L’Aîné des orphelins by Tierno Monénembo (review)

This critical study of Tierno Monénembo’s Rwandan novel provides a number of insightful comments and, more generally, addresses the inherent difficulties associated with the fictionalization of genocides; it is also clearly structured and written. In the first chapter Amina Bekkat offers a useful introduction to Monénembo’s trajectory as a novelist since the 1970s, as well as a precis of the historical circumstances that eventually led to the 1994 Rwandan genocide. She then examines the decisive role played by Nocky Djedanoum in the organization of the 1998 commemorative Fest’Africa project ‘Rwanda: écrire par devoir de mémoire’, the well-known (and now widely documented) cultural event that benefited from the participation of such prominent African writers as Véronique Tadjo, Boubacar Boris Diop, and Abdourahman Waberi. Chapter 2 concerns itself more specifically with L’Aîné des orphelins and its narrator, Faustin. Bekkat convincingly demonstrates that the structure and development of the narrative is heavily dependent on the narrator’s traumatic memory, that is, his inability to remember properly and his tendency to seek ‘refuge dans des conduites de contrôle et d’évitement’ (p. 36). This chapter also ponders the dilemma novelists face when writing about unspeakable horror, and the author mentions the contributions of Maurice Blanchot and Michael Rinn to the debate on the fundamental disjunction between writing, language, and suffering. This discussion is pursued later in the book where Bekkat contrasts the verbose excesses of Zola’s La Débacle (1892) with the sobriety of Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and Mohammed Dib’s Qui se souvient de la mer? (1962). Chapter 3, which is overly descriptive in places and would have benefited from further editing, explores characterization. The sections devoted to Faustin, however, make some valid points regarding his status as an allegory of post-genocide Rwanda (he is the victim who becomes an assassin), and his gift for narrative deception and propensity to rewrite the history of the genocide to placate Western commentators. The chapter also touches on autobiography: the ‘style faussement naïf ’ (p. 76) adopted by Faustin, the child-narrator, is inscribed into a French and francophone tradition that includes Jules Vallès’s L’Enfant (1879), Émile Ajar’s La Vie devant soi (1975), and Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas obligé (2000). At this point, Bekkat establishes a particularly relevant connection with other little-studied books by Monénembo — Un rêve utile (1991) and Cinéma (1997) — and the presence in these novels of young autobiographical—in fact, ‘autodiégétique[s]’ (p. 78)—voices. In sum, this is a good introduction, in which Amina Bekkat succeeds in performing a difficult balancing act: while the book is a literary guide with a clear didactic brief (indeed, Champion’s new ‘Entre les lignes’ series is close to the Hatier ‘Profil d’une œuvre’ books), it also provides plenty of food for thought.