Left to Tell by Immaculée Ilibagiza

 So, yes, I guess it is sort of odd that I chose to read about the genocide in Rwanda over my holiday break; "the most wonderful time of the year".  This autobiography, Left to Tell, is one I have been meaning to read for a while.  My Dad went to hear Ilibagiza speak at a Yale seminar last year and he was moved by her story of faith; my Dad then relentlessly asked me to read her story, not saying that I would like it, just saying that I should try to understand what he learned at that seminar.

Her story, as my Dad had promised, was one that did not just depict the pain of Rwanda, the pain she had to endure being a persecuted Tutsi, her story portrayed the evolution of hate in Rwanda and the generations of Rwandans that were brought into a culture laced with hatred.

A disclaimer I must add before discussing this novel: I know that I can never truly understand what this woman endured.  I fully recognize that I can never grasp the pain of watching my homeland turn into a war zone literally overnight and being forced to endure the pain of losing not just a loved one, but all the people one ever loved in an entire lifetime.  The story was saddening, wretched to read at times for she described “the vicious, sadistic chants of killers…holding [her] brother’s skull in her hands…smell of death…shattered faces…shattered lives” but as I read this it was all blurry to me (129-199).  My mind is one born in raised in Fairfield, CT and as hard as I tried to feel this woman’s pain, I was at a loss.  She had to live through pain far greater than I think and hope to never have to feel.  I guess I felt embarrassed by my lack of empathy while reading the novel, how could I not be utterly moved by this woman’s story? 

It was not the basic story of her life that could move me by my juvenile understanding of genocide, the thing that moved me the most was Immaculée’s ability to have faith in such suffering.  The story I could must aptly connect and relate to was the story of her faith.  One of those big ‘life and faith’ questions is how can there truly be a god if people such as the millions of people in Rwanda have to suffer so greatly?  Immaculée’s story answered that question for me. 

I sat in church this morning (I swear this is not going to be a religious thing because I know I go to public school and all, just a recognition…) anyway, the priest discussed that in one year 1,000 people who were recorded in our church’s census no longer come to church.  The priest discussed that people find an answer that disproves the need to go to church and they move on.  I am no saint, my family is not super religious, but the fact that Immaculée was living in a “a small bathroom four feet long and three feet wide…the room not big enough for a sink” and she stayed there with at one point 8 other women for months and had the strength to keep her faith baffles me (73-74).  I could surmise that because she lost everything—family, friends, her home, her belongings—other than the dress she wore on her back, made faith really the only other thing she could call her own during the genocide.          

The most awe-inspiring point in Immaculée’s story was when she wrote,

“Because I felt that my faith was under attack, I spent hours contemplating two verses I’d memorized from Mark, which talked about the power of faith.  [two verses] …Even a few minutes not spent in prayer or contemplation of God became an invitation for Stan to stab me with his double-edged knife of doubt and self-pity.  Prayer became my armor, and I wrapped it tightly around my heart” (85).

When any person would ask for a machete or gun to keep them safe, she asked for a bible—she did truly armor herself with a power greater than weaponry.  When she found the man that was responsible for killing her two brothers, her mother, her father, as well as all of her aunts and uncles that lived in Kigali, her hometown, she uttered “I forgive you” (204).  At first I thought she was insane, scarred from the pain of losing so many loved ones that she had gone mad when she told Felicien, the killer of her family, that she forgave him—but then it eerily made sense, even to me.  A vast majority of her fellow Tutsi’s who came out of the genocide alive were unable to move past the event, some died after the war had unofficially ceased out of grief.  She was one of the very few that could move on with her life by forgiving the man that killed her family, thus releasing the hate that was the root of the Rwandan genocide in the first place.

Returning to the ‘small-world view’ disclaimer that I spoke about above; I always wondered and asked how people can hate one another to such a degree that they are willing to commit the atrocities of mass murder?  As much as I realized the strong faith that can be born from great pain, I also saw the other side, the side that is a lot gloomier.  To know that 1 million of my own people were killed in less than a year, I cannot honestly say that I could forgive as Immaculée did.  Resentment would most certainly settle in my bones as did the resentment of the ethnic hierarchy in Rwanda; Hutus feeling inferior to the Tutsis after the genocide in 1959 when Tutsis persecuted Hutus (the opposite of what the genocide was in 1994, this novel). 

The answer to my question goes further when I saw the evolution of hate in this novel.  The first day of school for Immaculée consisted of “ethnic role-call” or rather the separation of Hutus, Tutsis, and Twas in the classroom (13).  Immaculée came to find at an incredibly young age that the Hutus in the classroom were favored.  She realized that even being “number two” in her class maintaining a “94% GPA”, she would have to fight to have even a glimpse at the privileges Hutus were guaranteed (48).  That resentment that if I were Immaculée, I would feel, thus comes up again.  She was no more than 6 when she was told she was a lesser race—by the age of 20, 30, 40 it would appear that would be irksome.

I am not at all trying to say that what the Hutus did was right, but the hate-society that the Rwandans were raised in was basically inescapable.  As Immaculée concluded her novel “it will take the love of the entire world to heal my homeland,” she was right, it would take millions more people forgiving murder, forgiving rape, forgiving unfathomable atrocities to heal Rwanda (210).  It took just one act of violence to derail peace in Rwanda when the president was killed in 1993, but it would take the entire country’s mutual forgiveness to return Rwanda to the peaceful state of its origin.