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Overview
In 1994, the akazu, Rwandan's political elite, planned the genocidal mass slaughter of 500,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi and Hutu who lived in the country. Given the failure of the international community to acknowledge the genocide, in 1998, ten African authors visited Rwanda in a writing initiative that was an attempt to make partial amends. In this multidimensional novel, Abdourahman A. Waberi claims, "Language remains inadequate in accounting for the world and all its turpitudes, words can never be more than unstable crutches, staggering along . . . And yet, if we want to hold on to a glimmer of hope in the world, the only miraculous weapons we have at our disposal are these same clumsy supports." Shaped by the author's own experiences in Rwanda and by the stories shared by survivors, Harvest of Skulls stands twenty years after the genocide as an indisputable resource for discussions on testimony and witnessing, the complex relationship between victims and perpetrators, the power of the moral imagination, and how survivors can rebuild a society haunted by the ghost of its history.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253024411 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 02/20/2017 |
| Series: | Global African Voices Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 78 |
| File size: | 442 KB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Abdourahman A. Waberi is a novelist, essayist, poet, and short-story writer. Born in Djibouti, he is Professor of French and Francophone literature at George Washington University. The author of Transit, In the United States of Africa, Passage of Tears, and La Divine Chanson, he has been awarded the Stefan-Georg-Preis, the Grand Prix Littéraire d'Afrique noire, and the Prix biennal "Mandat pour la liberté." He was named one of the "50 Writers of the Future" by the French literary magazine Lire.
Dominic Thomas is Madeleine L. Letessier Professor of French and Francophone Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Read an Excerpt
Harvest of Skulls
By Abdourahman A. Waberi, Dominic Thomas
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2000 Abdourahman A. WaberiAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02441-1
CHAPTER 1
TERMINUS
Until very recently, when they were replaced by various synthetic materials, violin strings were traditionally made from animal tendons, called gut strings, usually from a cow or a horse. The harmonious and the sublime, it would therefore seem, can be extracted from pain and suffering. Does the same hold true for the Achilles tendons of Tutsis, so hideously severed from living beings shortly before they were massacred? Might they be susceptible to producing tropical symphonies as a tribute to close relatives or folks from here and elsewhere, to the various family clans living up in the hills, to the loamy soil coating the fertile terraced hillsides, to the rain, the lush vegetation, and the streak of lightning splitting the skies? Are there two kinds of people, just like there are two kinds of tendons, those who are fundamentally good and those who are inherently bad? Those who console humanity, like the conductor and violinist Yehudi Menuhin, and others who are mere flesh eaters?
The script is pretty much the same everywhere. The local civilian population gathers in an administrative building, usually in a school or a church, in response to an official announcement made by the mayor of the municipality or on the national radio. Then, a triage process is carried out, separating longtime neighbors, parishioners, childhood friends, inhabitants of the same compound. Hutus are asked to vacate the premises immediately. Grenades are tossed haphazardly into the assembly. Machine guns open fire. The Rwandan house is given a thorough cleaning. And then, finally, the hell of the Interrahamwe (those that attack together) militia and their machetes. Humans writhing, contorting, emptying of their substance, twisting like an earthworm chopped in half.
Kinyarwanda is a language that now has several unique terms, such as itsembatsemba (extermination) and itsembabwoko (genocide). These previously unknown or unprecedented terms will henceforth have a place in the language for eternity.
Independence Day was celebrated on July 1, 1962, on what was apparently a rainy Sunday. Already there was talk of the threat represented by exiled Tutsis and of their blind allegiance to the monarchy, plans for a secular peace were being stonewalled, and the sowing of the seeds of future discord was under way. Already people fantasized about genocide — the word as much as the deed. The small territory was on the verge of suffocation. A new slogan became fashionable: "Work will set you free." In the air and in people's minds, a languid and casual sense of anticipation, of pending violence, was tangible. People covertly hoped for incandescence and conflagration. Of course, the pogroms would soon follow.
The Hunting Season Is Open
Children born into the wrong families are rounded up and locked away in dark cells, forced to share a space with vermin, rat poison, and pesticide. They gradually succumb to pleurisy, starvation, and a slew of other unspeakable hazards. Quietly, laboratory tests are carried out. Quite freely, in the light of day, the violence begins, uninterrupted from that point on. No inquiring eyes — not a single reporter or observer — will come from the outside. No wonder: it is the beginning of a new era and people are full of euphoria at the end of the Cold War, Asia is thriving, Africa has the wind in its sails, the social revolution is in full swing in the postage-stamp-size country, whereas right next door, the imposing, conquering Mobutu belches from wealth and boredom, busy dictating the list of his desires to the cowardly deadbeats of this world.
