Le Passé devant soi

by Gilbert Gatore

Isaro, enfant d'Afrique adoptée en France, est une étudiante belle comme le jour qui voit son insouciance se fêler le jour où les nouvelles terrifiantes de son pays d'origine se mettent à tonner trop fort. Niko est un simple d'esprit au corps aussi harmonieux que sa dentition est monstrueuse. Depuis la fin de la guerre civile qui a ravagé son village, il vit caché dans la grotte peuplée de grands singes qui surplombe le lac. L'une voudrait comprendre ce que l'autre souhaiterait seulement oublier... Deux personnages fragiles, facettes d'une même médaille, font vibrer ce magnifique premier roman : la victime et le bourreau, confrontés chacun à la question de la rédemption et de la renaissance. L'écriture, éblouissante, épouse les contours de rêves aux couleurs aussi violentes que sensuelles et de contes ancestraux où des hirondelles trop fières d'elles paient du prix de leur vie les défis qu'elles lancent à de malheureux crapauds.

Genres: Africa, Rwanda, Fiction

224 pages, Paperback

First published January 3, 2008

About the author

Gilbert Gatore was born in Rwanda in 1981. During the civil war, he kept a diary that was later lost during his escape. He began writing fiction in an attempt to recreate the impressions recorded in his diary.

Marjolijn de Jager is a translator who specializes in Francophone African literature. She received the Distinguished Member Award from the African Literature Association in 2011.

Reviews

[Friederike Knabe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gilbert Gatore's debut novel The Past Ahead, Oct 2012, (Le passé devant, 2008) has literally taken my breath away while reading and for quite some time afterwards. Without ever mentioning either the country by name or the concept of genocide, the author brings the reader intimately close to the emotional turmoil of his two protagonists as they, from their very dissimilar post-trauma reality struggle to re-adjust to life after theirs was forever changed. They stand, without doubt as representatives for many.

Two Rwandans, Isaro and Niko, their destinies intimately linked, are both survivors of the horrors of the massacres in their country. Distinct in their voices, complete opposites in the reflecting on their experiences, their combined stories, told in parallel, create a deeply affecting portrayal of the limits of human endurance in times of greatest traumas. They are the two sides of a tragedy that is difficult to comprehend even now, almost twenty years later.

Isaro was saved as a young child by a French couple and grew up within a caring and protective family, the past more or less banned to the farthest recesses of her brain. Until that is, listening to the radio, she hears that the prosecution of the perpetrators of the massacres in her country would take several lifetimes to complete. What shocks her more than anything is the reaction of people around her: "It's terrible, but what can you do...?" For her, the only response is to return to the country of her birth and to bring the different voices - of victims and perpetrators - into the open - to confront and to heal?

Niko, disfigured and mute since birth and rejected by all in his village, has retreated to an island that is rich in mythology and void of human beings. His mind wanders between haunting memories of the past and foreshadowing dreams. His life story emerges through his re-imagining, as revealing for the reader as to himself. Niko's contemplations often return to self-questioning: Is he victim as well as perpetrator? Could or should he have acted differently? Did he have a choice?

These fundamental questions haunt Isaro as she embarks on her quest to "comprehend the incomprehensible", to help herself and others, she hopes, to go on living beyond the trauma. And of course, they increasingly preoccupy the reader. Despite exploring such profound questions the narrative remains intimately engaged in the personal story. Nonetheless, comparisons to other human tragedies may come to mind.

Not surprisingly, The Past Ahead is anything but an "easy read", despite the author's careful use of language and, where possible, oblique references to the devastating details. What does it take for an author to enter so deeply into the conflicting mind of his anti-hero without destroying him totally in the mind of the reader? Gatore deserves more than praise for succeeding so admirably. There is poetry in Niko's dreams; his description of his disabilities that are offset by his special sensitivities: "His ears discern the subtlest movements. His eyes pick up the most distant sounds. His nose embraces invisible shapes. His hands detect odors beyond the trace of a hint. As for his tongue, it tracks down indescribable feelings in the air he breathes." Isaro may be the more real-to-life, down-to-earth character: Strong at times, yet also overwhelmed at times, emotional and sensitive to her environment and her re-assessment of her life's challenges.

The Past Ahead is not only a powerful book, exquisitely crafted and now, finally, translated into English by Marjolijn de Jager, it is an important book that deserves a wide readership. It may be the first fictional treatment of the Rwandan Genocide by a Rwandan national. While Gil Courtemanche's A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, may come to mind, Gatore's book stands out in treating the tragedy in a very different kind of literary form and from a very intimate perspective.

