by the time he returned to Kwizera, it was too late to come back to his family. He had been living with these images for four years. They had become part of him. Changed how he saw the world.
Thirty-one.
Rachel grips the last photo. Nadine. Her hand shakes uncontrollably. Lillian gently loosens her fingers, takes the photo and places it back in the metal box. Rachel adds the stone heart with the broken spring that will never again open to the photo of the little girl with a squinty grin. She is no longer that child; she will never again love the same way a child loves. But what she has learned is how to love like an adult.
There’s the distinct sound of water rushing even though the river is low and still. Rachel hears her father’s voice, weary and smooth like tumbled rocks. I need to go find that treasure chest. When I do, I’ll come back and finish our story. Promise.
Something cracks open inside of her, a warmth that trickles into the vacant space where Serena turned somersaults and the memories of her father still live. Nadine is right: there is no moving past this thing, as Mick once referred to grief. This is the new normal: love tinged with sadness that ebbs and flows with the passing moments. This is her own amahoro.
She retrieves her wallet from her daypack, her hand going to the accordion of photos where she keeps her sonogram, and places the translucent black-and-white image in the box atop the locket. Her grief over losing Serena and her father—and her love for both of them—are interconnected, like strands of DNA that constitute her soul. They are both intrinsic to who she is: a mother and a child.
GACACA
{ January 2004, Mubaro, Rwanda }
THE GRASSY FIELD BETWEEN THE MAR-ket and the church is packed an hour after the morning market shuts down. People arrive with folding chairs, or spread out blankets with coolers and baskets of food. Some have colorful parasols to guard against the sun, which will be high and hot in a few hours.
Lillian sits at the end of a long wooden table, alongside eight other Inyangamugayo: local judges who are teachers, bankers, farmers, and business owners during the week. She had to become a Rwandan citizen for her name to be put on the electoral ballot three years ago, but after living here for three decades she didn’t think twice about it. There are no Hutus or Tutsis. The identity cards issued by the past Hutu governments are meaningless; they are all simply Rwandans.
What would Reverend King think of this grassroots justice? It’s not perfect by any means, slow-moving and reliant on circumstantial evidence. But the reverend would appreciate the sentiment: reconciliation and forgiveness. When it works, it is truly miraculous. Healing.
She has seen it work more times than not over the past year, with both the victims and the accused telling stories they have secreted away for nearly a decade. There’s restitution more often than jail sentences. Hutus and Tutsis work together to rebuild homes. The bodies of loved ones are recovered and buried properly. Apologies are offered and received. It is not enough; there can be no real restitution or redemption. The horror of what happened is too large. All the victims and the accused really have are their stories.
People are settling in and the judges are all here; it’s time to call the first witness. Lillian smoothes back her hair, now long and mostly gray, braided in a loose coil around her head. She tidies the stack of files in front of her, moves a wooden vase of red dahlias plucked from Nadine’s garden, now blessedly overgrown, a bit closer. She’s been waiting a long time for this day. It’s her daughter’s turn to finally tell her story.
Time seems to slow down as Nadine walks toward the table of judges. Lillian’s vision isn’t what it used to be, but each face is clear as she gathers her family in her heart. There is Nadine’s fiancé, Lawrence, beaming at her as she stands to speak. There are Tucker and Rosie, who is a beautiful young woman now. Living in London is doing her good. There is Rachel, beside Tucker, the cherub-faced baby girl they adopted last year asleep in her arms. Christian sits with his family; he doesn’t have to be here but he came of his own accord from Uganda to testify and support Nadine.
Nadine stands tall as she speaks. “The mission of the gacaca is truth, justice, and reconciliation,” she says. “Perhaps none of these things are possible. Today, I come here hoping to find amahoro.” Lillian notices that Nadine’s hand is shaking a bit as she picks up the envelope of photos that was buried under the mopani tree. She holds up the photos, one by one, and lays them out on the table.
“I was told that I must stay alive, at least for a while, to be a witness,” Nadine continues, looking to Lillian for strength. “That was part of my punishment for being born Tutsi. These images have haunted me, kept me prisoner in the shed behind the church where I hid… I have been afraid for ten years. These images will never leave me, but today I am letting go of the fear. Today, I will tell you everything that happened at the church where my friends and family were murdered. Where I was tortured. Raped.”
