Posted
July 7th, 2010
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Into the Quick of Life: The Rwandan Genocide – The Survivors Speak
by Jean Hatzfeld
Translated from the French by Gerry Feehily (Serpent’s Tail 2005)
In Rwanda in 1994, 800,000 Tutsis were hacked to death with machetes by their Hutu neighbours. This count represents five-sixths of the Tutsi population. In the villages of Nyamata and N’tarama, where more than 10,000 Tutsis were massacred in the first two days, Jean Hatzfeld interviewed some of the survivors. Their stories of horror contrast profoundly with his own subtle and vivid descriptions of Rwanda’s countryside after the genocide.
Born in Madagascar, Jean Hatzfeld worked for several years as a foreign correspondent for the French newspaper Libération, covering the conflict in Yugoslavia, where he was shot and wounded in 1992, and the Rwandan genocide. Into the Quick of Life won the 2000 Prix France Culture.
Gerry Feehily lived in Ireland, Italy, Spain, Germany and Japan before settling in Paris in the mid-1990s. He is English site editor and resident blogger at www.presseurop.eu and Courrier International, and a journalist specialising in literature and European politics. His work has appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, the New Statesman, the Irish Examiner, Spiked and 3am. He has also translated Pavel Hak’s novel Sniper, and his novel Fever was published in 2007.
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The big and little markets
[Extract as it appears in Making the World Legible]
A hundred metres away from the church Nyamata’s main street emerges, lined with majestic umuniyinya, called ‘chit-chat trees’. A wooden sign for an AIDS awareness campaign is the town’s only bit of advertising. It marks the entrance to the market square, where boys, except during the scorching siesta hour, swirl around a football made from banana leaves.
Nyamata lives to the rhythm of two markets, the big and the little one. The big one takes place on Wednesdays and Saturdays, where at dawn, tradespeople lay their goods out on pieces of fabric spread on the ground. As is the case throughout Africa, the market is sectioned off in corporations. Here in one corner, fishermen’s wives gather next to their fish, dried or smoked, strung together on creepers, protected from flies by the dust. In another corner are women farmers with mounds of sweet potatoes, bunches of bananas, sacks of red beans. Further on, shoes are piled up, in pairs or single, new or second hand. Stalls display luxurious cloths from Taiwan or the Congo snuggling next to piles of tee-shirts and underwear.
At the break of day, the crowd leaves little room for manoeuvre for the porters pushing long wooden barrows or for the women bearing wicker platters who keep the stalls stocked. Music is bought a little out of the way, in the street. The stall consists of a radio cassette player set on a stool for a trial listen, and three tables stocked with local music, traditional folk tunes from the Great Lakes, the melancholic songs of Annonciata Kamaliza, a famous Rwandan artist, and danceable hits from South Africa and the Congo. The music from the rest of the world is Céline Dion and Julio Iglesias.
The market is rather cheerful, modest, quite poor in fact, without jewellery stalls, without bric-a-brac traders, without anyone selling sculptures or paintings, without much in the way of bargaining or chit chat,
without any flare-ups either.
As for the small market, it takes place every day on the bumpy waste ground behind the square. It’s mainly a food market. Manioc is heaped up around the milling shed. The goat market is close by the slaughterhouse, in front of which stands a butcher’s stall. Not far off are a veterinary pharmacy and clinic, and the cabaret – a bar – for local vets. Firewood sellers work hand in hand with charcoal merchants. You can also find cobblers
remoulding flip flops, jerry cans of banana wine, jugs of buttermilk, turf and dried dung, heaps of trussed chickens, pyramids of sugar and salt, and everywhere, sacks of beans.
The market square is surrounded by shops painted in green, orange and blue, faded in the heat and dust. Half of them are shut and have been falling into ruins since the war. The other half house hairdressing salons and dark cabarets where men sip banana wine.
In Nyamata, there are no more newspaper stands or lay bookshops. For photocopies, you go to the parish bookshop. Near displays of coloured fabrics beneath shop awnings, close by the photo boutiques, seamstresses lean over wonderful black and gold Singer or Butterfly sewing machines. They stitch up torn trousers, make shirts to measure, sew hems on cloths, while their clients pay a visit to the church, to the chemist or to the local council.
