Blood Papa

by Jean Hatzfeld

  I don’t know a thing about movies. I haven’t been to the cinema. Where would I go? In Kanzenze there is no movie theater, and in Nyamata there are only films with kung fu fights and the like. When I travel to Kigali for vacations, I visit an aunt but we never go to places that charge admission. Neighbors invite me to watch television, especially during vacations. We applaud the petty lovers’ squabbles just like at the theater. My very favorite thing is the Rwandan national team’s games.

  I have a sweetheart. We get along well. We take long aimless walks. We don’t go down to Nyamata very often because getting our parents’ permission is complicated. I’m waiting for my twentieth birthday before I disobey. I know how to dance until I’m so exhausted my head spins. Dancing is my passion. In the school’s troupe we dance to traditional folk songs. The dance is called umushagiriro; we set the tempo by stamping our feet on the ground. At church we dance to Negro spirituals, in ecstasy, so to speak. It’s a blast. I sing and dance very prettily. People admire me, and I am always in demand.

  I was fifteen years old when I became very religious. I feel so good at church. I go on Monday and Wednesday evenings and Saturdays and Sundays during the day. We sing and we pray. I share in the cleaning duties, I dance. It makes me happy to go to church. Although my parents are religious, I don’t go to please them. Our neighbors influenced our choice of parish. I devote myself to prayer and meet a lot of acquaintances there.

  I have friends from both ethnicities, of course. At church, it’s essential, and at school, too. I don’t ever discuss the genocide with young people from the other ethnicity. I talk about different things, not about that. Reticence wins out. I think that young people are often upset by what they hear in their families or by the films they see. And there are sometimes run-ins at school. An orphan might get angry and say something nasty to a Hutu schoolmate, for example: “Get lost, we’ve got no use for you anymore.” The Hutu child complains, says he’s insulted, and won’t let it go. Everyone gathers around, tempers flare, and soon they’re grabbing at each other’s collars.

  That’s less common than it used to be. Now the girls tend to be more aggressive than the boys when the killings come up. They don’t step aside; they strike with their words. I’m not sure why. Maybe they see themselves as more vulnerable, so they are quicker to vent what they feel deep down inside. The safest thing is to keep out of it. I am wary of the turmoil and trauma that arise in groups of young people; the yelling frightens me. I prefer not to get involved. In Hutu families they talk about things in their own way, although I couldn’t say how exactly, because I don’t know young Hutus’ thoughts. I don’t get close to their innermost feelings.

  I have a friend I confide in when my heart is heavy. She is a close friend I share the walk to school with. Her name is Olive. She is the same age as me and lives in the lane overlooking our mudugudu. We are in the same situation: she, too, was born of a brutal seed. She came to tell me herself when she heard the rumors about me. It was a natural conversation, so to speak. We often talk over things because we understand each other. We both crave more distractions. We would love to listen to music with other young people in Nyamata. It would cheer us up. The only chances for amusement in Kanzenze are the soccer ball and traditional dance. My mama and I have discussed it, so now she tolerates my going out more often.

  * * *

  I SOMETIMES THINK about the papa who gave me life by causing my mama such terrible suffering. I would still like to meet him, though. First, no one can change what happened during those months of killing. Second, my Christian faith tempers the bad feelings I have toward him. Would I forgive him? Does a daughter forgive the man who gave her life? Would I try to understand him? I don’t know if I would ask him questions. If I saw him, I don’t know … I think I would greet him the way a daughter greets her father. I would ask him where he lives, in which region, his job. I would want to know why he waited so long to make himself known, whether he was imprisoned like so many others of his kind. For my part, we would have to avoid talking about Claudine and about their past. Basically, I don’t know. Maybe no words would come to my lips, only trembling.