As Nadine begins to tell how she and her family were kept prisoners in their own home, her new family members step forward and gather around her. In Lillian’s mind she sees snapshots, not of the past but the future: a wedding, a birth and a funeral. Nadine and Lawrence exchanging vows on the back porch of Kwizera, which will become their home. Tucker and Rachel standing over a bassinet with blue ribbons tied on it. The baby has Henry’s dark, sparkling eyes. She sees Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta for the very last time. Kaleidoscopic light—red, green, purple, gold—shines through the window, warming her. She is at peace.
She nods at her daughter. Amahoro.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I need to start by thanking my wonderful agent, Valerie Borchardt. I will always have immense gratitude and respect for Valerie, who thoughtfully and diligently worked to find the right publisher for my novel—and me.
I could not have conjured up a more passionate and just plain smart publisher than Michelle Halket. She has been an advisor, a mentor and a friend during this rollercoaster ride of launching a novel into the world. I have endless appreciation for the sales team at IPG for their hard work getting this novel into bookstores, and the independent booksellers who were early supporters.
I spent eleven years imagining and revising this story. I am grateful beyond words for the support I have received along the way. Adrienne Brodeur, you are my Fiction Angel. To Wally Lamb, Brenda Peterson, Priscilla Long, Dani Shapiro, Claire Dederer, Dawn Tripp, Caroline Leavitt, Susan Henderson, Jenna Blum, Christina Baker Kline, Jessica Keener, Steve Yarbrough, Jill McCorkle, Ann Garvin, Jennie Shortridge, the list goes on and on (forgive me for cutting it short): You all showed me throughout the years that a satisfying writing life is not just about the work but also about being kind and generous to other writers and readers. You have all been incredibly kind and generous with me.
I am honored to have had the support of writing communities including Aspen Summer Words, Hedgebrook, Hugo House, Mineral School, Sewanee, Squaw Valley, and Tin House. I won’t even attempt to thank everyone in Seattle’s strong community of writers and independent booksellers. I am proud to live in this City of Literature. Special thanks to Elizabeth Dimarco, Sonja Brisson, Ingrid Ricks, and my sister Essayistas!
I could not have persevered for over a decade without the love and support of my family: Eric, Drew, Justin and Kodi. You are all pieces of my hear
t. You give me moments of joy, even during the roughest days. Ellen, you are not only my sister but also my best friend, always there for me. I thank my parents, Richard and Nina Rieselbach, for their encouragement and support.
Lastly, but certainly not least, I will forever be indebted to the people of Rwanda who welcomed me, watched out for me, and shared their stories with me. I am honored to be a conduit to share these stories of finding amahoro with the world.
A CONVERSATION WITH JENNIFER HAUPT
Q: Why did you go to Rwanda in 2007?
JH: The short answer is that I was a reporter exploring the connection between grief and forgiveness. I went there to interview genocide survivors. I also went to interview humanitarian aid workers about why they were drawn to this tiny, grieving country a decade after the 1994 genocide.
I had a handful of assignments for magazines, writing about humanitarian efforts in the capital city of Kigali. Within the first week they all fell through for one reason or another. That’s when I decided to hire a driver and go into the ten thousand hills to visit the small churches and schools with bloodstains on the walls and skulls of anonymous victims stacked on shelves. I wanted to trace the steps of the genocide and talk with the survivors, mostly women, who were guides at these rarely-visited memorials.
Q: What did you find in Rwanda that was surprising?
JH: I didn’t even realize until I was in Rwanda that I needed to address my own grief for my sister who died when I was age two. There was an unspoken rule in my household growing up: It was forbidden to speak of Susie. That’s how my parents dealt with their grief and I respect that. In Rwanda, it felt safe to grieve for the first time. My grief was miniscule compared with the genocide survivors. And yet, we shared a powerful mixture of emotions — compassion, sorrow, longing — that crossed the boundaries of race and culture.
What struck me was that many of the aid workers I interviewed were also grieving over the loss of loved ones. They came to Rwanda as a way of reaching out to help others, and also to heal their own souls. Most of the people I spoke with, no matter if they were Rwandan, American, European, were, in some way, grieving. I had always thought the universal commonality that connected all of us was love, but I learned in Rwanda that grief is an equally strong bond. Grief and love form the bridge that connects us all.
