In June 1994, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was 15 years old when she was evacuated, alongside her mother, from Butare, her hometown. A survivor of the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda, she now lives in Bordeaux where, she writes, “there is not a day that passes without this spring of ashes and blood bursting into our minds or disrupting our sleep. lint.”
Since 2015, she has published collections of short stories, poetry, two novels and a story, driven by the desire to “speak, write, tell so as not to be buried by the silence of some, the negationist logorrhea of others or, quite simply, the indifference of the world.” For almost thirty years this woman has been part of a “daily attempt to overthrow misfortune”. Overturn misfortunethis is precisely the title of a collection of poetry that she is publishing these days, and for which THE Duty met her by videoconference.
Head on
Time is relative and, she writes, “three months are so short, but now for us it is a lifetime.” Nevertheless, the furrows of memory benefit from the passage of time and, she admits, “there is a reflection to be made on what time does to memory, to our way of seeing lived experiences”.
Time, perhaps that’s precisely what it took for him to pick up his pen. After working within international NGOs — she notably lived in Canada in 2005-2006, where she did population health research at the University of Ottawa — Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse turned to writing in his mid-thirties.
Others before her had spoken out, but a story was missing, which became essential for her to write: “I often quote Toni Morrison, who proposes the idea that if there is a book that you would like to read and that you can’t find it, write it down. This is where my impulse to write comes from, which came to add to what had already been done, and which is very good indeed, but which perhaps focused more on the events themselves , when I wanted to approach the daily, intimate experience of this abysmal experience of surviving a genocide. »
A story of your own
The writer remains very humble about the scope of her work: “Literature cannot do much in the face of a child who dies or a life that is shattered. But it was Lydie Salvayre who, I believe, suggested that we all have a need to take flight, to which literature sometimes responds. Putting words to grief somehow makes us feel lighter. » Her thoughts travel and she gives us this clarification: “That things are well named does not prevent misfortune, but when things are badly named, it adds to misfortune. »
He said and wrote a lot of things about the genocide, and while she recognizes the accuracy and courage of certain texts, others raised eyebrows: “We weren’t always listening survivors, and what is important to ask is when the words of those most affected are really heard. »
The reappropriation of the story of these events is at the heart of his collection. Thus she writes that “Our hearts within us will burn / Until our story / Is told by us”. This call for a sovereign voice rubs shoulders with the reproach of narrative dispossession: “Very often, it is others who tell the world about this genocide, giving us the impression of having become extras in our own story. » Some verses also make life difficult for the hypocrisy of those who listen “The hand on the heart, the eye on the watch. »
Calm and passionate at the same time, she does not hesitate to trace the story of this genocide back to its source, where the West, with the arrival of Belgian colonization, came to impose another version of history: “A construction like that tells us that we were told by others, and that we believed what was said about us. We believed in it so much that a century after the arrival of the first white people, there was a genocide. »
Because the common thread of the horror is a kidnapping of the collective story of the Rwandan people, sovereignty undoubtedly passes, according to her, through this reappropriation: “It is all the more important as we come from a a story which was that of a disappropriation of who we are, and which, today, it is a question of living fully. And that is very political and at the same time very literary. »
The frontier of life
The poet writes: “Between those who have left / And those who remain / This long dislocation / From end to end. » Hundreds of thousands of people, it is estimated, left the country to escape the violence of the genocide. However, she assures us, a very strong link persists between Rwandans scattered across the world, through language, through visits, but also because “belonging to a collective also means belonging to a memory “.
However, she qualifies: “Those who left and those who stayed, we can understand it in two different ways. There are those who left because they were killed, and those who survived. And it is also this framework that we try to keep, to ensure that their memory lives within us. And every time a survivor writes, it’s a sort of paper cenotaph that we make for our own. »
The writer’s verses also embrace the emancipation of feminist speech, claiming a tradition where “women have always had a say”. Rwanda, she emphasizes, is the country with the most women in Parliament. She also calls herself the heir of Nyirarumaga, the queen mother who created, several centuries ago, the first groups of court bards, and the first poet of a country with a strong oral tradition: “Obviously, not everything is not perfect. It remains a patriarchal society, but I find it important to emphasize that, contrary to what we sometimes imagine in a globalizing and caricatured vision of Africa, there is also what Rwanda has. »
Thirty years have already passed, but there is a long road ahead. While the curtain of the collection falls on a half-hearted hope, there is no shortage of battles to come: “Hope is something that must be made possible every day. By supporting survivors, by understanding their need for immense consolation, by fighting against revisionism, by passing on the testimonies of this history to new generations, by educating journalists so that our history is not simplified , and finally by always being alert, so that the genocide serves to cultivate critical thinking and allows us to recognize, around us, here and now, hate speech. »
Inspiring, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse intends to overthrow misfortune and re-enchant language: “Life changes if we don’t play it often / Go out on the boulevards laugh drink kiss / Lips wear out if they don’t kiss / / Live, in the present. »