Tales from the Rwandan genocide

quot;Dans le nu de la vie: recits des marais rwandaisquot; Naked in life: Stories from the Rwandan marshes, just published, aims not to explain but simply quot;to get closerquot; to the reality of the genocide, the Liberation newsman told AFP.

quot;The book8217;s objective is not to add to the pile of investigations, texts and sometimes excellent novels that have already been published. But just to bring alive the astonishing stories of the survivors,quot; he said. A genocide is quot;an inhuman enterprise imagined by humans, too insane and too methodical to be understood,quot; he believes. Hatzfeld, assisted by photographer Raymond Depardon, earned the confidence of a group of 14 survivors, including a school boy called Cassius, now 12, an agricultural worker named Jeannette 17, Jean-Baptiste, a school-teacher 60 and Sylvie, a social worker 34. All of them had been quot;demolishedquot; by their experiences, taking refuge in silence quot;as enigmatic as that of the survivors of the Nazi concentration campsquot; in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Hatzfeld says in his book.

Jeannette tells of the day the Hutu militias known as the interahamwe came looking for her mother who was hiding in the reeds. When they found her quot;she stood up and offered them money, asking them to kill her with just a single blow of a machete. They undressed her and took her money. They first hacked off her arms, then her legs. She lay there murmuring Saint Cecile, Saint Cecile8217; but refused to beg.quot; She took three days to die, lying on the ground while her children looked on helplessly. Two years later, Jeannette added, her sister recognised one of their mother8217;s killers: quot;he was the eldest son of our pastor, a well-educated boy.quot;

The survivors8217; tales were recounted either in the local tongue kinyarwanda or in quot;Rwandan Frenchquot;, but Hatzfeld has transcribed them into what he unabashedly admits is a heightened quot;poeticquot; form. quot;This may shock people, but it8217;s partly because there was so much beauty in their words that I wanted to write this book,quot; he said.

He asked one of his interlocutors, Sylvie, what the quot;secret of such lovely languagequot; was. She replied: quot;That8217;s the way it flows because, if you come back from there the genocide, you8217;ve been naked in life.quot;

Other books that have recounted the Rwandan genocide, in which some 800,000 people were killed, include Jean-Pierre Campagne8217;s novella quot;Les Vacances de Dieuquot; God is on holiday and the Pulitzer prize-winning quot;We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will be Killed with our Familiesquot; by the New Yorker staff writer Philip Gourevich.