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- Herausgeber: Orenda Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Prize-winning novelist and short-story writer Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse's harrowing, urgent memoir documents and reconstructs her escape, at the age of fifteen, from the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda. "A moving and powerful account of the violence of the genocide in Rwanda and of the aftermath for the survivors. Its descriptions of the terror of the days in hiding are unforgettable" Abdulrazak Gurnah, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature "This book is a precious thing. A telling of essential truths, an act of generosity and of courage. Out of great tragedy Beata has fashioned a testament of enduring love" Fergal Keane "A superb act of defiance and an unexpected gift to the world. It reclaims the right to individualise the genocide against the Tutsi and offers a powerful alternative to resilience stories" Olivette Otele, author of African Europeans: An Untold History –––––– The author was fifteen at the height of the genocide inflicted on the Tutsi people in Rwanda. She and her mother had spent weeks moving from one insecure shelter to another amid scenes of petrifying violence. Hundreds of thousands of Tutsi were killed in a period of only three months. The lives of Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse and her mother were a sleepless nightmare – until, eventually, a place was eventually found for them on a convoy to safety. More than a decade later, after rebuilding her life in France, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was ready to begin the process of reconstructing her incomplete memories of the escape and establishing community with other survivors. She is now a poet and a prize-winning novelist, but until now she never written about her own history. Beginning by making contact with the BBC team which filmed the convoy, then by tracking down aid workers, journalists and fellow escapees and scouring archives in a search for photographs of her crossing of the border, the author pieces together records and personal accounts to try to comprehend the chaos that overtook Rwanda at the time of the genocide. –––––––––––– **Winner of the Grand Prix de l'Héroïne Madame Figaro, the Prix Montluc Résistance et Liberté, the Prix France Télévisions and the Prix du Roman Métis des Lecteurs. Finalist for the Prix du Livre Inter** "An extraordinarily powerful book, a journey of memory and investigation and discovery; original, humane, and beautifully written" Philippe Sands "The Convoy is a genocide survivor's determined quest to find out more details about her past. But in Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse's gifted hands, this moving and profound book expands to become a meditation on what it means to remember and what we can still salvage from all those things that remain unknown. The Convoy is a deeply intimate story and a generous, capacious examination of survival and healing. It is an affirmation of love's ability to forge new paths across terrain that hatred and violence once tried to destroy. This is a necessary book for our times" Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, finalist for the Booker Prize "The Convoy is a literary detective novel which, as Seamus Heaney would say, allows hope and history to rhyme. Told in clear, concise prose, this is a brave story that comes at a perfect time, and allows us to know that nothing ever truly ends" Colum McCann
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Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse
THE CONVOY
Translated from the French by Ruth Diver
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The author acknowledges the Fondation des Treilles (Var) for the writing residency of two months which it awarded her in 2022. The aims and objectives of the Fondation des Treilles, created by Anne Gruner Schlumberger, are to foster dialogue between science and the arts in order to advance creativity and research.www.les-treilles.com5
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Photograph of Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse by Céleste Nieszawer © Flammarion
Contents
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For Mfurayanjye, who is now fifteen years old. And for Micomyiza, who will be one day.
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“This child who says he is alive and is telling the tale, that’s me. In the middle of life, childhood returns, sweet and bitter, with its pictures.”
Rithy Pahn and Christophe BatailleThe Missing Picture
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My life was spared. On June 18, 1994, a few weeks before the end of the genocide against the Tutsi, I was able to flee my country thanks to a convoy organised by the Swiss humanitarian agency Terre des Hommes. I was fifteen years old at the time. The rescue operation was officially reserved for children aged under twelve, but my mother and I were able to be included in it, hidden in the back of a container truck. During the following weeks, some people told us that they saw us on television as we were crossing the border between Rwanda and Burundi, a crossing we undertook on foot.
In 2007 I contacted the B.B.C. crew that had filmed our convoy, in the hope of getting a copy of the video in which I appeared. I have not been able to find that footage.
One of the journalists gave me four photographs that he had taken that day. I could not see myself in them. At the time, I had no idea what to do with those images.
On August 18, 2020, I found the humanitarian aid worker who had organised our rescue in 1994.
He died four months later.
