The Past Ahead: A Novel

INTRODUCTION

I N T R O D U C T I O N While working on the translation of Gilbert Gatore’s novel, I kept asking myself two questions. First, why had he written this particular novel? It is a story in which Niko, one of the two protagonists , is developed in such a way that the reader comes to have great empathy for him, feeling increasing compassion for Niko and even anger with those around him, since all but one of the villagers cast him aside. Then, when we learn much later in the novel that Niko is also the perpetrator of horrendous crimes, I wondered how, despite the horror of his character’s actions, the author had made it possible for me to continue feeling some sort of compassion for him. The answer came just recently when in an interview on Art Beat1 the author and journalist Roger Rosenblatt was asked why writers write. He gave four reasons: “to make suffering endurable, evil intelligible , justice desirable, and love possible.” Whether Gilbert Gatore would agree with this response I cannot and do not know, but for me, his reader, he has succeeded on all four fronts. Phébus, his French publisher, provides us with the following biographical information: “Gilbert Gatore was born in Rwanda in 1981. On the eve of the civil war, his father gave him The Diary of Anne Frank to read. Profoundly moved, the young boy decided, like the heroine, to keep a diary throughout the conflict. When he fled the country with his family in 1997, Zairian customs officers took everything they had, including the precious notebooks. Ever since, he has tried to recover the strength and truth of those emotions in his writing.” By keeping a diary, suffering was made en- xii INTRODUCTION durable both for Anne Frank and, generations later, for Gilbert Gatore . (On a personal level, for a woman whose origin is Dutch and who herself has rather vivid childhood memories of World War II, it is particularly moving to learn that Gatore’s earliest inspiration came from Anne Frank.) The novel’s two characters, Isaro and Niko, are mirror images of one another, even though at first they appear to be each other’s most extreme opposites: a beautiful, talented, smart young woman, raised with all the comforts of a middle class family, and an ugly, handicapped, ostracized young man, victim and executioner, selfseeker and self-concealer. Everything each of them embodies is wholly lacking in the other. However, as the story progresses it becomes clear that they are two sides of what is essentially the same person, especially as we realize that it is also a novel within a novel, since Niko is the protagonist in the tale that Isaro is in the process of writing. Gatore has explained in an on-line interview that “the contrast is . . . inside themselves as well as between the two characters; . . . Isaro is the reverse of Niko” (le contraste . . . est à l’intérieur d’eux-mêmes et entre les deux personnages; . . . Isaro est la renversée de Niko).2 Although Niko is “voicing the perpetrator’s perspective,”3 it is very different from the speech of Jean Hatzfeld’s real-life criminals . The latter remain incomprehensible to the listener. Although, as the French historian Gérard Prunier wrote about the genocide in Rwanda, “Understanding why they died is the best and most fitting memorial we can raise for the victims. Letting their deaths go unrecorded , or distorted by propaganda, or misunderstood through simple clichés, would in fact bring the last touch to the killers’ work in completing the victims’ dehumanization.”4 Niko, the fictional perpetrator, allows us to begin to find evil intelligible, no matter with how much hesitation and distaste we do so. By the time we discover what he has done once an adult, we know all about his wretched, motherless, and loveless childhood, we have come to care about him, and we know that he despises himself enough to vanish from society—and by so doing he begins to make evil intelligible for us. It is just one case, but it is an extremely compelling one. INTRODUCTION xiii “Write about what you want to know,” Rosenblatt says, and so Isaro does. But it is too late for her. She seeks to understand evil by writing Niko’s story. In Women Witnessing Terror,5 Anne Cubilie outlines that the...