  The more we dwell on all that, the heavier the pain of our past becomes. I’m not looking to forget my history or leave it behind, just don’t bug me about it anymore! Just forget about me! I even wish they’d stop talking about all those things on the radio and TV. During the Week of Mourning—silence. I understand the survivors who can’t accept keeping quiet. Me, I can. I yearn for silence. Survivors like to share their intimate feelings with other survivors, which is understandable. They pour out their sorrows, but me, no. Do I relieve mine by divulging the secret of my birth? My history isn’t like other people’s. When they discuss the killings and show pictures, it’s as if they were passing a blade across a deep inner wound. Still, I don’t at all feel reluctant to talk to you. There’s nothing risky about a muzungu’s book, because not everyone reads it.1 The people who buy it don’t blabber on saying nasty things—or do they? On the other hand, repeating something so abnormal for the neighbors’ ears, that would be harmful. All these thoughts quicken the sadness of the girl who is revealing them to you, and I get mixed up.

  Deep down, I feel trapped, as I said. Sometimes I wish I could hide from the words that tell my story so I could keep the sadness away. I don’t want this melancholy. I don’t want to hear another word. What happened sullies me with shame. I don’t want to see anything anymore in those mocking looks. But instead I sometimes see only my mama dragged by force through the depths of distress. She told me about the marshes, her misfortune in Congo. She answered my questions, even the ones that must have tortured her. So much gratitude and goodness bring tears to my eyes. I want to show her, and to tell everyone. That’s why I don’t know which to choose: to speak or to keep silent about my situation.

  IN RILIMA

  On the road to Burundi, a path breaks off into the dust of the arid Bugesera toward Rilima. At the Gako military base, one leaves the last of the eucalyptus forests behind. The savanna grasses begin to grow yellow and short, the scraggly bushes knot, and first the banana groves and then the bean fields disappear. An undulating ocher expanse opens out under the dazzling sun for as far as the eye can see. At a certain point, the path plunges down toward the shore of a lake. Crocodiles slide through a tangle of aquatic grasses without rippling the water on the lookout for incautious birds and, as rumor has it, unfortunate fishermen.

  People say that forty years ago the pastures belonged to free-ranging buffalo herds. Visitors crossed paths with elephants, pythons, and the occasional lion. Today, sinewy Ankole cattle graze in the bush, nodding their long, lyre-shaped horns, which attest to their noble bloodlines and account for their resistance to thirst.1 Thanks to their valiant pedigree, they have been exempted from the country’s agricultural reforms, and needn’t bother with cowsheds, road crossings, or ropes tied to trees. Nothing has changed since my last trip through here. The ocher earth surrounds squares of green crops, whose water points draw women, often young girls, walking single file to fill the jerry cans they carry on their heads or on their bicycles.

  The penitentiary’s high beige walls overlook the landscape from atop a hill. A gate has replaced the former barrier of a simple rope, and flower-bedecked parking lots now welcome the SUVs of VIP visitors from the Red Cross, the UN, and various other humanitarian organizations. A crowd of women and children have settled under a cluster of trees beside the prison walls. They chat in small groups amid heaps of bundles from home. Some have lit fires and set out their cooking pots; a good many are asleep on mats. The women here rose before sunrise to arrive in time for visiting hours, carrying supplies or documents for their men to sign.

  Nearby, pink-uniformed inmates attend to water duties, weed the flower beds, and unload the trucks. Farther off, on the esplanade from which a path leads down to the lake, a group of squatting prisoners, tools over their shoulders, await the whistle signaling them to depart for the prison pl
antations, which extend over several dozen acres. The men will return in the evening intoning work songs, their shoulders bent under sacks filled to feed their fellow inmates and enrich the prison administration.

  On a blackboard in the intendent’s office, the figures for the day’s population are written out in chalk: 2,574 génocidaires, including 101 women, and 497 common criminals, 71 of whom are over seventy years old. Although the prison population has decreased by two-thirds since the presidential pardons in 2003, the clamor one hears from within the walls hasn’t diminished. The din of beating drums can’t quite drown out the rhythms of booming hymns; the muezzins’ calls still vie with the preachers’ sermons; the church choirs compete with the shouts from volleyball games and the syncopated singing of inmates at work.

