The Books: “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families” (Philip Gourevitch)

I’m on my history bookshelf.

Next book on this shelf is called We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch.

What a book. What an unbelievable book. If you haven’t read it – all I can say is: please. Do yourself a favor: Go out and buy it NOW.

Gourevitch stood in line at the Holocaust Museum in DC in 1994, all the signs of “Never Again” all over the place. As he waited in line for his ticket, he read the New York Times. On the front page (and I’m sure we all remember this image) was a photo of a river clogged with dead bodies. He read, with growing horror, about what was going on. He could not believe his eyes. And in the setting he was in – with “Never Again” shouting at him from all sides – it took on even greater meeting. Oh, never again, huh?? He was a young young guy – 25 years old – but he had already had some stuff published in The New Yorker (he’s a HELL of a writer) – so he basically had The New Yorker send him over to Rwanda. This book is the result. It is THE book of the Rwandan genocide. There are stories in here that you will never EVER forget. Hotel Rwanda is based on one of the many stories included in this book. Gourevitch opened the way for others. Now there are many books you can read in your local Barnes & Noble about the genocide – but his was the first.

A haunting book. An infuriating book. A tragic book. It is so good – can’t say enough about it.

I’ll post an excerpt that always struck me as … particularly intense. And deep. It also shows you Gourevitch’s style here, which isn’t like other reporter’s styles. He doesn’t just report the facts. He goes deeper. You’ll see what I mean. He interviews a doctor named Odettet Nyiramilimo – a Tutsi woman, born in 1956. She’d seen a lot of shit, and had somehow survived the 1994 slaughter. But of course – there had been many “dress rehearsals” for genocide – pogrom after pogrom through the years – she grew up with this shit.

But look at what Gourevitch does here.

He’s a reporter who is not just about his STORY. He is after … something else. I don’t know why I know that – but it just seems that he notices EVERYthing. He doesn’t only pay attention to that which will enhance the STORY he is after. The moment I am speaking of in the following excerpt is really startling – it cracks open the story – It’s NOT just a story. It is a human LIFE. Which can never be narrowed down into just a plot-line. Gourevitch is after that something else … maybe he’s after meaning – not just facts – but MEANING – When we are faced with genocide, so often we just want to know WHY?? Or HOW could you do that?? These questions never really can be answered – it’s at the heart of the mystery of man’s inhumanity to man … but that’s what Gourevitch is after. His book is about Rwanda, yes, but it’s also about, in a larger sense, the essential mystery of genocide – and his writing shows that. I love him.

From We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda by Philip Gourevitch.

In 1973, after her brother-in-law rejected her, she kept walking, home to Kinunu. She found her father’s house empty and one of his side houses burned. The family was hiding in the bush, camping among their banana trees, and Odette lived with them there for several months. Then, in July, the man in charge of the pogroms, Major General Habyarimana, ousted Kayibanda, declared himself president of the Second Republic, and called a moratorium on attacks against Tutsis. Rwandans, he said, should live in peace and work together for development. The message was clear: the violence had served its purpose, and Habyarimana was the fulfillment of the revoltuion.

“We really danced in the streets when Habyarimana took power,” Odette told me. “At last, a President who said not to kill Tutsis. And after ‘seventy-five, at least, we did live in security. But the exclusions were still there.” In fact, Rwanda was more tightly regulated under Habyarimana than ever before. “Development” was his favorite political word and it also happened to be a favorite word of the European and American aid donors whom he milked with great skill. By law, every citizen became a member for life of the President’s party, the National Revolutionary Movement for Development (MRND), which served as the all-pervasive instrument of his will. People were literally kept in their place by rules that forbade changing residence without government approval, and for Tutsis, of course, the old nine-percent quota rules remained. Members of the armed forces were forbidden to marry Tutsis, and it went without saying that they were not supposed to be Tutsis themselves. Two Tutsis were eventually given seats in Habyarimana’s rubber-stamp parliament, and a token Tutsi was given a ministerial post. If Tutsis thought they deserved better, they hardly complained; Habyarimana and his MRND promised to let them live unmolested, and that was more than they had been able to count on in the past.