That is when I decided to write this story.14
Prologue
It would take an uncertain journey of fifteen years, an investigation of the depths of fading memories, to find an image in which I hoped I might appear, then to search for my companions in flight, then at last to explore the possibility of weaving together an account that people would be willing to hear. Fifteen years to allow myself to write this story at last. My own story, and through it – for this is really about finding my place within a community once again – ours, the story of the children of the convoys.
This word “convoy” is freighted with a terrible meaning in the society from which I am now speaking. This society that generously welcomed me, at a time when that still seemed the natural thing to do, with no other condition but to leave the past behind me, at the furthest reaches of Western consciences, as one accepts shedding a skin, but as a silencing nevertheless. Here in France people think about death convoys, about the trains that took away the victims of another genocide, fifty years before ours, towards the concentration and extermination camps which so few survived. It was through reading the words of those who did return, through learning to journey alongside them, that I forged the language that now allows me to tell the story of other convoys. Those of my people, the one thanks to which I survived, in Rwanda, on June 18, 1994.
A convoy to life.
16Launching into this account today demands that I consider my past as honestly as possible, that I rediscover who I was back then.
An adolescent, wrenched out of childhood by men’s violence, crosses a border thanks to a rescue operation led by humanitarian aid workers. She escapes death in improbable circumstances, but at that moment she has no idea that she will one day turn this into any kind of story. She is unaware at the time that Terre des Hommes, the name of the N.G.O. that ensured her safe passage, is also the title of a book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, published on the eve of World War II. She registers the scenes, but especially imprints the sensations, the few words spoken, and the mute terror too. She clings to the hope of life, this new, fragile and uncertain life, which is revealing itself on the other side of the bridge she is about to cross to leave her country. In the weeks that follow, she will cross other borders; the horizon will open up to offer her a protected existence in a foreign land. Much more than a passport or a visa, it is a language, French, that allows her to cross all these borders symbolically and physically. A language as a shield that she used to drive away the killers, that she is still using to conquer the new territory in which she must find her feet: France. As the months go by, her vocabulary in this language which she mastered as a child becomes filled with new words: “genocide”, “rescue”, “survivor”. Those words she had read in histories of times that were said to be past. She will try to make them her own. She must, for she understands that the world is constantly using them to describe her experience in that country she was able to flee. Those words are stamped on all the pages of the immaterial passport that she must present, as a foreigner, as she enters the new life she now must build. She discovers that what happened in that country and what took most of her loved ones from her, 17those events, of which she still retains a vivid memory, are defined by this word: genocide. It is a huge word that crushes her, but also a tiny word that can never contain the extent of her loss. One that does not speak the names of the dead, her two cousins, Uwingabire and Mpinganzima, with whom she used to play, or her second cousin nicknamed “Captain”, or the names of her uncle and aunt, or of all the others, of all her extended family. It says nothing of the friends and neighbours, of the dozens of people whose names, like constellations, had always marked the expanse of a plural existence, of an “us” that was suddenly erased.
That word should summarise everything, and now, in fact, in the language of those around her, in the minimalist account they give to introduce her – as the new pupil at school, the little refugee – it is often enough, along with the name of her country, to impose silence. A blank moment of embarrassment and compassion, in which there is no room to unravel the past in all its complexity. She quickly understands that in this land of opulence and peace, she must also learn to keep quiet. She who had always dreamed of becoming a journalist discovers that liberty of expression may well be a reality here, but it is one that is circumscribed. “Rwanda” and “genocide” – those two words take up all the available space, and the first one doesn’t even seem to need the second. In the minds of French people, most of whom had never even heard that word until it crept into their newspapers, “Rwanda” has become synonymous with horror and violence. It also evokes “interethnic massacres” and “tribal barbarity”. Everything is mixed up. People are in the habit of simplifying things when it comes to Africa. Rwanda is all the proof that is required that the caricatural image of the “heart of darkness”, that Conradian expression that has been a catchphrase since colonial times, can still be used without compunction. 18Even though Africa has rid itself of some of its demons, there will always be some part of that darkness that will rear up again: apartheid is over, of course, but then look at Rwanda.
For those people, that’s the way it is. And always has been.
No-one wants to hear the rare voices reminding them that the ethnicisation of Rwandan society is a colonial construct. It’s just that they’ve been killing each other since the dawn of time, haven’t they?