  Only two men remain from the group of prisoners who spoke in Machete Season: Fulgence Bunani, who was sent back to prison following a gaçaça trial, and Joseph-Désiré Bitero, whose death sentence was commuted to a life term. His daughter Fabiola had earlier jumped into my van to join me. The wait drags on. She grows restless, not knowing if her father will be allowed to come out, and anxious, too, about making the most of the few minutes authorized for their visit. She was four years old when her father was imprisoned. She attends a technical high school near Kibungo Prefecture. She is a beautiful young girl, at once cheerful and timid. In an ordinary family, she would have been strolling arm in arm with a sweetheart and perhaps by now a husband. Instead, she is by herself and stays constantly on her guard. One can sense her suspicions, but her distrust no doubt has less to do with people per se than with the way they look at her.

  She expressed no hesitation about telling her story. On the contrary, she seized the occasion of our interviews to share her experiences, which she had long kept buried in herself. She didn’t finagle her way out of answering and she didn’t impose conditions on my questions, as I had feared. She shares her mother’s plaintive voice, which has become a way for her to convey her uneasiness. One rarely sees her in Nyamata, except at the market or occasionally at the Cultural Center; she won’t be found with a group of girlfriends. She takes on odd jobs during school vacations, sometimes on building sites. Otherwise she spends her time at home. Her gaze, like that of her brother Fabrice, hints at past hardships.

  Joseph-Désiré finally arrives, approaching with the rolling gait of someone accustomed to being watched. He has a stout and supple sway to the shoulders and wears white sneakers a touch less chic than the boxing shoes he sported during our last visit. Although his star as an interahamwe chief has waned among the prisoners, his popularity surprisingly persists. He remains for everyone the same man he has always been. He lingers in long hearty greetings. His eighteen years of prison have scarcely left a trace. The region’s fresh dry air and the prohibition on alcohol undoubtedly compensate for the effects of living in such close quarters. He has hardly gained a pound; he sleeps well, has good digestion, and suffers only from rheumatism and from fevers during malaria epidemics. “Things seem to be going all right,” he says. “I’ve gotten used to this life, spending my days keeping my mind busy on pointless things.” All the same, a certain weariness emerges from his words; the firmness of conviction that was once so recognizable in him seems to have flagged. For years he expended his energy on refining his rhetoric, filing appeals, contesting evidential points, and decrying procedural errors. Although the strict logic of his thought would doubtless rule out the possibility, he probably senses that his litigiousness eventually undermined any hope of benefiting from the government’s policy of reconciliation. He may suspect—although he has always been a difficult man to read—that by rejecting contrition, by ignoring his victims, by refusing to open his eyes to the past, indeed, by endlessly calculating, he badly miscalculated.

  A number of years ago, in the little garden near the prison wall, he explained to me: “Any civilized person must take responsibility for his actions. However, life sometimes presents us with actions that one can’t admit to out loud. Me, I was the leader of the interahamwe for the district … I assumed that responsibility. Not everyone is capable of acknowledging such a truth. Confessing to such a serious sin demands more than courage. And telling the details of something so extraordinary can be sheer hell—for the person who does the telling as well as for those who listen. Because afterward, if you have revealed a situation that society refuses to believe, a truth that society considers inconceivable, it may hate you beyond all measure … A man is a man, even on death row. If he has the opportunity to keep quiet about a terrible, or even diabolical, truth, he will try to keep that truth quiet forever. Too bad if his silence relegates him to the status of a savage brute.”

  If there is a time when one knows he is being sincere, it is when he expresses his regrets as a father and teacher for having ruined his children’s education. As he told me one day, explaining why he returned from Congo after two years of exile, aware that a death sentence inevitably awaited him in Nyamata: “I knew that the prisons were overflowing and that a good many people were dying there. But I wanted to return to my country so that my family might still have the chance at an ordinary life on the parcel. I didn’t want my daughters to end up like some shabby derelicts in a faraway forest.”

