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INTRODUCTION

While working on the translation of Gilbert Gatore’s novel, I kept asking myself two questions. First, why had he written this particular novel? It is a story in which Niko, one of the two protagonists, is developed in such a way that the reader comes to have great empathy for him, feeling increasing compassion for Niko and even anger with those around him, since all but one of the villagers cast him aside. Then, when we learn much later in the novel that Niko is also the perpetrator of horrendous crimes, I wondered how, despite the horror of his character’s actions, the author had made it possible for me to continue feeling some sort of compassion for him. The answer came just recently when in an interview on Art Beat¹ the author and journalist Roger Rosenblatt was asked why writers write. He gave four reasons: “to make suffering endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable, and love possible.” Whether Gilbert Gatore would agree with this response I cannot and do not know, but for me, his reader, he has succeeded on all four fronts.

Phébus, his French publisher, provides us with the following biographical information: “Gilbert Gatore was born in Rwanda in 1981. On the eve of the civil war, his father gave him The Diary of Anne Frank to read. Profoundly moved, the young boy decided, like the heroine, to keep a diary throughout the conflict. When he fled the country with his family in 1997, Zairian customs officers took everything they had, including the precious notebooks. Ever since, he has tried to recover the strength and truth of those emotions in his writing.” By keeping a diary, suffering was made endurable both for Anne Frank and, generations later, for Gilbert Gatore. (On a personal level, for a woman whose origin is Dutch and who herself has rather vivid childhood memories of World War II, it is particularly moving to learn that Gatore’s earliest inspiration came from Anne Frank.)

The novel’s two characters, Isaro and Niko, are mirror images of one another, even though at first they appear to be each other’s most extreme opposites: a beautiful, talented, smart young woman, raised with all the comforts of a middle class family, and an ugly, handicapped, ostracized young man, victim and executioner, self-seeker and self-concealer. Everything each of them embodies is wholly lacking in the other. However, as the story progresses it becomes clear that they are two sides of what is essentially the same person, especially as we realize that it is also a novel within a novel, since Niko is the protagonist in the tale that Isaro is in the process of writing. Gatore has explained in an on-line interview that “the contrast is . . . inside themselves as well as between the two characters; . . . Isaro is the reverse of Niko” (le contraste . . . est à l’intérieur d’eux-mêmes et entre les deux personnages; . . . Isaro est la renversée de Niko).²

Although Niko is “voicing the perpetrator’s perspective,”³ it is very different from the speech of Jean Hatzfeld’s real-life criminals. The latter remain incomprehensible to the listener. Although, as the French historian Gérard Prunier wrote about the genocide in Rwanda, “Understanding why they died is the best and most fitting memorial we can raise for the victims. Letting their deaths go unrecorded, or distorted by propaganda, or misunderstood through simple clichés, would in fact bring the last touch to the killers’ work in completing the victims’ dehumanization.”⁴

Niko, the fictional perpetrator, allows us to begin to find evil intelligible, no matter with how much hesitation and distaste we do so. By the time we discover what he has done once an adult, we know all about his wretched, motherless, and loveless childhood, we have come to care about him, and we know that he despises himself enough to vanish from society—and by so doing he begins to make evil intelligible for us. It is just one case, but it is an extremely compelling one.

“Write about what you want to know,” Rosenblatt says, and so Isaro does. But it is too late for her. She seeks to understand evil by writing Niko’s story. In Women Witnessing Terror,⁵ Anne Cu-bilie outlines that the vocation of “giving testimony is about being a witness to impossible storytelling, and also a performative act between the mute witnesses, the dead, the survivor witness and the witness to the survivor.” Trying to verbalize what in essence cannot be spoken is, indeed, impossible storytelling. Yet merely attempting to convey what is incomprehensible might be a way to survive tragedy. It is this urgency that leads Isaro to abandon her studies in Paris, leave France, and undertake a research project that entails interviewing perpetrators in her homeland while at the same time working on her own imaginary story of Niko. He is in a sense the witness to the survivor she has been so far, but, in her case, creating the monster who is the very embodiment of evil is not sufficient to keep her going. And it doesn’t. It cannot help her in her attempt to be part of a community again or to live an ordinary, everyday life. She realizes that justice is, indeed, desirable, but she is unable to find it anywhere or to help it materialize.

Finally, and only briefly, Isaro touches upon love, proving to herself—and to us—that love is possible, until she has the terrifying thought that the man she is in love with and, in fact, has been living with, might—just possibly might—be the very man who is guilty of the annihilation of her family. No matter how unlikely this may be, the thought will never leave her, and so she cannot go on. Ian Palmer tells us, “There is a saying in Rwanda that Rwandans must swallow their tears. They do. If they did not they would surely drown.”⁶ Isaro drowns.

Although the novel never mentions a specific country, Isaro’s native land where the horror takes place obviously refers to Rwanda. Yet a Vogue Italia (March 18, 2011) interview with Gatore tells us that “. . . even if his novel was written from the desire to reconstruct his lost diary, the author says he is bored with brutal stories: ‘My book isn’t a political tract—and it isn’t yet another book about the poor little Rwandan.’ ” Indeed, it is not. It is a true artist’s attempt to “comprehend the incomprehensible.”⁷ Like other artists, he has been if not accused of using art to do so, certainly questioned about whether and how art can possibly depict and explain genocide and, furthermore, whether this is ethically acceptable. A visitor to the virtual exhibition⁸ of Kofi Setordji’s memorial on the genocide in Rwanda wrote in the guest book, signing with the name Boo Friedman, “People will never voluntarily confront genocide or crimes against humanity—It is too harsh, too incomprehensible, too cruel. Genocide can only truly be comprehended through art, of any medium.” In an interview with Maarten Rens (in February 2002, in Accra), Setordji himself said, “After the genocide people lament. All they possess is what is inside them . . . You cannot break the spirit inside them and we see this spirit in the form of music and poetry.” And in the fiction of Gilbert Gatore.

MARJOLIJN DE JAGER

NOTES

1. Jeffrey Brown interview with Roger Rosenblatt on Art Beat—PBS News-hour, January 31, 2011.

2. On-line video interview: www.dailymotion.com—ina.fr, April 14, 2011.

3. Anneleen Spiessens, “Voicing the Perpetrator’s Perspective: Translation and Mediation in Jean Hatzfeld’s Une Saison de machetes,” Translator, 16.2 (2010), 315-336.

4. Gérard Prunier, The Rwandan Crisis: History of a Genocide (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), xii.

5. Anne Cubilie, Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 3.

6. Ian Palmer, “Darkness in the Heart,” British Medical Journal (August 12, 1995), 459; Expanded Academic ASAP (online), September 13, 2011.

7. Rhoda Woets, “Comprehend the Incomprehensible: Kofi Setordji’s Travelling Memorial of the Rwanda Genocide,” African Arts, 43.3 (Autumn 2010): 52.

8. In 2002 the Dutch foundation Africaserver.nl created an online exhibition of the genocide memorial in their Virtual Museum of Contemporary African Art.