LITMIR.BIZ

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      © 2012 by Indiana University Press

      First published in French as Le passé devant soi © Éditions Phébus, Paris, 2008

      This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

      All rights reserved

      No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.

       The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

      Manufactured in the United States of America

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Gatore, Gilbert, [date]

      [Passé devant soi. English]

      The past ahead : a novel / Gilbert Gatore ; translated by Marjolijn de Jager.

      p. cm. — (Global African voices)

      Includes bibliographical references.

      ISBN 978-0-253-00665-3 (cl : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-253-00666-0 (pb : alk. paper)

      ISBN 978-0-253-00950-0 (eb)

      I. De Jager, Marjolijn. II. Title.

      PQ2707.A86P3713 2012

      843′.92—dc23

      2012015756

      1 2 3 4 5 17 16 15 14 13 12

      To my parents,

      to Pierre and Maddy Le Bas,

      thank you.

      I have broken an order, and the guilty are never bored.

      —J.-M. COETZEE, IN THE HEART OF THIS LAND

       What better is there to be done when there’s no doubt whatsoever that it’s too late?

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      The translator wishes to express her sincere gratitude to Dee Mortensen, senior editor at Indiana University Press, and to Dominic Thomas, professor of French & Francophone studies at University of California, Los Angeles, for their unswerving encouragement and support for the translation of Gilbert Gatore’s novel. Without such enthusiasm for and faith in the importance of francophone African literature, works such as these would remain unknown to the large audience that is waiting to discover these voices.

      I am equally grateful to the French Embassy’s program of French Voices, which has supported this publication with the generosity of its funding.

      And, as always, warm gratitude goes to David Vita, my first and acutely critical reader, without whose daily presence and support my work would be much more difficult.

      INTRODUCTION

While working on the translation of Gilbert Gatore’s novel, I kept asking myself two questions. First, why had he written this particular novel? It is a story in which Niko, one of the two protagonists, is developed in such a way that the reader comes to have great empathy for him, feeling increasing compassion for Niko and even anger with those around him, since all but one of the villagers cast him aside. Then, when we learn much later in the novel that Niko is also the perpetrator of horrendous crimes, I wondered how, despite the horror of his character’s actions, the author had made it possible for me to continue feeling some sort of compassion for him. The answer came just recently when in an interview on Art Beat¹ the author and journalist Roger Rosenblatt was asked why writers write. He gave four reasons: “to make suffering endurable, evil intelligible, justice desirable, and love possible.” Whether Gilbert Gatore would agree with this response I cannot and do not know, but for me, his reader, he has succeeded on all four fronts.

      Phébus, his French publisher, provides us with the following biographical information: “Gilbert Gatore was born in Rwanda in 1981. On the eve of the civil war, his father gave him The Diary of Anne Frank to read. Profoundly moved, the young boy decided, like the heroine, to keep a diary throughout the conflict. When he fled the country with his family in 1997, Zairian customs officers took everything they had, including the precious notebooks. Ever since, he has tried to recover the strength and truth of those emotions in his writing.” By keeping a diary, suffering was made endurable both for Anne Frank and, generations later, for Gilbert Gatore. (On a personal level, for a woman whose origin is Dutch and who herself has rather vivid childhood memories of World War II, it is particularly moving to learn that Gatore’s earliest inspiration came from Anne Frank.)

The novel’s two characters, Isaro and Niko, are mirror images of one another, even though at first they appear to be each other’s most extreme opposites: a beautiful, talented, smart young woman, raised with all the comforts of a middle class family, and an ugly, handicapped, ostracized young man, victim and executioner, self-seeker and self-concealer. Everything each of them embodies is wholly lacking in the other. However, as the story progresses it becomes clear that they are two sides of what is essentially the same person, especially as we realize that it is also a novel within a novel, since Niko is the protagonist in the tale that Isaro is in the process of writing. Gatore has explained in an on-line interview that “the contrast is . . . inside themselves as well as between the two characters; . . . Isaro is the reverse of Niko” (le contraste . . . est à l’intérieur d’eux-mêmes et entre les deux personnages; . . . Isaro est la renversée de Niko).²

Although Niko is “voicing the perpetrator’s perspective,”³ it is very different from the speech of Jean Hatzfeld’s real-life criminals. The latter remain incomprehensible to the listener. Although, as the French historian Gérard Prunier wrote about the genocide in Rwanda, “Understanding why they died is the best and most fitting memorial we can raise for the victims. Letting their deaths go unrecorded, or distorted by propaganda, or misunderstood through simple clichés, would in fact bring the last touch to the killers’ work in completing the victims’ dehumanization.”⁴

      Niko, the fictional perpetrator, allows us to begin to find evil intelligible, no matter with how much hesitation and distaste we do so. By the time we discover what he has done once an adult, we know all about his wretched, motherless, and loveless childhood, we have come to care about him, and we know that he despises himself enough to vanish from society—and by so doing he begins to make evil intelligible

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