The ethic of hospitality from strangers arising from a breakdown of more immediate socio-moral networks is captured with a devastatingly visceral edge in Gil Courtemanche’s A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali. In the Rwanda of 1994 of which he writes, no local inhabitant can take it for granted that he or she will not be hacked to death at any moment by a relative or a friend or a neighbour. In Courtemanche’s complex portrayal of Rwandan multi-ethnicity, the rhetoric of symbolically and semantically asserted Otherness — he’s dark, squat and thick-lipped and so he’s a Hutu; she’s tall, slim and light-skinned, so she’s a Tutsi — is by no means clearly demarcated either by spatial arrangements or by physiognomy. Only some stereotypes circulate with a myopic stubbornness that is lethal. Thus Tutsis are cockroaches from which Rwanda needs to be cleansed. The only redeeming relationships seem to be between a few foreign aid workers/journalists and their circle of friends from among the native population of Kigali. The horrors of the genocide as a shared sense of the precariousness of life at the end of the millennium are narrated through conversations among them — virtual strangers bonded in both extreme fear and fragile hope.
One of the most powerful aspects of the novel is the highlighting of a comparative global perspective from which the Rwandan killings can be understood. Rhetorically this works not so much through providing a substantive political context to the genocide, as through graphic comparative details of the very aesthetics of warfare and genocide. The Rwandan massacres, Lando, a Tutsi friend tells the French-Canadian narrator Valcourt, are not fit for hi-tech television, which is more comfortable with the ‘clean’ wars of Americans and their precision bombing. This is war that the rest of the world will find hard to stomach on television because of its gruesome excesses:
We’re going to rape, cut throats, chop, butcher. We’re going to cut open women’s bellies before the eyes of their husbands, then mutilate the husbands before the wives die of loss of blood, to make sure they see each other die. And while they’re dying, coming to their last breath, we’ll rape their daughters, not just once but ten times, twenty times. And the virgins will be raped by soldiers with AIDS … With machetes, knives and clubs we’ll do better than the Americans with their smart bombs. (p.60)
Elsewhere, Methode, another Tutsi friend of the narrator, dying of AIDS with only a week or two to live, has been reading voraciously on the Nazi Holocaust and pondering the fate of Jews and Tutsis. His contemplation on the differences in culture and style of each of the genocides is a grim reminder of the extent to which human civilisation has mastered the art of killing in all its various genres:
The world had known the scientific Holocaust, cold, technological, a terrifying masterpiece of efficiency and organization. A monstrosity of Western civilization … Here it would be the barbarian Holocaust, the cataclysm of the poor, the triumph of machete and club. Already in the province of Bugesera, corpses were afloat on Lake Mugesera, drifting towards the Kagera, the legendary source of the Nile. This was the way to send the Tutsis back to where they came from, to Egypt — as loudly declared by Monsieur Leon, who owned a fine house in Quebec and here was behaving like a little Hitler. (p.39)
The novel’s title is an ironic uptake on the lives of privileged diplomats, journalists and UN workers based in the Rwandan capital, who insulate themselves from the spiral of interethnic killing outside to sit by the pool in the only luxury hotel in the city, the Mille Collines, also the setting of the film Hotel Rwanda. The satire directed at the insulated white community in Rwanda is scathing:
This is how the Whites at the hotel, instant minor gods, hear and figure Africa. Close enough to talk about it, even to write about it. But at the same time so isolated with their portable computers in their antiseptic rooms, and in their air-conditioned Toyotas, so surrounded by the little Blacks trying to be like Whites that they think black is the smell of the perfumes and cheap ointments sold in the Nairobi duty-free shop. (p.42)
The novel is self-consciously marked as docu-fiction by the author, a French Canadian journalist, who witnessed and reported on the genocide. Courtemanche was in Rwanda at the time to make a documentary on the HIV epidemic in Kigali which had affected almost one-third of that city’s population. Tied to this harbinger of death were the rumblings of an ominous ethnic feud that was just waiting to manifest its volcanic fury. Courtemanche’s razor-sharp yet deeply empathetic pen creatively transfigures this near-apocalyptic tableau of horror into a searing poetic document of life at the edge of time and sanity.
