The first thing I felt in front of each member of the group was not aversion, or contempt, or pity, or even antipathy, but distrust: it was immediate and mutual. What I didn’t know when our meetings began was that this feeling would never be entirely dispelled, no matter what particular bond I managed to form with each man. With time, the hostility gradually faded. Occasionally I caught myself sharing with them moments of cordiality, or ordinary cheerfulness, chatting about this and that. Yet never for one instant did I feel free of that distrust. Everything about them kept it alive.
Distrust was also in the air during my first meetings with survivors in Nyamata, while I was writing Dans le nu de la vie. The wariness was one-sided, however, directed toward me, never the other way round, and their reticence was of a different nature. Besides being suspicious of a foreigner whose compatriots had not lifted a finger to prevent the genocide, the survivors were convinced that it was too late, that there could no longer be any point to their testimony, not when offered to people who had tolerated the massacres. So my whole enterprise was suspect. Even more tellingly, they did not think they would be believed if they recounted what they had lived through during and since the genocide. They also feared their stories might revive their pain. They concluded that they were wasting their time with this intruder, that there was no sense or advantage in speaking up outside the community of those who had escaped the slaughter.
So their distrust was keen, but I found that if I remained mindful of their feelings, time did help to allay their suspicions. Survivors must stay on guard vis-à-vis the outside world, for they now live in their own world of survivors.
The killer, on the other hand, does not dread your disbelief—on the contrary: he fears that you will bring accusations against him. Even if you can convince him that his words will do him no harm, he fears that no matter who his listener is—or later on, his reader—he would be better off remaining silent. And no relationship of trust can completely dispel that anxiety. The killer stays on guard because he feels the threat of punishment hanging over him.
After the publication of Dans le nu de la vie, readers asked me how I chose the fourteen Rwandan participants. The answer is simple: I didn’t choose them. During a trip to the Bugesera, I met Sylvie Umubyeyi, a social worker, and followed her as she made her rounds. She was searching the bush in the Nyamata area for children who had been abandoned and scattered during the genocide. After telling me her story, she took me to the home of Jeannette Ayinkamiye, a young survivor who had taken refuge with a female friend and some orphaned children in a tumbledown house by a plot of land they were clearing. Then Jeannette told me her story. The charisma of the one woman, the grief of the other, and the gentleness, solitude, and strength they shared introduced me to their world. From their two stories sprang the idea of a book.
The other twelve narratives were those of the first twelve people whom I approached—often by chance—and found willing to try telling their stories. The truth is, they chose themselves. Despite my ingrained reflexes as a journalist, I felt that in the aftermath of a genocide, criteria of age, sex, social class, and
cultural background were meaningless; it would have been absurd to put together a representative panel by searching for such-and-such a survivor because he or she had been this or that before the genocide. My fourteen witnesses were mostly women and mostly farmers, simply because they accepted the experiment more spontaneously than did men and intellectuals.
In the course of my subsequent trips to Rwanda, these last reproached me for not allowing them to express—with their intellectual vocabulary and detachment—their different conception of the event. I told them that their initial evasiveness had been understandable as well as significant, but that it would have been stupid and dishonest if I had later replaced one narrative with another, since each was unique.
I got lucky again when—during difficult moments of misunderstanding, renunciation, dejection, or breakdown in the dialogue with certain people—I resisted the temptation to replace some witnesses with others who would be more talkative, more cooperative, or more French-speaking. I kept up the dialogue with each of the original participants, however long it took, until we seemed to get somewhere.
Throughout this work with the survivors, I did not contact the killers. The idea never occurred to me, and the killers meant nothing to me. I never thought of continuing my project with them or of drawing a parallel between the two sets of narratives. That would have been immoral, unacceptable in the eyes of the survivors (in the eyes of readers, too, of course), and uninteresting besides. Out on the hills I occasionally encountered people suspected of being killers, and I’d met many of them in 1994. I could well imagine what they were like. Only at the end of my conversations with the survivors did I feel any wish to visit the prison—out of a sort of ambiguous curiosity sparked by various details and contradictions in the survivors’ descriptions.