  FABIOLA MUKAYISHIMIRE

  NINETEEN YEARS OLD

  Daughter of Joseph-Désiré Bitero, Hutu prisoner

  You know Gatare, the teachers’ neighborhood in Nyamata. That’s where I was born. We lived there in the first house built in brick because my papa aspired to be a prominent person. In reality, I grew up near Kanazi, in a cob-walled place, the one with the rusted sheet metal you see along the road, where our family settled after we returned from Congo. Not a single memory has stuck with me from our escape to the Congolese camp. I was a little girl. I can recite like a schoolgirl the twists and turns of the panicked journey they talk about, the camps that opened their arms to us at the foot of the volcano. I have forgotten personal details, except that we ate a lot of cookies and that we were surrounded by black lava everywhere we looked. I think we children went to the outdoor preschool, we played with traditional balls made of banana leaves. We lived in plastic-sheet tents—I’ve seen them in photos.

  I remember many aggravations from after we returned to Nyamata because I endured them throughout my childhood. Papa had gone off to prison, and Mama raised the hoe from morning to night. We were forbidden from entering the neighbors’ yards. We had to entertain ourselves within our enclosure, without dillydallying along the way. We made do by ourselves. I jumped rope, I played soccer with my brothers. Since then, my fondness for soccer has always stayed with me. I am skillful at playing; I watch the matches when I can. What holidays or ceremonies do I remember? Dancing at an uncle’s wedding was memorable. Yes, there’s that, because it was our first visit. I also won’t forget the Sunday of my confirmation, when I wore a white dress like so many other girls.

  We were thrilled by the mass at Christmas every year. We put aside our worn-out clothes. We went to church in fine order, then continued the vigil at home. My mama served quite extraordinary meals, like rice with grilled sweet potatoes and gravy. No one invited us, not even our aunt from Nyamata, who was a well-to-do nurse. The days of the Nativity, we weren’t allowed to have fun with the families next door. Joy made itself scarce. Danger loomed everywhere. Neighbors hurled all kinds of threats and grumbled about revenge. We were too little to measure the actual malice of the neighborhood folks. We avoided them.

  Our whole ethnicity has gotten a terrible reputation, but in our family, we know we are seen as worse than the others. We pay for sins we didn’t commit. And there is no way to fight back because it has to do with Papa. It’s uncomfortable to admit and unthinkable to complain. Anyway, complain to whom? We keep it inside, the sadness in the soul.

  Years ago, my mama was a nurse’s aide at the Nyamata maternity clinic. Since Congo, though, she farms to survive. She works the hoe but makes no profit from the land. It’s obvious that f
arming disgusts her. When she despairs, she gives up the hoe. She has headaches. When a child annoys her or when a neighbor offends her, or when a drought lasts, her troubles become so overwhelming we have to take her to the hospital for psychiatric care. I feel endlessly sorry for Mama. Myself, I don’t suffer from anxiety, but her difficulties pain me all the same.

  We children are the only ones who stand by her. No relatives come to her aid, as tradition says they should, not even with little gifts or small sums of money. We no longer see our relatives. Some didn’t come back from Congo, others chose to stay in Gitarama without ever returning to Nyamata, and, of course, most are just as needy as we are. They steer clear of our parcel. People in our family don’t love each other like before. In Africa, if you find yourself without a family, it’s a big thing. The same goes for acquaintances. They no longer sneak away a few minutes to stop in, especially if the rains are short or some misfortune is hanging over their homes. My papa’s former colleagues don’t dare drop by to say hello. His death sentence frightens them. Basically, people fear nasty looks if they come to our door. They finagled their penance, they humble themselves before the gaze of the authorities, and they fear being suspected of negationism. We manage on our own. Once you have been abandoned by everyone, you get used to not expecting the mutual support that tradition demands.

  * * *

  MY NAME IS Fabiola Mukayishimire. It means “thanks be to God.” I am nineteen years old. When I was a little girl, the rumors vexed me without my ever imagining what really happened. When I was more grown up, I insisted on knowing why Papa was never coming back. Mama lied: He had left for a faraway voyage. He works nonstop for a successful company. He is going to bring the whole family to the new place where he lives. Fabrice and I continued to worry. Since we repeated the questions about Papa’s extraordinary absence, she finally admitted that he was in prison. I was seven years old. We asked why he had been imprisoned, and she replied that they kept him there like nearly all the papas from the hills. Why? She weaved her way through explanations.