Between April 7 and July 15, 1994, hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and Twa people were murdered by the Hutu majority of Rwanda. The Rwandan Genocide is the kind of event that people who survived it will never fully recover from. It’s the kind of horrific event that forever stains the name and history of a country. In All Your Children, Scattered, by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse (pitch-perfectly translated by Alison Anderson), we see how the long shadow of the Genocide still smothers Rwandans decades later through the eyes of Blanche and her mother, Immaculata. Mairesse also shows us the stark divides between black and white, speech and silence, healing and long death.
Blanche is well aware of the irony of her name. In France, she goes by Barbra. Even though Blanche is half-French, through her father, she will never been anything other than an African to the French people she lives among. Blanche left her hometown of Butare, in southern Rwanda, near the start of the genocide. Her mother stayed behind and narrowly managed to survive. Immaculata stayed because her son, Bosco, joined the Rwandan Patriotic Front. All three family members manage to physically survive the violence, but all suffer deep, emotional scars that leave them forever changed.
As the narrative switches back and forth between Blanche and Immaculata, we learn more about their lives before and after the genocide and Rwandan Civil War. Before their world ended, Immaculata was torn between her two children. Blanche represents Immaculata’s desire to rise above the limitations placed on her by poverty, by expectations of her gender, and by the lingering racism of colonial rule. For a long time, Immaculata would only speak to her daughter in French and briefly forbid her family from teaching her Kinyarwanda, one of the official languages of Rwanda. Blanche does learn Kinyarwanda eventually, but her mother’s drive to Europeanize her daughter leaves Blanche feeling like a perpetual foreigner in the country where she was born. Immaculata’s other child, Bosco, was fathered by a Tutsi population, a man who was Immaculata’s first love. We don’t learn much about who Bosco is. We only know what happens to him through Immaculata’s reports to Blanche. Unlike Blanche, Bosco is never pushed into anything. Instead, he seems to represent for Immaculata her authentic, Tutsi Rwandan self, or perhaps her self-destructive choices.
What fascinated me most about All Your Children, Scattered was the role that speaking or not-speaking play. After Bosco’s death, Immaculata stops speaking. She goes silent. Meanwhile, Blanche switches between French and Kinyarwanda to try and express everything. She uses both languages to try and teach her own son where she comes from. Yet, for all her words, Blanche fails to reach Immaculata in Immaculata’s profound grief over her lost Bosco. How can words ever express that kind of sorrow? Or the fear that Immaculata felt while she was hiding from Hutu forces that wanted to kill her and everyone like her? I was reminded of all the books, articles, and documentaries that have been created about the Holocaust. There’s an ocean of words out there that can teach us what happened but they all seem to fall short of fully capturing the experience of being hunted and murdered simply because one group of people believes that your group should be exterminated.
And yet, for all that, life does carry on. Immaculata’s family lives in her daughter and her grandson. The fact that we see the characters slowly heal over the years gives this book—which like I said is about one of the most horrific crimes in history—a hardwon sense of hope. Somehow, it is possible to find peace. Somehow, it is possible to find the words to connect with others and the world. I’ll admit that I didn’t fully understand all of the choices Mairesse made in this book (I’m frankly baffled by the allegorical story near the end) but I will say that it was a harrowing and beautiful read.