The exiled, vivaciously amassed on the perimeter of the motherland, breathing in her unique fragrance, live in subhuman conditions — hopeless young people enlist for distant campaigns, as far afield as Mozambique. They hold on to the grittiness of their mother tongue. After all, Lilliput in exile must learn to bide its time or else come up against its older brothers with the help of Belgians, the French, the Americans, the Catholics, the peasants, the Protestants, and the apostles of development. The helpful and the enjoyable work hand in hand, as do the subjective and the passionate.
It is not the head of a civilization that begins to rot first. It is the heart.
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE Discourse on Colonialism
Rue de la Serpette, Nyamirambo
A small flat bottle of uganda waragi, a type of whiskey made in Uganda, sticks out of the back pocket of his olive-green battle dress, a walkie-talkie hangs from his waist, and the young RPF officer, much like all his comrades hanging around, seems as calm as Buddha. The walkie-talkie crackles and after some static sound orders can be heard. As for the soldier, he can see clearly and into the distance at night; this is a question of habit, but given the escalating mayhem and lunacy also a matter of life and death for a rebel watchman like him. The missionaries of powerlessness, humanitarian organizations, and the NGOs often arrived long after the harvest, like flies swarming a butcher's block.
Those with the privilege of having skulls have been around for a long time. The world is divided into two separate camps, and not only because of having a skull above the shoulders. Skull bearers are equally archaic in terms of what they have to say and the way they move, and this has been the case ever since the forgotten ancestor Homo erectus first stood upright not far from here, in the Great Rift Valley, to be precise. Now extinct, they no longer realize just how old-fashioned they have become. Pouring gallons of ink into the local newspapers won't change a thing for them. Henceforth, we have entered a period of infamy, gone beyond the fable; the presidential jet has engulfed the world. Only survivors are left to complain. Us ... the world of fluids ... obfuscated as with an abruption of the placenta, an impossible parturition. ... We allow people to say, lead them to believe, that it was only a partial eclipse:
Killed ... I killed him with my own hands ... Yes: a fecund and copious death ... it was night. We crawled through the sugarcane. The cutlasses were chortling at the stars, but we didn't care about the stars. The cane slashed our faces with streams of green blades we crawled cutlass in fist ...
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE And the Dogs Were Silent
Harvest of Skulls, Continued
Giggling and trumpeting prisoners a stone's throw from the scene of their crimes. To set forth and bring to the light of day their activities is an impossible task. Criminals all think they are completely innocent. When questioned, the response comes in a weary voice and impersonal manner: "We weren't there when the crime occurred!" Calamities are best when not shared. We are just poor peasants. We didn't see it coming. Hear anything. The folks in town might know something, those who headed out in big cars filled with machetes and plastic gas cans. We're just waiting for the rain to come, for a sign from heaven to start the seeding. We had a good life here before, the Tutsis lived up in the hills just like everyone else, we worked well together. We didn't see it coming. We couldn't do anything. We were worried they would kill us too. You can't revive the dead. They seemed to be saying that either no one was to blame or that everyone was at fault. Our lips are sealed, just like they were yesterday. Even when censorship is not handed down, society finds a way to get organized and impose its own prohibitions.
World, beware, there is a beautiful country that they have spoiled with dissolute unreasonable larvae a world shattered flowers dirtied with old posters a house of broken tiles of leaves torn apart without a tempest.
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE And the Dogs Were Silent
Small country of escarpments, hills, valleys, and lakes, today transformed into a land of sorrow and ossuaries. It remained relatively calm over time, isolated in its mountainous fortress; things gathered momentum around 1959 or so. Misfortune skips and dances on the arm of History. The hills, enveloped in thick darkness, are invaded by bovine militias pushing their way through the entangled stalks, proliferation of branches and the climbing vines. Preparations for a harvest of skulls are under way. A theater that rots away the eyes and the mind, when one has not already completely lost it, that is. People are rallying behind the rumors, plunging us into the fermented sludge. He who remains silent consents. A cathedral of blood and ash emerges — a cathedral worthy of the thousand existing parishes in the small country or those of our friends in the Vatican. A magnetic cathedral that attracts fugitives and traitors, like the Sainte-Famille Church left in the capable hands of Father Wenceslas Munyeshyaka. In the meantime, no ripples, dead calm, the UNcouldn't give a damn; faced with warmongers, Kofi Annan merely shrugs. Oh well! We weren't waiting for the Messiah or a miracle maker! There's nothing to see here, move along! And yet ...