Two days a week, Jeanette Ayinkamiye comes down from the hill of Kanazi to do some sewing at the market, in the midst of twenty sewing machines which clatter in the studious silence, interrupted occasionally by a burst of laughter, a snatch of advice. On these days, Jeanette wears her long Sunday dress with puffed out sleeves, but no jewellery, nor tresses, nor a fringe, all forbidden by her Pentecostal pastor.
The other days of the week, she works her family’s plot. She dropped her studies after the genocide. She lives in an impeccably well-kept brick house with her two little sisters and two orphan children who she looks after, feeds, clothes and sends to school. She has never spoken to a foreigner before, but at the first meeting she agrees without hesitation to talk about herself. As the subject of her mother’s death painfully and repeatedly comes up, she shows a remarkable determination to carry on.
Jeanette Ayinkamiye
17 years old, farmer and seamstress
Kinyinya (Maranyundo) hill
I was born among seven brothers and two sisters.
Papa was hacked the first day but we never found out where. All my brothers were killed shortly afterwards. With Maman and my little sisters we managed to escape into the marshes. For a month we endured beneath papyrus branches, hardly seeing nor hearing anything of the world any more.
During the day, we lay in the mud in the company of snakes and mosquitoes, to protect ourselves from interahamwe† attacks. At night, we roamed among abandoned houses looking for things to eat. Since we
fed ourselves only on what we could find, we encountered many a case of diarrhoea; but fortunately it seemed that ordinary diseases, malaria and rain fever, wished to spare us this time round. We knew nothing of life any more, except that all Tutsis were being massacred where they lived and we would
shortly all have to die.
It was a habit with us to hide in small groups. One day, the interahamwe sprang Maman from beneath the papyrus. She stood up, and offered them money if they would but kill her with a single machete blow.
They undressed her so as to take the money fastened to her cloth. They first chopped her two arms, and next her two legs. Maman murmured, ‘Saint Cécile, Saint Cécile’, but she did not beg for mercy.
This thought makes me sad. But it makes me equally sad whether I recollect it by speaking aloud or silently to myself. This is why it does not embarrass me to tell you of it.
My two little sisters saw everything because they lay beside her, and they were struck too. Vanessa was wounded in the ankles. Marie-Claire in the head. The killers did not completely chop them up. Perhaps because they were in a hurry, perhaps they did so deliberately, as they had with Maman. As for me, all I could hear were noises and screams, because I was hiding in a hole a little further away. Once the interahamwe had gone, I got out and gave Maman some water to taste.
The first evening, she could still speak. She said to me, ‘Jeanette, I leave without hope because I think you will soon be following me.’ She was suffering very much because of the cuts, but she kept repeating to us that
we were all going to die and that this filled her with even more grief. I was not bold enough to spend the night with her. I first had to look after my little sisters, who were very hurt but not dying. The following day, it was
not possible to stay with her, because we were forced to hide. This was the rule of the marshes: when someone had been badly chopped, you had to abandon them there for the lack of safety.
Maman lay in agony for three days before finally dying. On the second day, she could only whisper, ‘Goodbye, my children, ‘ and ask for water, but she still could not manage to go. I could not stay long with her because of the interahamwe attacks. I could see that it was all over for her. I understood also that for certain people, abandoned by all, for whom suffering had become their last companion, death must surely have been an all too long and pointless labour. On the third day, she could not swallow any more, only moan softly and look about her. She never closed her eyes again. Her name was Agnès Nyirabuguzi. In Kinyarwandan ‘Nyirabuguzi’ means ‘she who is fertile’. Today, I often dream of her, a very precise scene in the middle of the
marsh: I look at Maman’s face, I listen to her words, I give her something to drink but the water does not flow down into her throat but spills straight from her lips; and then the attackers begin their pursuit again; I get up,
I start running; when I return to the swamp, I ask people for news of my Maman, but no one knows her as my Maman any more; then I wake up.
† The extremist Hutu militia, trained by the Rwandan army and, in places, by
French soldiers.
Originally posted with the url: www.englishpen.org/writersintranslation/makingtheworldlegible/intothequickoflife-jeanhatzfeld/