Come to think of it, there are three words: anyone who says “Rwanda” also evokes “machete”, which itself evokes “genocide”. Three words unendingly contaminating each other in macabre causality, stifling the unfurling of any individual, circumstantial narrative, of any story of one’s own. The fear of specific details, of any expression of personal experience, jams the airwaves. And in any case, most people have already seen far too much on television over the past months to want to hear anything more about all that from the adolescent girl being introduced to them. Or perhaps they fear that madness might engulf her if she starts bringing out her dead in front of them – as the rivers of Rwanda did, washing corpses into the lakes of neighbouring countries, also shown on the world’s television screens – this madness from which she needs to be protected, which needs to be circumscribed in the past, in that other place. In the meantime, she quickly learns how to behave in France and decides to adopt the resilience programme that French society has devised for children like her. It has not yet become the global injunction that we hear about today, the one where polluted nature, raped women and shipwrecked migrants must all show resilience. But from the moment she is offered the support of care, education and security, she cannot continue to talk about the past without showing herself to be ungrateful.
19In the Catholic lycée of Beaucamps-Ligny, near Lille, which enrols her for free thanks to a programme for the education of children from war-torn countries – such as the Lebanese pupils before her – she learns quickly. And when someone asks her how she is getting on now, she knows she must answer: “Very well, thank you. The past is the past.”
And so here I am now, thirty years later, deciding to turn back to that past and to write about it. What exactly happened?
I arrived in the north of France at the age of fifteen. I had not been raped, nor hacked with a machete, and I still had by my side my loving mother, who had survived along with me. My mother very quickly returned to Rwanda to look for other survivors, to be with them, leaving me in the care of a wonderful French host family, with whom I had the opportunity of starting my life all over again from where genocide had left it.
My host family offered me not only affection and room and board, they also helped me to salve my sorrow by opening the doors of psychotherapy to me.
My life became almost normal again, as if by magic.
The only narrative that I allowed myself for two decades was the one that I unfolded in the consulting rooms of psychologists and psychiatrists – where I would find myself exploring much more than my experience of survival – or in conversations with the very few people who dared to ask me: “What happened to you?”
For everyone else, for my friends, teachers or colleagues, I became this woman who, thanks to her work and humanitarian activities, had managed to give back to the world some of the help she received as an adolescent. When I started out in my working 20life, I chose to get involved in symbolic battles against death: combating A.I.D.S., addictions, suicide.
The years passed.
I avidly read whatever was published about Rwanda, essays written by journalists or historians, and the first testimonies by Tutsi survivors. I also found words in the accounts of Holocaust survivors that had the exact shape of my loneliness. Thanks to those words, I was able to tame my silence.
One day, at the very end of the century, as I was sensing that my memory was already starting to crumble, I jotted down in a little spiral-bound notebook a few dates, a few facts from those months of April to June 1994 that my mother and I had endured in hiding or on the run. My thinking was that, should I one day become a mother myself, my children might well ask me to tell them about that time.
Sometimes a journalist or an acquaintance would ask me to tell them about my experience so that they could write it up and publish it. I always declined, already confusedly aware that if my story were ever to be told, I would want it to be in my own words.
I fell in love with a young Frenchman who was not afraid of knowing. He asked me to tell him my story very soon after we met. As the years went by, he also gleaned a few of my memories that found their way unbidden into our daily conversations.
When we were expecting our first child, Yann, who had become my husband, suggested that we go in search of the images that I had told him about. Some people, whose identity I have now forgotten (maybe some friends we found in Burundi in June 1994, or in France shortly afterwards, people who had cable T.V.?), had said that they saw us on British television, my 21mother and I, as we were crossing the border between Rwanda and Burundi, on the day we escaped.
That is how the investigation that would lead to this book started, in 2007.
But books had come into the picture much earlier.