The Belgian director of Odette’s old school in Cyangugu would not readmit her, but she found a place in a school that specialized in sciences, and began preparing for a career in medicine. Once again, the headmistress was a Belgian, but this Belgian took Odettet under her wing, keeping her name out of the enrollment books, and hiding her when government inspectors came looking for Tutsis. “It was all trickery,” Odette said, “and the other girls resented it. One night, they came to my dormitory and beat me with sticks.” Odette didn’t dwell on the discomfort. “Those were the good years,” she said. “The headmistress looked after me, I had become a good student — first in my class — and then I was admitted, with some more trickery, to the national medical school in Butare.”

The only thing Odette said about her life as a medical student was: “In Butare once, a professor of internal medicine came up to me and said, ‘What a pretty girl,’ and he started patting my bottom and tried to set up a date even though he was married.”

The memory just popped out of her like that, with no apparent connection to the thought that preceded it or the thought that followed. Then Odette sped along, skipping over the years to her graduation and her marriage. Yet, for a moment, the image of her as a young student in an awkward moment of sexual surprise and discomfort hung between us. It seemed to amuse Odette, and it reminded me of all that she wasn’t telling me as she recited her life story. She was keeping everything that was not about Hutu and Tutsi to herself. Later, I met Odette several times at parties; she and her husband were gregarious and understandably popular. Together they run a private maternity and pediatrics practice called The Good Samaritan Clinic. They were known as excellent doctors and fun people — warm, vivacious, good-humored. They had a charmingly affectionate ease with each other, and one saw right away that they were in the midst of full and engaging lives. But when we met in the garden of the Cercle Sportif, Odette spoke as a genocide survivor to a foreign correspondent. Her theme was the threat of annihilation, and the moments of reprieve in her story — the fond memories, funny anecdotes, sparks of wit — came, if at all, in quick beats, like punctuation marks.

This made sense to me. We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us, and, looking back, there are these discrete tracks of memory: the times when our lives are most sharply defined in relation to others’ ideas of us, and the more private timse when we are free to imagine ourselves. My own parents and grandparents came to the United States as refugees from Nazism. They came with stories similar to Odette’s, of being hunted from here to there because they were born a this and not a that, or because they had chosen to resist the hunters in the service of an opposing political idea. Near the end of their lives, both my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandmother wrote their memoirs, and although their stories and their sensibilities were markedly different, both ended their accounts of their lives right in the middle of those lives, with a full stop at the moment they arrived in America. I don’t know why they stopped there. Perhaps nothing that came afterward ever made them feel so vividly, or terribly, aware and alive. But listening to Odette, it occurred to me that if others have so often made your life their business — made your life into a question, really, and made that question their business — then perhaps you will want to guard the memory of those times when you were freer to imagine yourself as the only times that are truly and inviolably your own.

It was the same with nearly all the Tutsi survivors I met in Rwanda. When I pressed for stories of how they had lived during the long periods between bouts of violence — household stories, village stories, funny stories, or stories of annoyance, stories of school, work, church, a wedding, a funeral, a trip, a party, or a feud — the answer was always opaque: in normal times we lived normally. After a while I stopped asking, because the question seemed pointless and cruel. On the other hand, I found that Hutus often volunteered their memories of life’s engrossing daily drama before the genocide, and these stories were, just as the Tutsi survivors had said, normal: variations, in a Rwandan vein, of stories you might hear anywhere.

So remembering had its economy, like experience itself, and when Odette mentioned the hand of the professor of internal medicine on her bottom, and grinned, I saw that she had forgotten that economy and wandered into her memories, and I felt that we were both glad of it. A professor had imagined her susceptible and she had imagined that as a married man and her teacher he should know greater restraint. They had each other wrong. But people have the strangest notions as they navigate each other in this life — and in the “good years”, the “normal times,” this isn’t the end of the world.