Life Laid Bare

"One of the things that writing about Rwanda doesn’t offer you – although writing about many other fascinating places does – is a substantial literature by the people you’re writing about. There just aren’t many books by Rwandans that are readily accessible to an outsider. There is a Kinyarwandan (Kinyarwanda is the language) oral tradition, there’s a lot of poetry and in the last century more and more written stuff, but little of it has been translated, and of the writing on the genocide that’s taken place – their own recent history – most of it has taken place in French or English. And most of it has not been done by Rwandans. Under the circumstances, I would say that the most fascinating literary project about Rwanda in the last few years has been by Jean Hatzfeld. He is a French writer and reporter who worked for a long time for the newspaper Libération and covered the Balkan wars. For the last six or seven years, he has been visiting Rwanda on and off, and always going to the same small town in the southeast. The first book he wrote took a kind of a hybrid form – a mixture of oral history and personal reflection – and it was based on the stories of a group of survivors who had spent the 100 days or so of the genocide hiding in these dense papyrus swamps near their home. They were being hunted there by a gang of killers from around their village, people whom they knew. What makes this a great book is not just its subject matter, but its style and its voice. Hatzfeld is obviously someone who spent a huge amount of time just hanging out in the village, in the bars, in the backyards, in the fields, with people who had had this experience – and he relates their stories with unmediated immediacy, and with great soul. When Hatzfeld finished that book, which was called Dans le Nu de la Vie (or in English translation Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak ) people asked him, well what about the killers? So he wound up going back to Rwanda and realised that the whole group of killers who had been pursuing the survivors he’d been writing about were all in one prison nearby. And he arranged to meet with them on a regular basis, individually and collectively, to hear their stories. And it’s the most direct (I guess you could say honest) account, by people who took part in the genocide, of the excitement and thrill of the hunt and the kill that motivated a lot of them. Then on New Year’s Day in 2003, President Kagame announced an amnesty, in which a huge number of prisoners – 40,000 from around the country – were to be released. These were prisoners accused of genocide, who had by then spent nearly ten years in prison. Many of them had been through some form of justice, or at least rudimentary justice, but many of them had not yet been fully judged or punished by any tribunal. The government just felt the need to diminish the prison population, which was massive and overcrowded, and to start reintegrating people into the society, however awkward that would be. Hatzfeld then went back to his village and watched them come home, and suddenly he had these two groups of people, whom he’d studied more closely than you can imagine, re-encountering one another. And in the process he learned a great deal more than he had known in the first place about either of them. And so the third book, which is called The Antelope’s Strategy , really combined these two experiences. And in some ways it becomes a great literary work, because it’s also a commentary on the two earlier works. You see the evolution of his encounter with these two groups and his reflections on what is called ‘reconciliation’ by the government, but is just the problem of living together – a problem that Rwanda most dramatically confronts us with. And it’s a beautiful book, a book that’s incredibly deep. It also tells you something very shocking, which is that ultimately this process of reintegration is really not hard at all on the killers. They go home, they have their freedom, they have their fields, they have their families waiting for them. They give a rather minimal confession and they’re left alone. And obviously the survivors have a much, much harder time reintegrating. So this notion that Rwanda is this society where the victim has gained power and has taken it out on the perpetrators, that’s false. It’s a fiction most often put forward by human rights activists, who aren’t paying close enough attention, frankly. What you find is that both groups feel in many ways disenfranchised. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Hatzfeld keeps politics at a distance – which is the distance at which these poor peasants experience it. So when you hear about the government, you hear about it in the sense that a van shows up, three government officials come out, announce there will be a meeting, everyone has to show up, everybody shows up, they get lectured about how they’re supposed to live together, then the guy disappears and then they get on with living together – or not. And there is much more to it than that. The reason that people are living together, without violence to a large degree, the fact that people are in jail or out of jail – all that has to do with policies, which are another story."