"Murambi, the book of bones" by Boubacar Boris Diop

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By: Tirthankar Chanda Follow

Novelist and essayist, the Senegalese Boubacar Boris Diop is one of the major voices of contemporary African literature. In 1998, he participated in the residency for writers "Rwanda: writing for memory" to understand the facts and the workings of the Rwandan genocide. His novel, Murambi, the book of bones (2000), born of this experience, enlightens us with extreme lucidity on human barbarism in times of conflict.

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Genesis

Boubacar Boris Diop explained during a radio conversation that the plot of his novel Murambi, the book of bones   had been inspired by the testimonies of survivors of the genocide in Rwanda. In 1998, four years after the massacres, he participated with 9 other African writers in a writing residency in Rwanda. This residence was organized by a cultural collective based in Lille, who was concerned to see African fiction delay in taking charge of the human tragedy which the Rwandan hills were the theater between April and July 1994, with some 800,000 to 1 million dead.

In order to put an end to this "  deafening silence  " of African creators, the collective invited writers to come and confront the still alive traces of the killings, and listen to the survivors and their imprisoned executioners. The organizers hoped that these meetings could serve as a trigger for creation, making it possible to perpetuate through fiction the full extent and horror of the Rwandan tragedy.

The click did indeed take place ... Murambi de Boubacar Boris Diop is proof of this. This novel, constructed as an investigation, with a deliberately stripped-down style, is undoubtedly one of the most powerful and successful works to emerge from this writing residency. This has resulted in a dozen books, all centered in one way or another on the question of how to tell murderous madness. The guest writers, many of whom did not know Rwanda, were forever marked by the mass graves, the exposed bones and the lingering smell of death in the city, as they wrote.

Unbearable also was the account of the killings which the survivors made to them, revealing the barbarism at the heart of the societies and what Hannah Arendt calls the "trivialization of evil". How in these conditions still believe that a new day is always possible? How to find the words to say the inexpressible of the exterminating drive? This is the challenge that Boubacar Boris Diop had to take up when writing his story on the Rwandan genocide.

Challenge

The novelist took up the challenge by opting for a strategy of fragmentary stories, mostly told in the first person. The reader follows in Murambi a myriad of destinies drawn both from the camp of the victims and from that of the killers who plunged Rwanda into the night. Faustin Gassama belongs to this second group. His testimony is icy, diabolical, but devoid of any moral comment allowing the author to remain faithful to the experience of his characters.

But not all Hutu are killers, as evidenced by the luminous personality of the nun Félicité Niyitegeka mentioned in the story. She prefers to die with the illegal Tutsi whom she helps to cross the border into Zaire rather than denouncing them.

Another important character in the novel, Cornelius Uwimana, a history teacher in Djibouti, who returns to Rwanda, his native country, four years after the massacres. He is a Faulknerian character. Métis son, born of a Tutsi mother and a Hutu father, Cornelius is shaken by the reality of the genocide which he discovers as a helpless spectator and the a posteriori barbarism. The young man is all the more shaken by his discovery that his return coincides with terrible revelations about his father. The quest for the truth in the footsteps of this unworthy father, who has become the executioner of Murambi and his own family, will bring the son to the heart of the Rwandan darkness.

Political dimension…

Muramb i is an eminently political novel because in the background, it is crossed by questions about the historical and socio-political foundations of the genocide. By the voice of his characters, the novelist protests against the clichés about the so-called "  tribal   " war between Hutu and Tutsi. “  The massacres in Rwanda do not date from time immemorial : the first massacres began in 1959 and there have never been any ethnic groups in Rwanda. Nothing separated the Twa, the Hutu and the Tutsi. While in Zaire there are 225 languages, there is never only one language in Rwanda, one god  ”, explained Boubacar Boris Diop during a radio interview on the occasion of the publication of his delivered.

Again political, the metaphor of French soldiers in the novel setting up a volleyball court above the mass graves of Murambi where 40,000 Tutsis perished. It must be recognized that there is an economy of means here, a lucidity, an efficiency worthy of a novelist at the top of his art. A must read.

Murambi, the book of bones , by Boubacar Boris Diop. Editions Zulma, 220 pages, 8.95 euros.

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