We arrive in Rilima early in the morning, after the water chores, often bringing along some prisoners’ relatives who load up the vehicle with bags of flour. We park beside the outer wall, on a road where inmates assigned to maintenance or bookkeeping go about their work. The road is lined with gardens and detached houses accommodating some storerooms and the offices and lodgings of prison personnel. The little house at the end is a day-care center for the offspring of female prisoners, children conceived in captivity—through promiscuous happenstance or through more or less happy complicity.
A guard is waiting for us, always the same one, who writes down the names of the two people whom we wish to interview that day. While he goes to get them, we briefly greet the warden, his staff, some guards and trusties. I carefully stay away from any visiting prosecutors and lawyers, to avoid arousing suspicions among the prisoners. Innocent, a nervous and excitable soul, is constantly running into innumerable acquaintances, both imprisoned and free, with whom he simply must strike up endless discussions.
The conversations with the prisoners are individual and confidential, and not only with regard to the outside world. Nothing of what is said by one is ever reported to any of the others in the gang, not even to obtain further information about an event. This promise was a sine qua non—to prevent them from colluding
on their stories beforehand and to avoid response strategies like those used in their testimony in court.
If a persistent misunderstanding or block occurs, the whole gang gets together, and we talk about the problem.
When the two prisoners arrive in their pink uniforms (styled as pajamas, suits, or Bermuda shorts, depending on the inmate’s taste), we distribute the day’s packages. We exchange confidences, anecdotes, and rumors—about the prison, the hills, Nyamata, the country at large, and what the radio is saying. Then we get settled in the garden of a prison house with our first interviewee while the other waits his turn in a neighboring garden, taking advantage of the open air and quiet to rest or gossip with pals, far from the crowd in the prison yard.
We sit face to face on two benches, by a hedge, in the shade of an acacia with drooping branches weighed down by many nests of yellow-and-black weaverbirds, whose squawks discourage eavesdropping. When the tape recorder is turned on, the interview begins, in French, or in Kinyarwanda (the Rwandan language) translated by Innocent.
On this subject, readers might well question the influence of the translator on the distinctive language of the speakers. Innocent understood that a transcription of the recorded material in extenso was the necessary first step, from oral to written oral testimony. I have to say that he then translated the testimony given in Kinyarwanda so faithfully and so well that it is impossible, even for a French-speaking Rwandan, to distinguish between the transcriptions
that were translated and those made directly from spoken French.
Irrespective of the speaker, the language, the subject, or the mood of the day, each interview lasts about two hours. At that point either Innocent shows signs of understandable anger or I become exasperated or—most often—disgust, boredom, or frustration destroys both his concentration and mine. In short, we get tired. We feel the need, sometimes suddenly, to escape the universe into which our interviewee has plunged us with his imperturbable voice.
The prisoner, however, remains equably alert and receptive no matter what subject is raised and what turn the discussion takes, and he often seems disappointed or sorry when there is an interruption. Receptivity does not mean volubility. But while sometimes he may confine himself to an open-ended silence or cling stubbornly to an absurd lie, he never seems weary or displeased. In itself, his way of speaking, almost in a monotone, is radically different from that of the survivors.
It would be unthinkable to compare the accounts of the survivors with those of the killers, but one can briefly compare their manner of speaking.
Whenever I started a taped conversation with a survivor, it was always the beginning of something completely unpredictable. The dialogue might last five minutes or five hours. It was often interrupted by tears, untranslatable silences, disgressions—sometimes trivial and lighthearted—about daily life, or reflections on the war or agriculture; it might be punctuated by the arrival of visitors, the whims of a child, a Primus, a stroll, or a car ride.
Sometimes the survivor, man or woman, would offer several different versions of the same event from one day to the next.
This was usually for a reason that Angélique Mukamanzi, a young woman from Kanzenze, tactfully explained: “There are also people who constantly change the details of a fateful day because they believe that, on that day, their life snatched away the luck from another life that was just as worthy. Still, in spite of these zigzags, a person’s memories do not go away … People choose certain memories, depending on their character, and they relive them as if they had happened just last year and will go on for another hundred years.”
Or for another reason described by Janvier Munyaneza, a herdsman and lycée student in Kibungo: “Over time I sense that my mind sorts through my memories as it pleases, and I can’t do anything about it—it’s the same for my colleagues. Certain episodes are told over and over, so they expand with all the contributions from different people. They remain transparent, so to speak … Other episodes are neglected, and darken like a dream … But I know we no longer have any interest in inventing or exaggerating or concealing, as we did at the liberation, because we are no longer muddled by fear of the machetes.”
In every case, it was easy to speak frankly about these “zigzags.” Sometimes the survivor might break off abruptly, because, in the words of Marie-Louise Kagoyire, a shopkeeper in Nyamata, “showing our hearts to a stranger, talking about how we feel, laying bare our feelings as survivors is shocking beyond measure. When the exchange of words becomes too blunt, as in this moment with you, one must come to a full stop.”
On the other hand, we went through several nice, polite, but discouraging meetings with Francine Niyitegeka, a farmer and shopkeeper in Kibungo, before she said at last, “Fine—if you come tomorrow, we’ll talk.” She had finally managed to work through a psychological blockage and went on to speak about
how the marshes had destroyed the bond between her and her fiancé in these terms: “We had no intimacy left. We felt too scattered, we couldn’t find real words to exchange, or gestures of kindness for touching each other. I mean, if we met, it no longer mattered to either of us, since we each worried more than anything else about saving our own life.”
