By KARI MUTU

More by this Author

Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse has narrated the Rwandan Civil War and its repercussions through the eyes of one family in the novel All Your Children, Scattered.

In the novel, Blanche travels from France to her hometown of Butare in southern Rwanda for the first time in years. There she meets her mother, Immaculata, and stepbrother Bosco whom she hasn’t seen since leaving the country during the October 1, 1990, to July 18, 1994, civil war.

About 800,000 people were killed in the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi that took place between April and July. For 100 days, militias from the majority Hutu carried out a violent campaign against the minority Tutsi and people aligned with them.

Read: OBBO: After horrors of genocide, Rwanda tears still flow

Blanche attempts to rebuild the fractured relationship with her reticent mother who miraculously survived the killings by hiding from soldiers and nearly starving.

Her brother Bosco, who is half Hutu, joined the fight in 1994 and returned home a broken and scarred man. Blanche is ridden with survivor’s guilt for having led a fairly comfortable life in France, even though it was her mother who orchestrated her departure.

As the mixed-race daughter of a Rwandan Tutsi mother and Belgian father, her skin is “exactly midway between black and white,” and her hair fair and slightly frizzy. Consequently, Blanche struggles with a quest for identity as she never quite fits, either in Rwanda or France.

Her husband, Samora, is a west Indian man with whom she shares a love of Afro-American-Caribbean music and dancing. Their son Stokely, however, is drawn to classical music and becomes gifted at playing “white people’s music” on the clarinet. He only speaks French and inevitably struggles to communicate with his grandmother on visits to Rwanda. Surprisingly, it is Stokely who helps to break down the barriers between his mother and grandmother.

In Blanche, Immaculata and Stokely we traverse Rwanda’s history through three generations of a family, from the Belgian colonisation to the civil war and the current times. One family’s guilt, trauma, and identity crises are those of a nation. Growing up, Immaculata’s generation was forbidden from speaking local dialects.

Read: Comic book writer brings Rwanda history back to life

As a French woman in a country with strong racial classification, Blanche finds Kinyarwanda the language that best articulates her sorrows and secrets.

Mairesse, 44, is of mixed race herself, was born in Butare so presumably draws from her lived experience.

She is also a survivor of the genocide, having escaped the country in 1994 to France where she still lives.

In All Her Children, Scattered you get a real sense of the key characters, their wounds and how the genocide permanently reshaped their personalities regardless of the distance and years.

'I’d had to go elsewhere on the continent to realise how silent, secretive, and obedient we were, even austere in some respects, 'Blanche ruminates.

Instead of a linear narrative, the story is recounted in an enticing manner where the present day interlaces with flashbacks, the book moving back and forth between Rwanda and France, and pieces coming together like parts of a jigsaw puzzle.

Mairesse has several persons narrating the tale which expands our view of Rwandan history. Her insightful style of storytelling enhances our understanding of war’s impact on people, the struggle to forget or make sense of the incomprehensible, and how language becomes a tool of division or unity. Her focus is not so much on the historical facts but on the aftermath many years later.

Read: Rwandan genocide survivors film premieres on Netflix in June

Mairesse, a writer of acclaimed short stories, is also a poet and the book’s language is vivid and elegant. While the story does not delve much into gruesome details, the psychological trauma visited on the characters is evidence of the atrocities committed.

From her Catholic heritage comes the book’s title, taken from a line in the church liturgy that says, ''Gather to yourself all your children scattered throughout the world.''All together Mairesse delivers quite an impact for a fairly small book, less than 200 pages.

The novel was initially written in French; translator Alison Anderson has done a marvellous job for the English version.
It won the Prize of the Five Continents of the Francophonie and has been longlisted for PEN America Translation Prize in 2023.