At thirty years old, I came across this sentence by Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it has not been written yet, then you must write it.” I realised that through all those years of silence and my attempts at “exemplary resilience”, I had been looking for the book that I could give to those who, despite their closeness and goodwill, gave me the impression of not being ready to read a first-hand account, mine or anyone else’s. Something to read for people who kept repeating that it was “indescribable” without really thinking it through. What I realised is that words can indeed contain the scope of the disaster – eyewitness accounts are there to prove it – and that our inability to communicate actually stems from the fact that those words are inaudible. I wanted to write something that would recount the experience of survival, both here and back there, in all its multiformity and over the long term, without resorting to euphemisms, but also without it being frightening. Something that would describe the before and the after in order to explain the three months of night that we endured. I understood that it would take painstaking craftsmanship to make our stories acceptable, even though the crimes were not. And so I launched myself into writing my first collection of short stories, which I titled Ejo,1 a word that means both “yesterday” and “tomorrow” in the language of the country of my birth. I chose fiction as a way of keeping a necessary distance, for myself and for my readers. Some of the stories were inspired by real events or people I had transformed in my imagination.
22This was followed by another collection of short stories and a novel that, in one way or another, made it possible to understand how lives were stopped, ravaged and forever changed by the genocide.
Those books were read by the people they were intended for and by many others as well. Often French readers would talk about them using words like “your testimony”, and no matter how much I might protest that this was not my personal story, I understood how difficult it would be for me to extract myself from this framework in which works of fiction from Africa are so often considered as ethnographical treatises.
Rwandan men and women also read my work, and I was glad to hear their enthusiastic reactions. A playwright friend of mine, for example, wrote: “Thanks to your novel I am rediscovering my whole city of Butare, which you have resurrected, it’s fabulous.” An acquaintance, an older person, thanked me for having “so beautifully brought our finest proverbs to the fore”. My mixed race, which gave me the impression as a child of being always set apart by a difference that was too visible, had given me a complex of not belonging. I thought that, after 1994, the extreme experience of genocide, which I had endured alongside everyone else, would at last authorise me to be completely Rwandan.
That remained fragile, however. I would be invited to talk about my books, and congratulated for my knowledge of our language, Kinyarwanda, to which I gave a prominent place in my literary works. And yet.
One day, the head of a survivors’ advocacy group told me, as part of an invitation to speak to a school class about the genocide against the Tutsi: “There will be a survivor and yourself.” I do not know whether he made this distinction because I had been invited to talk not only about my experience in 1994, but 23also about my books. Am I not a survivor just as the others are? I did not dare ask.
In the Western world of creative writing that I entered with my first books, and despite the acclaim from critics and booksellers, all it took was a few cuts to make me falter.
An editor with whom I was supposed to work told me one day, I imagine without thinking too much about it, that it would be difficult for her to promote my work because “that niche is already taken”. And when I asked her, incredulously, what she meant by that, she explained that there was already a Rwandan woman writer in the publishing landscape. I could not believe my ears. Do I not have the right to be an author too, just because I am also Rwandan? Are we still at the point of thinking, in Paris, that there is only one place, one voice, per African country, and that we must compete to win it? I was mortified.
A few months later, a dear friend, an author who had worked for a long time – and with much talent – with Rwandan stories, asked me in front of the audience of a talk we were giving: “Why do the bios on your books all say that you are a survivor? Is that your occupation?”
This question would be offensive for anyone, but it was all the more so for me, in that it came on the heels of those other situations I just mentioned, which I experienced as negations. I reminded him, since I felt he was demanding that I justify myself, of the cases of other Rwandan writers who had been presented as survivors of the genocide when they in fact were not. Why should I then not have the right to say that it is from my real, lived experience that I write?
24I was discouraged for a time and considered never writing this story. But silence, as I learned from reading Audre Lorde, would not bring me peace:
[…]
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive.
And so, for years, and maybe this still holds true today, I was hampered by the paradoxical attributions and injunctions of others, to which I had no idea how to respond.
Now at the end of my journey between memory and writing, I understand that I will carry this fragility for a long time. I know there will always be someone to tell me that my tale has already been told, and at the same time, in a dizzying contradiction, someone else to tell me that it is too personal, not “universal” enough. I know that there will be people to tell me I am exaggerating, that I am too hard, or that I did not understand them. But did they ever try to understand me?
Writing this book has been a constant balancing act. I must tell this story. Can I do it alone, can I grant myself that right? Who am I to do so? A survivor, to be sure, but a privileged survivor, since my lighter-coloured skin allowed me to be spared the fate that so many others met. A writer, yes, but one who until now 25has stayed safely retrenched in the comfort of fiction, and has carefully avoided revealing her naked life.