Shipments of gleaming machetes, purchased cheaply in China, are arriving every day at Kanombe airport. We start unloading them, promising the cockroaches unprecedented levels of violence. All the while chugging bottles of Mützig beer and Cuban rum. Shirtless, mopping the sweat from our faces and listening to Simon Bikindi's patriotic songs aimed exclusively at the cultivators' receptive hearts, before reloading the shipments onto trucks ready to crisscross the seven hills of the capital for distribution in the various neighborhoods. Placed under the banner of chiefs with brows furrowed from permanent anger, we gnawed away at our nails waiting to be unleashed on those two-headed serpents, those lepers to be banished forever. All men and women bearing frail necks, including unborn children, are tracked without respite. They don't stand a chance. Let's be honest, not beat about the bush: they're screwed, done for. In the land of the Bible, they're made, like sheep, worse than rejects. Even crushed or dismembered, we can't be sure they're dead, so we go back over the bodies and finish them off with anything we can lay our hands on, a machete, a scythe, a club, a bludgeon, a Kalash, a sickle, an axe, a stone, a big stick, a tree trunk, an iron bar, a bayonet, a shank, a stake, a bullet, a rifle stock, burning tires, a brick. We chanted on the way home. They won't have the luxury of heading back to Ethiopia along the Nyabarongo River, we won't give them time for that. The scoundrels will be completely exterminated. Never again will we hear stories about yesterday, of bygone days, or of tomorrow. Never again will we have to listen to someone spinning a yarn that opens with the naïve or arrogant words "Once upon a time." Never again will someone utter the instructions "Touch me here, now my head, my chest, my stomach. Where's my head? My body?" Why is there so much emptiness around me? The only eye contact that remains will be with a deep sky, second to none. The maps of taste, pain, and remorse have become indistinguishable. Try as we may to escape the killings, they continue to haunt us. We made a covenant with the cleansing fires from the depths. It's dark and cold all around us. The city was completely surrounded, the cockroaches were armed, and we were afraid of their gunfire. A plot had been hatched against our people, the powder keg was ready, all that was left was to ignite the match. We had to fight back, outrun the lightning, set up a rear base for the women, the children, and the disabled. This was our Inquisition Tribunal! The name of the last blockade escapes me now, the number of infiltrators. I only killed three puppies, a trifle, that's all. It's coming back to me, now I remember, it was down at the Christus Centre, in Remera. You could hear the enthusiastic patriotic voices of Kantano Habimana and Valérie Bemeriki on the radio. O Bene Sebahinzi, the sons of the father of the cultivators, come to my rescue. No regrets, no tears. Not in our house. It's as easy as can be. The floodgates had opened, a gust of madness sent by the Devil to set us on that abject path. I don't feel well, I'm ashamed to mention it even, perhaps you can understand. I have some kind of an intestinal problem and am spewing thick white pus. I am the fury of the unchained soil. I'm going to end up like my brother Jean-Bosco, or like the other one, Paterne, who's now blind.
of the dead circulating in the veins of the earth who at times come and break their heads against the walls and the screams of revolt never heard which turn in tune with musical tones
AIMÉ CÉSAIRE Solar Throat Slashed
Mark is our seasoned guide for the genocide site, but in reality he's not that old himself. He lets us know how the skies are inclement, how there has been a shortage of rain in recent years. Now there is a drought and the runoff water from the bursts of rainfall destroys everything in its path. People are very unhappy about this. Dead bodies keep turning up in the papyrus reeds, the wells, after a bush fire, when the land is tilled ahead of seeding or after a torrent of water has come cascading down a steep hillside. Not a day goes by without someone finding a wrapped mummy, abandoned without burial by nameless killers. They sauntered in one day in the way animals do and just killed everyone; only my youngest, the girl over there who is now old enough to draw water, escaped, thanks to Divine Providence ...
And the bloodshed continues in Kanyarwanda.
