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A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

by Gil Courtemanche, Patricia Claxton, trans.

Even in the months before the machetes started to fall in 1994, Kigali was not the sort of city that promised long life. The pool referred to in the title of this first novel by Québécois journalist Gil Courtemanche is attached to the Hôtel des Mille-Collines, which overlooks the city centre. Beyond it lies the iron market, which shrinks every day to make room for the workers who build coffins for AIDS victims.

In 1994, without a single weapon of mass destruction in use, at least 800,000 Rwandans were killed by their countrymen. It only took 100 days. Unlike the dispatches sent by the western media who showed up when the dead were already limed and covered, Courtemanche’s novel unfolds in the months before the rapes and roadblocks began.

The other recent literary attempt to make sense of the massacres was Philip Gourevitch’s 1998 non-fiction book We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. Gourevitch’s reports came after the fact – he made his first trip to Rwanda in 1995 – and the resulting book was studious, thorough, and mourned the broader sense of government injustice. Courtemanche’s fiction acts in counterpoint – he’s not just there to photograph corpses and tabulate.

Courtemanche’s fictional stand-in, Valcourt, knows the dead, and although the temptation is there, he refrains from romanticizing the Rwandans. They fuck, spread HIV, prey on whites, and lose themselves in bottle after bottle of lukewarm Primus beer. The book is unapologetically sexual, with sections on virgins ecstatically losing themselves, prostitutes plying their trade, clandestine meetings by the pool. Through it all Courtemanche presents his paradox: here are people so alive in themselves they are dying as quickly as they possibly can.

They know he is looking at them differently. “You see dead bodies, skeletons, and on top of that you want us to talk like we’re dying,” says Cyprien, an AIDS-inflicted tobacco seller in the market. “I’ll start doing that a few seconds before I die, but until then I’m going to live and fuck and have a good time.”

It’s this vitality that eludes Valcourt, who has been stumbling through his own life. He starts the novel a disenfranchised journalist, officially Québécois, though he’s almost forgotten what that means over the years. He’s not sitting by the pool writing in his notebook to capture the spirit of Africa, or anything so virtuous. He writes, in his own words, to put in time between mouthfuls of beer, to demonstrate that he doesn’t want to be disturbed by the menial Belgian aid workers and middle-class Rwandans who hover around the pool, trying to catch the eye of the local women.

It’s one of these women Valcourt eventually falls for. Gentille has the blood and identity card of a Hutu but the fine features and light skin of a Tutsi. As the country begins to crack along racial lines, identity cards become less useful than facial features. “Life hung on a word,” Courtemanche writes. “A desire, a nose too fine or a leg too long.”

As their love story progresses, Gentille is surprised that physical sensations can be felt so gently, that she can be seen as more than a series of orifices, and she hopes that Valcourt may help her get away from Rwanda. But as in any love story, time and circumstance threaten.

The genocide seems to take on an acceptable, inevitable tone, like a deer cull that drops the population to a sustainable number. When Valcourt and Gentille stop at a university in the city of Butare, the Belgian professor of philosophy says, casually, “They have to kill each other at regular intervals. It’s like the menstrual cycle: a lot of blood flows, then everything returns to normal.” As the unrest begins in earnest, it’s obvious there won’t be a return to normality, at least not for these two.

Patricia Claxton’s translation from the French has kept the boasts of the men and hopeful euphemisms of the women intact. Though he can’t always pull it off as beautifully as Graham Greene, Courtemanche has written a novel that contains the kind of social criticism that still, almost 10 years after the terrible events, is sharp and pertinent. As grisly as the book is, he has plenty of bile left for other targets, including the media and Canada, a donor country, a nation that “asked no questions and gave with its eyes closed, a perfect country in short.”

The anger in A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is eclipsed only by its sadness. The dedication page mentions “friends swept away in the maelstrom” and with this nasty, hopeful, bilious, and affirming book, Courtemanche has done them justice. The journalist in him has produced an elegiac portrait of a troubled nation. The novelist in him has, thankfully, emptied himself, heart and all, into a love story full of real people that demand to be remembered.

 

Reviewer: Craig Taylor

Publisher: Knopf Canada

DETAILS

Price: $34.95

Page Count: 256 pp

Format: Cloth

ISBN: 0-676-97481-3

Issue Date: 2003-3

Categories: Fiction: Novels

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