Gilbert Gatore was born in Rwanda and escaped with his family in 1994, the year of the massacres. He was twelve years old and very much aware of the events unfolding around him, without comprehending the broader context or meaning. Absorbed by the Diary of Anne Frank that his father had given to him, he embarked on keeping his own diary. It only exists in his memory now; it was taken away by border guards during the family's flight in Africa.

I am grateful that I was made aware of this excellent novel by the publisher and offered a review copy. This did not influence my views of the book.

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spiraling in on the Horror

A few weeks ago, I began Running the Rift, Naomi Benaron's novel about the Rwandan genocide of 1994. I am told that the book has a powerful ending, but I could not reach it because of the almost simplistic and overcolored writing in the first half. By contrast, when I opened this book, written by a Rwandan who, as a boy, kept a diary all through the civil war, it was not so much the authenticity that struck me as the literary daring. This is not the unsophisticated writing of some unskilled author from the dark continent, but an artistic achievement of the first order that could hold its own with ease in the French literary establishment.

"Dear stranger, welcome to this narrative, whose only survivor will be you." An arresting beginning, but the author does not intend to shock. Everything in the book is confusing at first, deliberately so, because nothing is normal in the wake of such evil. "If logic and meaning seem one and the same thing to you," she writes, "you may well find this journey unbearable." Yes, she: because Gatore writes through the persona of a female survivor, Isaro, adopted by a French couple and brilliantly educated in France, who abandons her studies in order to disentangle her country's past by the use her pen. We watch her despair and her failing relationships; we also watch her writing. And part of what she writes, told in numbered paragraphs like verses in a Bible, is the story of a young man, Niko, who has gone into hiding in a cave in a mountain in the middle of a lake, accompanied only by large monkeys that can aid or enslave him on a whim. Isaro's warning about logic and meaning is well taken, for over the first half of the book at least, Niko's story becomes increasingly more fantastic, whether he himself is sinking into delirium or Isaro is using fantasy as an oblique way of spiraling back to the horror.

Gatore's writing is strong throughout, even in translation, though I am not sure that I entirely trust this. Marjolijn de Jager has missed an important implication of the title "Le passé devant soi," or "the past before you," which is less a paradox about time than the sense that one's past is part of the agenda on the table, that must be confronted before moving on. As Isaro writes:

In contrast to what is often affirmed, perhaps as reassurance, isn't what is ahead of you the past rather than the future? Can the before and the after be seen as one and the same thing?

Yes, this could probably have been translated more elegantly, but the construct, coupled with the highly unusual structure of this short but intense novel, is a powerful one as Niko and Isaro move simultaneously on their different spirals, the one moving away from horror, the other plunging back into the vortex. If I have one slight complaint, it is that after such concentration on the aftermath of genocide, the killings themselves, though horrible, seem almost banal. But really, is there any way to explain how a people collectively set about murdering one third of their population? Gatore does not even try, though he has found a magnificent way of studying the ravages of trauma and guilt, and done so not as an historian but perhaps in the only way possible, as an artist.

[Isabel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dieses Buch. Schon lange hat mich eine Geschichte nicht mehr so mitgenommen. Ich muss es immer noch verarbeiten und bin sprachlos über diese intensive Erzählung. Es zeigt schonungslos, was ein unverarbeitetes Traumata mit den Menschen macht und warum jahrelanges Schweigen keine Lösung ist. Dabei wählt Gatore keineswegs den einfachen Weg bei dem es eine klare Trennung von Tätern und Opfern gibt, denn so einfach ist das Leben nicht. Auch befasst er sich mit der Frage: Wie kann man überhaupt noch über diesen unvorstellbaren Völkermord schreiben? Wie die passenden Worte finden? Als erster Autor wagt er sich über eine bloße Berichterstattung an eine literarische Form heran. Bitte lest es nicht einfach nebenbei, da es wirklich belastend ist. Aber dennoch ist es eines der wichtigsten und literarisch wertvollsten Bücher, das ich je gelesen habe!

[Moushine Zahr · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is the first time I read a book from author Gilbert Gatore, but I have read other authors from Rwanda and other book about the Rwanda genocide early 1990's. Having read the well written "Murambi, le livre des ossements" by author Boubacar Boris Diop on the genocide, I found this book ambigious and contradictory.

Readers follow on each chapter 2 characters, a man in Rwanda and a woman in France:

1. The author introduces us to the leading character, Niko, a unique person with a very specific background, education and life, while entering a surrounding that seems surreal. This imagined beginning and present time contradict with the realistic past of Niko from childhood to his involvement in the genocide.

