The story starts with Jean Patrick, a young Rwandan boy, deciding that he will become a runner and his goal is to represent his country at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. However, Jean Patrick is a Tutsi (the minority ethnic group in Rwanda), so the way ahead will never be smooth. We follow him through secondary school and university as he gets ever closer to his dream, running Olympic qualifying times with ease and meeting the Rwandan president. At the same time through other characters we hear of the growing unrest in the country and the underlying tensions between Hutus and Tutsis which are continually threatening to bubble to the surface. Jean Patrick, however, is content to bury his head in the sand when it comes to politics and focus on his Olympic goal. He believes that if he can just keep running and represent Rwanda in the Olympics he will have done his bit for national unity and everything will be ok. Then there comes a day in April 1994 when the Rwandan president dies and hell is unleashed within the country. Genocide (the systematic slaughter of Tutsis by their Hutu neighbours) begins and Jean Patrick and everyone he has ever cared about are caught right in the middle of it.
Obviously, with such a stark and harrowing subject matter this is not an easy book to read, but it is a rewarding one. There is a huge amount of background information, about the events in both immediate and colonial and pre-colonial history which eventually led to the genocide in Rwanda, woven into the story and I was very grateful for this insight. I knew about the Genocide and how it unfolded prior to reading this, but not the reasons why it happened. Mercifully for the reader, the section describing the genocide is relatively short but Benaron does not shy away from describing what happened and makes it very clear that people were being killed by people they had previously considered neighbours and even friends. The subject matter is dealt with with humanity and compassion without ever seeking to sanitize what happened.
The novel ends 4 years after the genocide, with some of the main characters attempting to come to terms with what happened and move forward with their lives. There is a real sense of hope as the novel draws to a close, although the reader is left deeply affected and desperately hoping that lessons have been learnt from this bleak period in recent history.
This is a novel about genocide, yes, but it is also a novel about humanity (finding the humanity in every person), forgiveness, identity and ethnicity, and about love. I think Naomi Benaron has achieved a lot with this novel. She writes beautifully and really manages to transport the reader to the Rwandan hillsides she describes, as well as making the reader feel at home with Rwandan culture and customs. She uses two American characters to continually question the validity of her writing and even her right to write about Rwandan society as an outsider looking in. Susanne, the American woman, often makes naive statements and assumptions about Rwanda that make the Rwandans bristle as in the following exchange:
"Aren't they sweet? They go to primary school near my project slopes, when they're not too busy helping in the fields. I wish I could adopt everyone of them,"
Bea stiffened. "Probably they are happy where they are." Susanne had stumbled into another sin, but she didn't seem to notice.
The interview with the author, in my edition of the book, is particularly interesting and she explains this when asked if it gave her pause to assume the perspective of another culture:
It gave me pause everyday while I was working on the novel and it continues to give me pause today. The situation is particularly complicated because it is not just one person assuming the perspective of another. It is, in fact, a political question, because it involves the appropriation of a colonised culture by someone who stands for the coloniser. As much as I would like to refuse this label, I could not be honest with myself if I did not come to terms with it. This meant that I had to approach Rwandan culture with humility, respect and honesty; I had to be vigilant to avoid stereotypes and false representation.
Also contained within my edition is an essay by the author entitled "Fiction and Social Responsibility: Where do they intersect?" which addresses the idea of whether fiction is even a suitable medium to be discussing such huge issues as genocide, or whether it in fact demeans them. This is a very interesting and insightful read and the message of it rings true with me as a reader. We cannot turn away from these powerful, brutal and often unpalatable issues, but fiction makes more people able to grasp the reality of events such as the Rwandan genocide and therefore be affected by and act upon the injustices they read about. To quote Naomi Benaron one last time: The literature of social justice changes the world one reader at a time.
This is a powerful, affecting and unsettling book, but you should read it.
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