It was harrowing to see the risks these survivors took in telling their stories. They did not hesitate to let themselves be overwhelmed by their memories, their uneasiness, their pain. They dared to revisit forbidden places and to bring nightmares back to life. Quite often they spoke of memories and thoughts they had never revealed before, and seemed astonished at what they or others had said. They whispered, flared up, became harsh or tender. The tone of their voices was never the same from one day to the next. Even if their stories changed in the telling, you had to listen to them with all your heart.
But the killers never allow themselves to be overwhelmed by anything. Their memories may fool them because of normal deformations over time, but that is nothing like the traumas and psychological blocks their victims have described.
Each killer controls what he says in his own way. Élie, for example, tries touchingly to express his feelings as precisely as possible, while Ignace automatically answers at first with a lie that he can then carefully refine. All of them gradually speak more sincerely as the interviews progress, making more of an effort to open up. Nevertheless, there is a cautionary line that they almost always refuse to cross. Although they speak in a monotone that increases our uneasiness, there is something more, something equivocal in their voices that makes us think these men are not so indifferent as they appear. Their guardedness is dictated probably by prudence or perplexity, often by a strange insensitivity, but
also perhaps by a sense of propriety. It is worth remembering that since their return to Rwanda they have not yet met any survivors face to face. We shall get back to this later.
Finally, we might mention the question of vocabulary. To describe events, the survivors employed a vocabulary that was raw, vivid, and precise. They constantly used the words job, cutting, or pruning, taken from the work on banana plantations, to designate the murderous action of the machete. Said Jeannette Ayinkamiye, “I know that when you have seen your mama cut so cruelly … you lose forever some of your trust in others. I mean, you will never again be able to live with people as you did before.” Or Berthe Mwanankabandi: “Others could not help making a last gesture to ward off the machete that would cut them, a gesture that would make them suffer even more. This refusal is our bond with nature.”
Moreover, they all spoke of the genocide—using this new word in their language, itfembabwoko, or falling back on the word ubwicanyi, “killing”—with an astonishing grasp of its significance.
JEANNETTE: “When there has been one genocide there can be another, at any time in the future, anywhere—if the cause is still there and no one knows what it is.”
ÉDITH UWANYILIGIRA: “During the genocide, survivors lose their confidence along with everything else, and that muddles them more than they realize. They can doubt everything—strangers, colleagues, even their surviving neighbors … Understand this: the genocide will not fade from our minds. Time will hold on to the memories, it will never spare more than a tiny place for the solace of the soul.”
INNOCENT: “Genocide is not really a matter of poverty or lack of education … In 1959 the Hutus relentlessly robbed, killed, and drove away Tutsis, but they never for a single day imagined
exterminating them. It is the intellectuals who emancipated them, by planting the idea of genocide in their heads and sweeping away their hesitations.”
BERTHE: “Genocide pushes into isolation those who were not pushed into death.”
SYLVIE: “I must make clear that after a genocide, certain words no longer have their old meaning, certain words just lose their meaning, and anyone who listens must watch out for the changes.”
The killers, on the other hand, use the word genocide rarely and only when alluding to the responsibility of the authorities, the directives from the capital and from the people in charge—in other words, only in relation to others, never when speaking of the events in which they themselves were protagonists. For that they prefer instead the word itsembatsemba, “massacres,” and especially intambara, “war,” thus likening their actions to the wars of previous generations or in other African countries.
“Basically,” explains Innocent, “if they sometimes use that word genocide in an answer, it’s just from inattention, because you used it in the question and they can’t think of another one fast enough. Otherwise, they avoid it as a troublesome word. They classify their memories as routine killings. Deep down they’re not interested in the word, only in the penalties it might bring.” In the same way, the killers almost never say “survivor” (rescapé), preferring to use words like “a stricken person,” “someone who has suffered” (personne éprouvée), or “survivor” (survivant).
Continuing this logic, during our first meetings the killers try to use military language to describe their actions. Pancrace Hakizamungili, who sometimes seems like the most cynical or indifferent member of the gang, boldly announces: “Then began the
terrible battle of the marshes.” The excessively pious Fulgence Bunani informs us, “We usually made war with machetes because we had no other weapons.” Encountering our disbelief or irritation, they rapidly abandon that tactic to return to a more realistic vocabulary. They say that they “hit” or “cut.”
To conclude these lexicological remarks, here is an anecdote that illustrates both the killers’ state of mind and the above-mentioned necessity to do these interviews with a group of people, not with isolated individuals.
During the first meetings, the men deny everything with placid obstinacy whenever they are questioned about their own participation: they have not personally done anything or seen anything, period. Innocent and I are stupefied by their aplomb. Above all, we cannot understand the contradiction between their much-debated collective agreement to talk to us and the unbelievable denials that pour out when they do start talking. After much discussion and growing disappointment, I begin to think that my project is in fact unrealizable, although I remain mystified by their repeated assurances of cooperation, since they don’t have that much to gain from our undertaking except a little relaxation in a shady garden.
The key to the mystery arrives by chance when, without realizing it, I sometimes pass from the informal, singular “you” (tu) to the plural “you” (vous). Each time, as if by magic, the replies become precise, and I finally grasp the link between cause and effect.
For example, to the question, “Can you (tu) describe how you (tu) would begin your mornings?” they would answer, “I would get up, I would go to the field to cut the sorghum and count the goats.” But to the question, “Can you (tu) describe how you (vous) would begin your mornings?” they would answer, “We would get up at dawn, we would gather on the soccer
field at around nine o’clock … Then we would go down to the marshes and search the papyrus using the machetes.”
In fact, although each one is willing to recount, on his own, his experience of the genocide, they all feel the need to hide behind a more diluted syntax, to replace “I” by a more collective, impersonal “we.” To broach certain very personal subjects, such as “The First Time” or “And God in All This?” I wait for our moments of greatest complicity, which often come at the end of our meetings, when we have grown used to one another.