How am I to pass from fiction to the portrayal of real events, how can I tame the narrative of historical facts in which I am a protagonist?
In an interview in 1986, Primo Levi recounts how he went from writing autobiography to his first novel, If Not Now, When?, a story of Polish and Russian Jewish partisans attacking the Nazis behind the Eastern Front during the last two years of the war. He says that he set himself the challenge of finding out whether or not he had become “a fully-fledged writer, capable of constructing a novel, shaping character, describing landscapes [he had] never seen”.
Without wishing to compare myself to such a foundational author as Primo Levi, but because I could not help looking for answers in his work – and in that of Charlotte Delbo and Aharon Appelfeld – it occurred to me on reading those lines that I was taking a path in the opposite direction. Going from fiction to personal account to prove to myself … what, exactly?
That I have the right to be a survivor just like the others?
Not a day goes by when I do not doubt that. Am I on the right path? I would like to find the other children of the convoy of June 18, to give them the photographs, to give them this story. Will they find my work useful? Might they feel as if I have appropriated this story that is also theirs? Would it not be better for me to stop saying “I” and just to write the story of our crossing, as a journalistic account, from an outside perspective? And what about the journalists who were there? Won’t they find my comments about them unjust or presumptuous?
For I was only a child in 1994 and it would seem logical that it should be the adults who tell that story. Some of them have done so, and their accounts have fed into my own. These are 26the foreign men, journalists or rescuers, who left a written trace in books, articles or documentary films. A humanitarian aid worker and a journalist were witnesses at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (I.C.T.R.), which recorded all of their words.
The women and children, with the exception of one single survivor, my friend Annick Kayitesi-Jozan, have remained silent. And this has bolstered my determination: to make space, finally, for their words in this account, which must become a collective one. To write from those identities, past and present, from the child I was and the woman I have become.
I often doubted myself. But if I abandoned the project, I feared this story might be told by someone who could not tell it from the inside as I would. I feared that he or she would not be troubled by the questions of legitimacy that I was asking myself, that he or she might lack distance, or perhaps delicacy. Were my doubts a surfeit of delicacy? I would not want anyone else to turn us into a caricature or a fine story, or to speak in our place. But then what should I do in order not to be charged with wanting to tell “a fine story” or speaking in the place of others? I realised very quickly that I would never be able to include all the memories, those of others as well as my own, to carry us all singlehandedly, to carry us all in words. My own memory has frayed a little, it is full of holes which I have no way of mending, but which I nevertheless must not hide.
Another fear welled up, as I was writing the first pages: someone is bound to say that my version of the facts does not conform to the truth. I remembered a scene that someone had told me about, of a Holocaust survivor who was speaking to a class of schoolchildren, and of another survivor who was in the room, who had told the person sitting next to her (the one who told me 27this story): “She is talking nonsense, that’s not how it happened at all!” Our memories are defective, reconstituted, dissonant.
I started, again and again, then I stopped. It was not writer’s block but the fear of not being the right chronicler, of not creating an irreproachable account, one faithful to the facts and to the victims, one that would deal kindly with the contradictions of those who helped us or told our story.
In order to reassure myself, I often think about the words of some of the journalists who were present at the border the day we crossed in 1994, whom I found again and to whom I entrusted my project: “It’s up to you to write this story. You are doing the right thing. You are the only person who can do it.”
28
To begin with, I was looking for a list of names. Those of the children in the convoy of June 18, with whom I wanted to share four photographs that I had found, and to restore a little of our common past.
Except that, as the years went by, instead of leading me to the names of survivors, my investigation mostly brought me the names of the rescuers, the witnesses and the killers, the only ones which were recorded in writing and in the archives. The rescued children remained an undifferentiated mass for a long time. As if our lives had left no trace, as if we were condemned to remain children indefinitely, those who gave others their roles, who turned others into rescuers, witnesses, accomplices or killers.
