Mairesse The Convoy

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-1-916788-71-8
Verlag: Orenda Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

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

Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was born in Butare in Rwanda in 1979. She was fifteen when she survived the genocide against the Tutsi. She settled in France and has become a writer. Her first novel All Your Children, Scattered and Consolée, her second, were both applauded by critics and booksellers and won prizes.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Mairesse, Beata Umubyeyi

Weitere Mitwirkende

Diver, Ruth

Leseproben

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.

Launching 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, those 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. Even 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. 

In 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 life, I chose to get involved in symbolic battles against death: combating A.I.D.S., addictions, suicide.

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