The idea of actually talking to the killers came much later, thanks to recurrent questions asked by readers of Dans le nu de la vie. Their interest was contagious. If people who had been touched or enthralled by the survivors’ stories wanted to know what had gone on in the minds of the killers, that meant it was reasonable to try asking them. That said, while I had no doubts about my first project, I was constantly doubtful about this one. I began it skeptically, because the relationship I tried to establish with the killers seemed at first both disheartening and futile—and brutally different from the rapport I had established and have maintained with the survivors and other people in the Nyamata area.
Alone, faced with the reality of genocide, a survivor chooses to speak, to “zigzag with the truth,” or to be silent. A survivor who chooses to speak accepts the constant need to question and challenge the confusions of memory.
Faced with the reality of genocide, a killer’s first choice is to be silent, and his second is to lie. He may change his mind, but he will not discuss why. Alone, he takes no risks, just as he took none during the massacres. So you cannot plan on questioning him alone, on interviewing a succession of men whom you’ve chosen independently of one another.
And so I decided—after a string of failures, botched meetings, and insipid discussions—to address not just a series of randomly chosen individuals but a group of prisoners who would feel protected from the dangers of truth by their friendship and joint complicity, a bunch of pals secure in their group identity established before the genocide, when they helped one another out in the fields and downed bottles of urwagwa together after work, a group identity strengthened during the chaos of the killings in the marshes and by their present imprisonment.
I selected the ten friends from Kibungo for simple reasons.
Their gang was both ordinary and informal, one of many in the countryside, with no special ties at first, as might be the case with a religious association, a sports club, or an organized militia. They had banded together because of the proximity of their fields, their patronage of a cabaret, and their natural affinities and shared concerns.
They lived on the same hills as most of the survivors I had talked to. They had taken part in the carnage in the marshes of Nyamwiza, where the fugitives had gone to hide, burying themselves up to the neck in slime, beneath the vegetation. They were all farmers, except for one civil servant and one teacher; only three belonged to any paramilitary or interahamwe organization. Aside from Élie, they had never worn a police or army uniform. None of them had ever quarreled with his Tutsi neighbors over land, crops, damage, or women.
Moreover, Innocent Rwililiza knew them all well, and they knew him. A pupil and then a teacher at the local school, a public scribe in his spare time, the life and soul of several associations, a man of boundless dedication, a beloved and amusing frequenter of numerous cabarets, Innocent was well liked in those hills, in particular in Kibungo, where his family farm is located. He was an indispensable intermediary, the ideal collaborator, and a formidable translator whenever necessary.
He has this to say about the gang: “I knew them from way back. I had taught some of them, like Adalbert, Pancrace, Pio. The others I used to run into along the way and share a drink with at the cabaret.
“Adalbert was very intelligent and very bold, sly and mean in an ordinary way. Pancrace was tough and hard to read. He’s been in Adalbert’s shadow since they were little kids. Pio was really quite nice. Alphonse was the wiliest at business but obliging enough with a bottle in front of him. Fulgence thought of himself
as a good-looking boy. He was even more dapper than many Tutsis. And very fond of praying.
“Léopord, him, he never got himself noticed for anything but his height. And the fact that what he later did with his machete was dumbfounding. Ignace was a codger and a dodger, plus he’d suddenly go nasty with Tutsis. He always hated them, and said so long, loud, and often to sway his colleagues or make them laugh. But him, he never laughed. He lived on the outs with everyone, even his family.
“In the end, those boys were no different from the others in character. But they went around together. You saw that they shared and shared alike with field work and drink at the cabaret. During the genocide I know that gang went out cutting from the first day to the last. At Adalbert’s prodding, perhaps, or under the bad influence of Ignace, they became relentless.”