Should I continue to look for the children? I realise that what I have to offer may be a disappointment for them. A few photographs, some dates and the destiny of our rescuers. Even if there are only a handful of them, some of them could read this story, in this generation or the next. The children of 1994 no doubt have children of their own by now, and those photographs, in a family album of the past, might present a possibility of telling the story of their survival, of weaving together the threads of frayed memories.
Since I started writing, my reading and my encounters have shifted some of my convictions. For instance, I did not think, at the start, that I would write my own first-hand account, tell 29the story of what I had endured myself before I reached the Terre des Hommes centre. And then I went and talked to a lycée class and, when I got home, as I sat back down at my desk, it seemed unthinkable that I should not do so. I could not talk about the other children, give an account of the few lives that I had been able to find again, and excise myself from the story. Recounting my experience in the convoy would only make sense if I took the trouble to talk about the weeks preceding it, weeks of hiding and fear that had led me to the location set up by the N.G.O.
In the same way, the question of the form of the account slowly evolved.
The writers Daniel Mendelsohn and Imre Kertész taught me that the way one tells a story is just as important as what one decides to share. I had imagined that I would shed the novelist’s cloak for this book, and become nothing more than a witness, just like the others. I did not want to “create literature” with our story, but I could not stop wondering whether I might not have to succumb to that imperative. For if I contented myself with a linear narrative, if I restricted myself to the factual account of what happened to us from April to June 1994, no-one would know anything about what time does to the past. It amplifies, erodes or cracks it into fragments, into pebbles that are scattered or stay still, lost on the side of the path, but which can be found again when the time of telling arrives. Then the old and the new, the life of before and the life of afterwards, resonate together and make sense.
Those fragments are assembled here into a mosaic that has more to show than the convoy of June 18. Only if I tell the story of my fifteen-year quest along the winding pathways of memories spread over Rwanda, England, Italy, Switzerland, France and South Africa can the dizzying odds of that escape and the meaning of that particular day be understood. 30
Sometimes you have to tell one story to reach another one. Each story holds other stories, and by writing in spirals, I am not scattering myself but moving forward. For I must continue, I must say all the words while they are still there. Say everything before I forget it.
Adding individual stories to the central story of the convoy is also a way for me to widen the horizon of the world I am writing about, of the event that I am describing, to show how it echoes with the present and with other worlds. A way to show its many layers. Each one of the children is much more than a human life that was destroyed or saved; each of the protagonists of that inaugural scene between Rwanda and Burundi, on June 18, 1994, can bear witness to a journey of thirty years on the borders of fragile humanity, to a life story thrown off course.
31
On June 18, 1994, a few weeks before the end of the genocide against the Tutsi, I flee my country thanks to a convoy organised by the humanitarian agency Terre des Hommes. I am fifteen years old. The rescue operation is officially reserved for children under twelve, but my mother and I are part of it, hidden in the back of a container truck. In the following days, some people tell us that they saw us on the B.B.C. as we were crossing the border between Rwanda and Burundi. More than ten years after the events, I contact the British television crew that filmed our convoy, in the hope of getting a copy of the footage in which I appear. I do not manage to find those images of me. One of the journalists sends me four photographs. I do not find myself in them and at the time I have no idea what to do with them.
I file them in a folder on my computer and assume I will forget them.32
1
Four Photographs
“… only then did I know beyond any doubt that these fragments of memory were part of my own life as well. I was too alarmed by this sudden revelation to be able to write down the addresses and phone numbers given at the end of the programme. I merely saw myself waiting on a quay in a long crocodile of children lined up two by two, most of them carrying rucksacks or small leather cases.”
Austerlitz
W.G. Sebald
Translated by Anthea Bell
34
Nice, spring 2019
I was participating in the annual Memory Week organised by the Lycée Thierry-Maulnier in Nice for the fourth year running.
All year long, the five wonderful teachers who were responsible for this project would have their students working on the genocides of the Jews, the Tutsi and the Armenians. Then they organised a week of presentations by researchers, therapists, artists and survivors or their descendants.
This pedagogical and human approach aimed not only to provide information, but also to sow a few seeds in the young people that, as they germinated, might allow them to become vigilant and engaged citizens, able to carry forward memory.
It was in this school, in front of adolescents of fifteen, the same age I was in 1994, that I first started bearing witness to my experience as a writer and survivor. I could see myself in them, and my writing, which their French teacher had assigned them to read, was all the more meaningful to them since it was by a direct witness of the genocide.