JOSEPH NSENGIMANA Tous pour la nation
CHAPTER 2THE CAVALCADE
Just imagine what our green and unspoiled hills looked like in the early days of creation, long before the filthy cattle arrived, long before the meager lyrical song of the crossbow, the long-legged women with their high headdresses descended in small groups from the barren and incandescent Abyssinian plateaus. Even then they carried with them the diseases of the dry lands. Imagine, brothers of the hoe, the look of terror and bewilderment in the eyes of these brave farmers when the cavalcade of hordes appeared, the warriors leading the way, women and clusters of children following the herd. A torrential stream, an impetuous current, a genuine deluge as in the story of Noah's Ark. Without place, gods, or fire, the nomads ransacked, killed, scorched the earth and the people on their way through. The nomads — perhaps your memory needs refreshing, my children — arrived on foot, forced to abandon their horses earlier up north because of the thickness of our protective forest. They brought enslaved captives along with them to use as servants, interpreters, or sorcerers. They seduced us with their woven white cotton fabric from Ethiopia. We were treated worse than cow dung. Our fathers' fathers were the ones who learned how to show deference and loyalty to the masters of the earth and the seas. They learned how to die with them and for them in silence. At sundown, they never forgot to stoke the fire with fresh peat. Eyeless, they hovered in the way children do around their masters and the herd. They knew their place exactly; one cannot be in two places at once. Harmony and peace, that's how things used to be. God was happy on this earth, but we weren't. For centuries, that's the way things were. That's how the world was transmitted to us orally, but henceforth, with the help of the Most High and all our sons and daughters, a few adjustments will need to be made, by any means necessary. A car starts to sputter when the motor is ailing, and the mechanic has to get his hands dirty in the oil and grease. Nothing has changed in this regard since biblical times. Didn't the Romans teach others how to use torture as a political weapon in order to safeguard the general interest? I'm sure you won't disagree that the secular wisdom of our fathers has its limits, and that our future depends on us responding to the new challenges that come with modern existence. Marriage outside of one's ethnic group must be prohibited. This makes perfect sense and is in accordance with the Scriptures and in keeping with the guidelines promulgated by our social revolution. Likewise, civil servants, even outside of committed relationships or marriage, may not be distracted by their devilish women, whose forefathers came across the Red Sea and turned our agricultural paradise into this valley of tears. I can see from your reaction that you think I'm exaggerating — go ahead and seek advice from our friends the White Fathers, dive back into your Bible, but it might be more straightforward to take a closer look at the evidence. If you knew how to take the country's pulse you wouldn't hesitate to agree with me now, would you? Here you are, take this as an example. We are blamed for just about everything. The mutilated nose of Queen Hatshepsut's Sphinx, that's us. The drought in East Africa, us again. Sleep sickness, still us. Everyone spins the rough wool of oblivion when it comes to us, becoming more blind even than he who cannot see. Be strong, assertive, be good, and show no mercy. Our own situation is so special that we have no need for stimulants as they do elsewhere in Africa; our only drug is hatred. May God preserve you from the doubt and hesitation so dear to skeptics and to those other two-headed beings. Sons of the earth, let's stand together, children of humus and clay, and shoulder to shoulder valiantly defend the fatherland. No one will come and take it away from us once our mission is finally accomplished. It's not our fault if those bloodsuckers and grave robbers go and kill their children for the sole reason of blaming us after the fact. For if the deities of Mother Earth left our plains and our valleys and sought refuge on the peaks of volcanoes, that's because of a well-founded fear of the noise and the dust of their profane hoofs, and because they found peace in the haze above the craters. No one ever says that: I'm the only one in this country to occasionally whisper it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Harvest of Skulls by Abdourahman A. Waberi, Dominic Thomas. Copyright © 2000 Abdourahman A. Waberi. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Preface Post-Genocide Rwanda
Acknowledgments
FICTIONS
Terminus
Cavalcade
And the dogs feasted
STORIES
No, Kigali is not sad
Return to Kigali
Bujumbura Beach
Afterword
Note on translations
What People are Saying About This
"Waberi is equally at ease recounting the tragic fate and tumultuous nature of current events in Africa as he is evoking the pulsating beauty of its landscape and the luminous memory."
Abdourahman Waberi is a land surveyor who assembles his stories from glittering kaleidoscopic beads: modern in form, schooled on the writing of authors such as Nurrudin Farah, Sole Woyinka or Derek Walcott, poetic and ironic in tone – and mercilessly direct when it comes to pointing out the African traumas of colonisation, the struggle for independence, civil war, dictatorship and catastrophic famine . . . Harvest of Skulls is a book opposing forgetfulness.
Waberi is equally at ease recounting the tragic fate and tumultuous nature of current events in Africa as he is evoking the pulsating beauty of its landscape and the luminous memory.
An elegant writer-novelist.
One of the more inventive of a new wave of African writers, Waberi is also unique in the range of his influences.
One of the main agendas of Abdourahman Waberi's work is the subversion of stereotyped and hegemonic perceptions of the African continent. He employs sarcasm, irony and biting satire in his efforts to reclaim history, blur polarities and humanize the conceptual landscape.
Abdourahman Waberi is a land surveyor who assembles his stories from glittering kaleidoscopic beads: modern in form, schooled on the writing of authors such as Nurrudin Farah, Sole Woyinka or Derek Walcott, poetic and ironic in tone – and mercilessly direct when it comes to pointing out the African traumas of colonisation, the struggle for independence, civil war, dictatorship and catastrophic famine . . . Harvest of Skulls is a book opposing forgetfulness.
One of the main agendas of Abdourahman Waberi's work is the subversion of stereotyped and hegemonic perceptions of the African continent. He employs sarcasm, irony and biting satire in his efforts to reclaim history, blur polarities and humanize the conceptual landscape.
Waberi is equally at ease recounting the tragic fate and tumultuous nature of current events in Africa as he is evoking the pulsating beauty of its landscape and the luminous memory.