2. The second leading character is a woman from Rwanda, raised in France, who was adopted as a young girl by a French couple present in the country at the time of the genocide. She has mixed feeling about her relationships to her adoptive parents and life in France, while most of the survivors still live in the country of the genocide.

Although the characters are well developed, I still didn't appreciate much this book because the author chose to write about 2 very specific characters, which don't represent the population, the people. While the story of the first character is very ambigious and filled with imagined surrounding and experiences, the second character is more realistic, but is dispersed in her objectives and realizations.

Readers cannot have a real immersive and complete image of what happened as the genocide is mentioned in a past tense as memory through 1 character, who is haunted by his victims.

[Julia · Rating 5 out of 5]

That I read it in October this year will be a fact that I never forget.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Past Ahead is one of those harrowing books that is hard to read and yet powerful in the questions it raises. It shines a light on the Rwandan genocide, forcing the reader to confront questions about guilt, justice and reconciliation.

Two narratives bring executioner and survivor together many years after the horror. Isaro is the sole surviving member of her family. As a little girl she was adopted by the French family who witnessed the atrocity, and she has been brought up in France, but in her adolescence she rejected these rescuers and abandoned them. When the novel begins she has returned to Rwanda to retrieve her memories and – because she feels the world has prematurely ‘moved on’ without justice to the victims – to document the entire genocide. She plans to interview everyone.

The other narrative is the story of a deaf-mute called Niko, who took part in the massacres. Isaro is writing his story.

The book begins with a warning:


1. “Dear Stranger, welcome to this narrative. I should warn you that if, before you take one step, you feel the need to perceive the indistinct line that separates fact from fiction, memory from imagination; if logic and meaning mean one and the same thing to you; and lastly, if anticipation is the basis for your interest, you may well find this journey unbearable.” (p. 1)

A postmodernist style, it seems to me, is eerily appropriate for the telling of this story. It’s called a novel in the introduction by the translator, but while it’s a work of imagination, it bears little resemblance to any form or style of novel that I’ve come across. It is the character Isaro who writes this introduction, which replaces her first draft which began “Dear Stranger, welcome to this narrative whose only survivor will be you”. Isaro had felt that her first draft was too violent and so altered it to this more cautious introduction. But these enigmatic words make more sense to the reader who learns from the back cover that Gatore was born in Rwanda in 1981 and kept a diary during the civil war. The diary was lost during his escape, and he began writing in an attempt to reassemble the fragments of his memories. The author is telling us in these opening words that this book reveals truth even if these things never happened exactly as depicted here.

That is why, I think, that Niko is characterised as a deaf-mute, unable to speak for himself. He represents the silenced voices of the perpetrators of the massacre, people whose only defence can be that they were following orders, though as Gatore shows us, there is more to it than that.

To read the rest of my review please visit http://anzlitlovers.com/2014/04/07/th...

[Susan Sample · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm unsure of how to review The Past Ahead. I don't know if I liked it. I think, perhaps, that is simply isn't a book you can "like," and thus, the question is too facile. It is a reasonably compelling tale of a (justifiably) progressively more mad woman writing a novel about a (justifiably) more mad man: the former is a survivor of the Rwandan (though unnamed) genocide, and the latter a perpetrator. There is debate over whether fiction can really do ethical justice to the devastation of genocide, and I have often wondered about that as well. On the other hand, sometimes I think art may be the only way to do justice to the human devastation. In this case, the novel is the result of a young man trying to recreate the "feel" of those times he lived through, and carefully recorded in his--tragically, lost--diary. It is an honorable mission. If there was something I'm not comfortable with, it is this: the characters both, as mad and complex as they are, seem too easy for me. The survivor who cannot, in the end, bear to survive (which makes all the sense in the world to me), and the perpetrator, in the end, who had a horrible, emotionally disconnected childhood that seemed to end, inexorably in something even more horrible (which makes all the sense in the world to me). But the problem is that most survivors survive. I can imagine falling on a knife to escape it all. I can barely fathom how most people don't, but they don't, and I would still like to understand that. And I can imagine someone already emotionally and socially crippled turning into a murderer when the moment comes, but that isn't most perpetrators. Most are "ordinary men." As the author hints at, but doesn't really delve into, they are farmers, teachers, bureaucrats and professional soldiers with spouses and kids who they love at home, and that is the thing that stuns people who study how people "become evil." This is good and worth reading...but I'm still not sure what I think.