The first time I participated, in 2016, I was profoundly moved by the presentation of Evelyn Askolovitch, who had survived the Holocaust as a child with her mother and father, first in two camps in Holland, then at Bergen-Belsen in Germany. She talked about how for many years her mother had taken over the family memory, on the assumption that her little girl remembered nothing of those events. Which was not in fact the case, but the child had buried her own memories and remained silent, 36letting the adults speak, then for decades she lived in the shadow of her husband, who was a well-known journalist in the French Jewish press. It was only after her husband’s death, when her mother was by now very old and she herself was almost eighty, that Evelyn finally allowed herself to speak. She had continued to do so ever since, especially in schools. As I listened to this inspiring woman tell her life story to the attentive adolescents, I had something of a bewildering realisation, which I told her about later: does this mean that I too will still have to keep speaking about my life when I am in my seventies? In her glowing eyes I saw encouragement. She herself had started speaking “late in life”, and still had lots of energy for it; I was still young and would have to hold the distance and sometimes think about protecting myself.
Since that conversation with Evelyn Askolovitch, I always think about her when I talk about the Holocaust to schoolchildren. For I do take care to mention the other genocides when I present my life story to them, because of the common destiny that links me to those other survivors, and because I fundamentally trust the convergence of memories rather than their opposition, from one generation to the next.
In 2019, in Nice, I found two Rwandan survivors, Félicité Lyamukuru, the president at the time of the organisation Ibuka Belgique, and the singer Jean de Dieu Rwamihare, nicknamed “Bonhomme”, who was well known in Rwanda for the heart-wrenching songs that he composed and performed during commemorations. There were also some people there devoted to the memory of other genocides, Jewish or Armenian elders who for years had been weaving the necessary connections between our respective stories, as well as the representatives of the association Ibuka France,2 and others besides.
37That evening, we attended the performance of a play, “Basculement, Rwanda 94”, which was about the beginning of the genocide in Kigali. Two of the actors were themselves survivors. It was the first time I had met them. At the Q. & A. on stage after the performance, the one called Rodrigue confided some of his story to the audience. He said he escaped the massacres by leaving the country thanks to a convoy organised by the Swiss N.G.O. Terre des Hommes. My heart started pounding so wildly in my chest, resounding all the way into my ears, that I heard nothing more of the conversation in the theatre.
I went and waited for Rodrigue at the exit to the dressing rooms, and he was no doubt surprised by my excitement as I began to talk to him.
Today, with hindsight, I can clearly reconstitute the meaning of the words that I blurted out at him that evening, as I gesticulated and struggled for breath, but it must all have seemed quite confused to him.
“I am also a survivor from Butare. And just like you I was able to leave the country thanks to a convoy organised by Terre des Hommes. A few years ago, I did some research to find pictures of our convoy, because people had told us that they had seen my mother and me on television, as we were crossing the border. I found the B.B.C. journalists who filmed the rescue operation. I did not appear on any of the images that they were able to give me, but since then I have come into possession of four photographs in which you can see several children who escaped that day. Maybe you are one of them! Do you remember the date when you left? I was in the convoy on June 18, what about you?”
I did not ask Rodrigue whether or not he wanted those photographs, whether he was interested in seeing them at all, 38no, I imposed them on him, starting from the principle that if I had tried to find a trace of that miraculous survival, then all the other children must have done the same.
Rodrigue listened to me calmly. At the end of my long tirade, he said in a slow and measured voice that he did not remember the date of his convoy. He had been only four years old. He would ask his older cousin, who was with him on the journey.
The possibility of finding a photograph of himself during the genocide seemed to interest him, but it did not seem to hold the same importance that it held for me. I kept hurtling on and awkwardly apologised: “I’ve had those photos for almost ten years, and I never thought of looking for the children who are on them to give them the images. Do you realise, you and your cousin could be on them, and that memento, which is so important for you, is just sleeping in my computer.”
He politely gave me the e-mail address I requested of him and promised to get any information he could.
