Blood Papa: Rwanda's New Generation by Jean Hatzfeld (review)

Jean Hatzfeld, in addition to writing for the French newspaper Libération for many years, has authored several previous books, including Life Laid Bare and Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak. His The Antelopes' Strategy: Machete Season (2006) was widely acclaimed within Rwanda studies for its timeliness in providing a forum for several génocidaires to tell their own stories and versions of life during the 1994 genocide and the issues they faced for about ten years afterward. The work provided fascinating insight into the hearts and minds of the guilty. In much the same vein, Hatzfeld in Blood Papa: Rwanda's New Generation returns to Nyamata District in central Rwanda to let his subjects tell their own stories.

Blood Papa, coming approximately twenty years after Machete Season, is equally timely for allowing a new generation of Rwandans—who came of age after the genocide—to recount the struggles and challenges they have faced growing up in a supposedly new nation trying to heal from the traumas of the past. This time, Hatzfeld provides moving accounts, told in the first person, of the anguish and social difficulties faced by Tutsi children left victimized by the genocide and those who were left with Hutu fathers who had taken part in the killings. The names of those he interviewed are too numerous to recount, but they include the sons and daughters of Tutsis who survived, the children of Hutu prisoners, and several Hutu and Tutsi parents who offer their perspectives on their children's postgenocide lives. Taken together, the stories chronicled and edited by Hatzfeld offer an entirely new perspective on a Rwanda still coping with the past and striving for reconciliation.

Numerous academic works and survivors' testimonials on Rwanda have come forth in the years since the genocide. Many academic analyses have either praise or criticism for the efforts of the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) to promote a new and reconciled society. The gacaca (traditional community justice) courts, organized by the RPF to reintegrate the guilty back into society, have been frequently lauded as a success. Many of the survivors' testimonials have been penned by Rwandans, nearly all Tutsis, who have recovered and moved on to successful lives and who now offer hope for their country's future. All these works however, miss the everyday trials and struggles of ordinary young Rwandans who face daily hardships and lingering questions about their futures as victims—of either the killers or guilty parents. Hatzfeld helps rectify this imbalance in the literature.

Readers learn, for example, of the anguish of children like Nadine Umutesi, the daughter of a Tutsi mother who was raped by an interahamwe and then taken to Congo. As a child, she knew her father as Damascène, her mother's husband, who raised her as his own. It was not until primary school that she learned from her mother the true circumstances of her birth, after being mocked and ridiculed by her teachers and classmates (45). She said, "Ever since I found out, I feel caught in a kind of uneasiness; I feel trapped by a sense of something like disgust. But I accepted the news as it was, because Papa continued to provide me with a papa's love" (46). Likewise, readers cannot help but be moved by the plight of the children of Hutus who took part, like Fabrice Tuyishimire, whose father remains in prison. Hatzfeld's book shows that official reconciliation programs offer little solace to children like Fabrice, who observed, "Suspicion flows freely among children. Another boy may seem happy by your side[;] then suddenly you wonder if he isn't putting on a show. With a friend who has suffered from the killings, the friendship is false. You endlessly examine people's faces. Deep down, you distrust everyone" (88). Stories like Nadine's and Fabrice's, representative of those of thousands of others, have been missed in accounts of Rwanda...