‘We have come to the end of time, eaten away by two cancers, hatred and AIDS. We are a little like the Earth’s last children’, says Raphael, (p.10) one of Valcourt’s Rwandan friends. The highlight of the novel is the juxtaposition of unsparing details of the genocide — too confronting, might I say, even pornographic at times, in its twin depiction of brutal rapes and the shameful might of machetes as they cut through flesh and bone — with a narrative of love, care and bonding between Valcourt and his hapless Rwandan friends. It is the stuff of great art since time immemorial; the epic battle between eros and thanatos, life and death, creation and destruction.
Kigali’s mystique and menace are entwined in stunning metaphors: the stomach-churning sounds of the genocide outside the hotel precinct are described as ‘a mortuary symphony against a picture postcard background’. (p.144) Valcourt is entranced by the Kigali landscape, ‘the hills sculpted by thousands of gardens, the mists caressing the valley floors’ (p.18). But the menace of machetes at nightfall brings fear to the soul: ‘the market’s cheerful, noisy anarchy had ceased, the way the birds in a forest fall silent when a predator creeps near’. (p.79) The morning after, ‘life wakens as if a whole city were emerging from a coma, astonished to be alive even as it counts its dead’. (p.41) The aftermath of a night of mass killing is figuratively transposed onto the busy world of scavenging birds and animals:
The canine cacophony yielded progressively to the human cacophony. The buzzards took flight in search of the fresh refuse produced by the night. When the buzzards had flown over the city at length and staked out their territory, the jackdaws left the lower branches of the eucalyptus trees around the hotel garden to go and make do, humbly as befits an inferior and obedient race, with places the buzzards had scorned. The croaking of all the city’s ravens was drowned out by horrid clumpings of French boots as a squad of presidential guardsmen jogged around the hotel. (p.98)
Also powerful are depictions of disavowal of responsibility on the part of former colonial powers for the history that led to the ethnic divide and the subsequent genocide. Much easier for them to primordialise these Africans: ‘A red haired Belgian, who had been teaching philosophy since the university’s foundation in 1963, laughed and said, “They like to kill each other at regular intervals. It’s like the menstrual cycle; a lot of blood flows, then everything returns to normal.”’ (p.189)
I wish to explore the poetic power of these depictions of extreme human suffering from the point of view of some recent criticism of the ‘dark lyricism’ — a kind of stylised and highly figurative poetics of extreme violence and human suffering — found in the works of J. M. Coetzee, especially in his novel Elizabeth Costello. Coetzee is, of course, the artist par excellence of minimalism and austerity. Much lauded for the diamond-hard, cutting brilliance of his bare narratives of the brutality of apartheid in South Africa, Coetzee, not surprisingly, takes exception to graphic descriptions of gratuitous human violence in the lyric metaphors such as one finds in A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali. Elizabeth Costello, in the eponymous novel, asserts: ‘To save our humanity, certain things that we may want to see must remain off-stage.’ (p.169). In the same novel Coetzee applauds the minimalist realism of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe for its courage to stick to ‘bare’ facts in the face of enormous desolation:
Robinson Crusoe, cast up on the beach, looks around for his shipmates. But there are none. ‘I never saw them afterwards, or any sign of them’, says he, ‘except three of their hats, one cap, and two shoes that were not fellows.’ Two shoes, not fellows: by not being fellows, the shoes have ceased to be footwear and become proofs of death, torn by the foaming seas of the feet of drowning men and tossed ashore. No large words, no despair, just hats and caps and shoes. (p.4)
What Coetzee asserts in his criticism of dark lyricism is the foremost responsibility of the artist to recognise and acknowledge the absolute material essence of the body in pain and not transmute the materiality of that pain into figurative language. The figurative, in reaching for points of comparison with other phenomena, leaches the suffering body of its singularity and dishonours it. Coetzee’s warning is, of course, salutary in the context of poetic clichés and deliberate artistic attempts to titillate the sadistic among us through excessive depictions of gratuitous and mindless violence. Both trivialise human suffering and to that extent are obscene.