That same evening, without even waiting for his confirmation of the date he escaped from Rwanda, I sent him the four photographs, as I would do several times subsequently, sharing those images of strangers, perhaps hoping that those four photographs might create a bond between us or speak of us as an entity that had endured through time – “the children of the convoys” – while also wondering at that moment whether I might be the only one to believe in that “entity”.
Two days later, Rodrigue replied: he and his cousin Abdul were in the convoy of July 3. He added: “If you find any other photographs, do send them to me so I can have a look.”
I have often thought about that conversation since then. I have tried to make sense of the young man’s apparently lukewarm 39attitude. Was his reaction due to the fact that I was talking to him about events from his earliest childhood, about a precise moment in time of which he had no memories, whereas I have been able to recall so many details of that particular day because I was fifteen? Or was it because he had experienced much more significant things, his separation from his parents, the constant death threats, or even more terrible events? If only I could have given him a photograph of his lost family members …
Rodrigue’s reaction unsettled me. It forced me to accept the idea that not everyone accorded the same importance to those photographs as I did, given that I had been exploring the question of memory for more than a decade.
Paradoxically, this encounter became a catalyst for me: I decided to find the children that are identifiable on the four photographs, so I could give them the images. Even if the images were of interest to only one of them, I told myself, it would be worth it.
Those photographs, that story that I am attempting to reconstitute, show what has connected us since 1994: a community of experience. They are the proof that on that day, at that precise place in the country which then had the highest percentage of killers per capita in the world, we had managed to escape them one last time, thus becoming survivors.
The very fact that they exist is significant, that they will always be available to anyone who might feel the need to look at them one day, when their time comes. That is what Rodrigue and other children after him have told me, showing that very Rwandan restraint that can sometimes appear to be indifference: “If you find other photographs, do send them to me so I can have a look.”
I came to understand that those images I had kept in my 40possession for so long without doing anything with them are precious. And yet, when I first received them, I was almost disappointed. I was looking for a trace of myself, but I was not anywhere to be seen. Had I been in the same frame of mind as Rodrigue was when I met him?
In order to know this for sure, I need to go back to the moment when they came into my possession.
This is how everything started.
Bordeaux and London, autumn 2007
I was pregnant. My husband and I knew that this first child would be a boy. I welcomed this desired pregnancy with a serenity I did not know I was capable of. A few years earlier, reading Kaddish for an Unborn Child by Imre Kertész had plunged me into deep distress. This sombre and oppressive soliloquy by the Hungarian author had led me for the first time to consider the question of parenthood after a genocide. What meaning could such a decision have, to bring a human life into a world of whose inhumanity I was only too aware? Kertész survived Auschwitz at the same age I was in 1994, the same age as my friend and survivor Annick Kayitesi-Jozan, who had told me about this writer. Annick, whom I always called by her pretty childhood nickname, Zouzou, is another child of the convoys: she was part of the July one. She was the first to write her story. Her son was born within a few months of my first child. We had often lost track of each other then found each other again over the years.
While Kertész made the choice not to become a father, Annick and I followed another path. And while I had been gripped by relentless uncertainty before my pregnancy, this disappeared as soon as I knew I was going to become a mother. That was when I had the conviction, without knowing where it came from, that one can survive survival and weave a new relationship of trust with the world. I also made the resolution at that time to do everything I could to protect my son from any transmission of my trauma, not by imposing silence – which I knew would 42resolve nothing – but, on the contrary, by telling him my story bit by bit, according to how much his child’s heart could contain and comprehend.
In the autumn of 2007, I was working for Aides, a charity fighting against A.I.D.S. My role was, among other things, to facilitate a discussion group of seropositive women, most of whom had been contaminated in the early 1990s and survived that terrible time before triple therapy was available. Their words and gestures around my swelling belly were so sweet. Some of them had unknowingly transmitted the virus to their children, who were then living fragile, constantly medicated lives. Others, the younger ones, hoped to be allowed to get pregnant one day without the risk of contamination that the medical establishment still presented as an obstacle.
I understand today that it was probably the fact that I was going to become a mother which made me decide to start this search.
I was four months pregnant when I agreed to let my husband contact the B.B.C. I had told him the story of the people who said they had seen us, my mother and me, in a report broadcast in June 1994. It was a vague memory to which I had never accorded much importance, unlike my husband, who had mentioned several times the possibility of searching for that footage.