Q: How did your Jewish background affect you?
JH: Fifteen years before I went to Rwanda, I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial site in Germany. The site is an impressive museum with photo exhibits and artifacts. The former prison barracks and crematorium where some of my relatives may have been imprisoned and murdered were now scrubbed clean. I went to Dachau expecting to feel sorrow, maybe anger, but instead I felt a disturbing emptiness. Nothing.
During the two weeks I spent traveling in the ten thousand hills of Rwanda, I couldn’t help but think of my visit to Dachau. Thousands of people visit Dachau each year; we Jews vow to remember the atrocities that happened there. Never again. It struck me that I was nearly always the only visitor at the dozens of tiny bloodstained memorials I visited. There was always a guide, usually a woman, a lone Tutsi survivor whose family members were murdered at the church or school.
I remember at one church, I was met by a woman named Julia who was in her mid-forties, around my age at the time. She had survived by laying on the floor among the dead bodies. Now, she gave tours so that no one would forget. I talked with Julia about her family members and friends who had been murdered here. We cried together; my tears were, in part, for my relatives and members of my tribe who had been murdered during the holocaust. I experienced a powerful connection with this stranger who lived halfway around the world from me, in a culture so different than mine, through both love and grief. I wanted to share that experience with others through the characters in my novel.
Q: Why did you write this novel, instead of a memoir about your time in Rwanda?
JH: Amahoro is a Kinyarwanda greeting that translates literally to peace, but means so much more when exchanged between Hutus and Tutsis since the genocide. It’s a shared desire for grace when there can be no forgiveness. It’s an acknowledgement of shared pain, an apology, a quest for reconciliation. I wanted to be the conduit for telling the stories of amahoro that I had heard in Rwanda, from Tutsis and Hutus. I wanted to explore more deeply the meaning of amahoro, from many different world views. I wanted to excavate my own grief more fully and, perhaps, find my own vision of amahoro. I could only do all of that, I felt, as a novelist.
Q: Why did you choose to tell this story through the eyes of three women of different ages and cultural backgrounds?
JH: I wanted to offer Westerners a window into a very different world, and to do that I started with an American protagonist leaving everything she knows to try and find amahoro. Rachel Shepherd is searching for her father, Henry, in Rwanda. She is also searching for the piece of her heart that he took when he left her twenty years earlier. The piece that knows how to love: like a child, like a wife, like a mother.
I also wanted to connect the African-American civil rights struggle with the struggle for civil rights of the Tutsis in Rwanda. That’s where Lillian comes from. Once I decided that she and Henry Shepherd had an ill-fated interracial love affair during the late 1960s in Atlanta, their story took on a life of its own. Lillian is on equal footing with Rachel as a central character in this novel.
Originally, this was just Rachel and Lillian’s journey: The intertwining stories of two women searching for the man they both love. Two women trying to piece together a family. I didn’t add Nadine’s story until eight years after I started writing this novel. She’s based on a 19-year-old woman I met in Rwanda who had left after the genocide and was returning for the trial of a Hutu man, a former neighbor, who she had seen shoot her mother and sister.
Nadine is a fusion of this woman’s story as well as other stories I heard in Rwanda — and then, of course, my imagination. She’s the lynch pin that holds together the stories of Lillian, Henry, Rachel, and Rachel’s love interest in Rwanda, an American doctor running from his past who has become like an older brother to Nadine.
Q: Is this a political story about the genocide?
JH: No. This is a story that is set against the backdrop of pregenocide, the genocide, and then after the genocide. I conducted a lot of research about Rwandan history but I don’t claim to be an expert on the country’s politics or tumultuous past. I do present some background about the genocide, which is factual, but this is historical fiction. The story is about the experiences of the characters during this time in history.
Jennifer Haupt went to Rwanda as a journalist in 2006, twelve years after the genocide that wiped out over a million people, to explore the connections between forgiveness and grief. She spent a month traveling in the 10,000 hills, interviewing genocide survivors and humanitarian aid workers, and came home to Seattle with something unexpected: the bones of a novel. Haupt’s essays and articles have been published in O, The Oprah Magazine, The Rumpus, Psychology Today, Travel & Leisure, The Seattle Times, Spirituality & Health, The Sun and many other publications.
In the Shadow of 10,000 Hills is her first novel.
jenniferhaupt.com
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