Murambi. The Book of Bones Quotes

“In my heart of hearts I knew I was wrong. The World Cup was about to begin in the United States. The planet was interested in nothing else. And in any case, whatever happened in Rwanda, it would always be the same old story of blacks beating up on each other. Even Africans would say, during half-time of every match, “They’re embarrassing us, they should stop killing each other like that.” Then they’ll go on to something else. [9-10]”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“I refuse to ask of the past more meaning than it can give to the present.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi, The Book of Bones

“He had to see her face, listen to her voice. She had no
reason to hide, and it was his duty to get as close as he
could to all suffering. He wanted to say to the woman in
black—as he would later to Zakya’s children—that the
dead of Murambi, too, had dreams, and that their most
ardent desire was for the resurrection of the living.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“Seeing her set off toward the main building, he thought
that the path that led her to her dead would not be lost in
the labyrinths of history.
She herself, was she dead or alive? Cornelius would
have liked to be able to ask that question to those who,
under the pretext of drawing up the exact figures of the
genocide, threw numbers around furiously. Let’s not exaggerate,
sir, after all, there were only eight hundred thousand
dead in Rwanda. No, one million two hundred thousand.
Many more. Somewhat fewer. He wanted to ask
them where the young woman in black should go in their
graphs. But it was easy to understand: after such an ordeal,
there was a little bit of death in everyone. Maybe
there was less life left in the veins of that unknown woman
than among the remains of Murambi.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“He would tirelessly recount the horror. With machete
words, club words, words studded with nails, naked
words and—despite Gérard—words covered with blood
and shit. That he could do, because he saw in the genocide
of Rwandan Tutsis a great lesson in simplicity. Every
chronicler could at least learn—something essential to his
art—to call a monster by its name.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“Loneliness was also the young woman in black who
came almost every day to the Polytechnic. She knew exactly
which of all the tangled skeletons lying on the cold
concrete were those of her little girl and her husband.
She would go straight to one of the sixty-four doors of
Murambi and stand in the middle of the room before two
intertwined corpses: a man clutching a decapitated child against him. The young woman in black prayed in silence, and then left.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“It’s important that you believe me. I’m not
making it up, for once that’s not necessary. If you prefer
to think that I imagined these horrors your mind will be
at peace and that’s not good. This pain will get lost in
opaque words and everything will be forgotten until the
next massacre. They really did all these incredible things.
It happened in Rwanda only four years ago, when the entire
world was playing soccer in America. Sometimes I go
back to Murambi. I look at the place where my remains
would have been and I tell myself that something’s wrong,
I move my hands and my feet because it seems strange to
me that they’re still there, and my entire body seems like
a hallucination to me.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“And all the beautiful words of the poets, Cornelius, can say nothing, I
swear to you, of the fifty thousand ways to die like a dog,
within a few hours.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“He felt his solitude like the muffled echo of that of the
victims. Well before the Interahamwe arrived, everyone
was already alone, torn between anguish and absurd
hopes.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“What a bad god is yours, white man,
that you can make me worship him only by force and not
by persuasion!”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“Our lives are brief, they are like strings of illusions
that die, like little bubbles in our entrails. We don’t
even know what game it’s playing at with us, but we have
nothing else. It’s the only thing that’s more or less certain
on this earth.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“Siméon’s words came back to him. He
had told him, a few days earlier: “Cornelius, don’t regret
leaving, because you deserved to live more than anyone.”
He had asked him why and Siméon had answered: “Because
your mother, Nathalie, brought you in to this world
running, to escape from the people who wanted to kill
her.” And that was where his destiny had come full circle:
a young woman in labor hiding from bush to bush in
Bugesera, and now him, Cornelius Uvimana, standing in
the middle of these remains in Murambi.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“In this place, amid sorrow and shame, his own life and
the tragic history of his country met. Nothing spoke to
him of himself as much as these remains scattered on
the naked ground.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“After a genocide, the real problem is not the victims but the executioners. To kill almost a million people in three
months took a lot of people. There were tens or hundreds of thousands of killers. Many of them were fathers. And
you, you’re just the son of one of them.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“It was astounding to Cornelius to note that the events of 1994 had left no
visible traces anywhere. Where on this avenue had they
set up the famous Nyamirambo barricade? Was it there,
right at the entrance to the Café des Grands Lacs, where
there had been corpses that dogs and vultures came to
devour? Only the city herself could have answered these
questions he still couldn’t ask anyone. But the city refused
to show her wounds. Besides, she didn’t have many.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“The genocide didn’t begin on the sixth of April 1994, but in 1959 through
little massacres that no-one paid attention to.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“He consumed the city with his gaze, trying to fathom intuitively the secret
relationship between the trees standing still on the
side of the road and the barbarous scenes that had stupefied the entire world during the genocide.”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones

“We lived with a Hutu family. They were polite, but their
son, a fanatical Interahamwe militiaman, was often nasty
to us. One day I caught him going through our things. I
closed the door and said, “Defend yourself, kid.” He likes
to play the tough guy to impress the girls in the neighborhood, but he doesn’t know how to ¤ght. He got a thrashing he’ll never forget. Anyway, I supposed he must have
been remembering all about it during these last few hours.
Yes, the time has come for them to settle all those little
scores. Every Interahamwe probably has his list of little
Tutsi friends to get rid of. [9]”
― Boubacar Boris Diop, Murambi. The Book of Bones