But can one not also say that Coetzee’s uncompromising aesthetic opposition to all figuration of human suffering and bodily violation comes in the way of communicating pain across human difference? The figurative and metaphorical in language is, after all, the site of human claiming and marking of this world, of naming ‘things’ in terms of something else — in the final analysis the very possibility of human communicability. What happens then to the ethical responsibilities of a trauma aesthetic? Should they be articulated only in terms of the impossibility of figuring pain, of an aesthetics of bareness and silence? Won’t such fidelity and respect toward the singularity of the suffering body be ultimately achieved at the expense of its eventual isolation from a global ethic of caring and responsibility invoked earlier in this essay? In reading the following account of the violated body of Valcourt’s wife, Gentille, do we as readers commit yet another violation as voyeurs or are we compelled to witness the unimaginable and assume a responsibility that will forever be haunted by Gentille’s violated, withered corporeality? Or do we do both? Gentille pleads with her husband to forget her:
I’m not the Gentille you loved and that you think you still love … I’m not a woman any more. Don’t you smell the sickness? … I don’t have breasts any more. My skin’s dry and tight like an old drum. I can only see with one eye. I probably have AIDS … my mouth is full of sores that keep me from eating sometimes, and when I eat, my stomach won’t hold anything. I’m not a woman anymore. Do you understand what they’ve done to me? I’m not human anymore. I’m a body that’s decomposing, an ugly thing I don’t want you to see. If I left with you I’d be even sadder than I am now because I see in your eyes as you look away that what you really love is your memory of me … Go now and leave the country. I’m dead. (p.247)
Her husband respects her wishes, but does not leave the country. Instead, he resists the reinstated Tutsi government’s thirst for revenge and provides legal defence to innocent Hutus accused of genocide. He and a Swedish Red Cross worker adopt a Hutu girl whose parents have been accused of participating in the genocide. They name her Gentille, thus signalling both a connection and a rupture with genocidal Rwanda — both an assumption of global responsibility for the genocide and an invocation of a humanist ethics that seek to break the cycle of revenge and retribution.
The tableau that endures in A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is that of the poignancy of uncanny, unpredictable affiliations between strangers in the midst of horrific human suffering induced by a colonially engineered absurd filiative ethnos and ethos.[24] The novel’s poetic rendering of extreme human truths amidst a landscape of terror and beauty enhances rather than detracts from the moral power of such shared suffering, a mode of sharing that Coetzee would reject. Valcourt’s prospective father-in-law, Jean Damascene, captures both the absurdity and poignancy of this tableau in his embrace of Valcourt, the French-Canadian in love with his Hutu-Tutsi daughter, Gentille, as his true son:
My son, today we have closed the circle of history and absurdity. The head of the interahamwes, who have sworn to cut the throats of all Tutsis and send them all the way to Egypt by the Kagera river, is a Tutsi. He’s an uncle of Gentille’s. The Head of the Tutsi rebel army is a Hutu and he’s also an uncle of Gentille’s … Both want to kill Gentille who doesn’t belong to either side. Gentille is like the fruit of the red earth of this hill, a mysterious mix of all the seeds and all the toil of this country. Son you’re going to marry a country they want to kill, one that could be simply Rwandan if it had the chance, the country of a thousand hills, which all of us, nameless and heedless of origin, have built like patient, obstinate fools … if you are crazy enough to embrace this hill, its consuming madness and its most beautiful daughter, I shall love you more than my own sons. (pp.192–3)
In the apotheosis of Gentille as an aspired Rwanda, all-embracing in its numerous ethnic mixings and strange foreign affiliations, there is an ethic of interconnectivity that transcends the current post-genocidal political rhetoric of Rwandan nationalism, one invested in an unlearning of ethnicity and an impossible embrace of the abstract human. Humanism, the novel suggests, is not a commitment to abstract entities denuded of traces of belonging. It is, rather, the acknowledgement of the enmeshment of man in his particular affiliations and recognition of both the possibilities and dangers of such affiliations. It is this recognition of mutual vulnerability that is also the possibility of an ethic of caring and hospitality. Judith Butler gives it a name. She calls it our ‘new humanism’ of ‘common corporeal vulnerability.’[25] Contiguous with this notion of ‘corporeality’ is Hardt and Negri’s recent theorising on the ‘common’ as the ‘flesh of the multitude’ that links and expands social being, producing and performing it in ‘excess of every traditional political-economic measure of value’.[26] This new social corporeality conceived in terms of a ‘flesh-like’ continuum rather than as racially and sexually marked difference is resistant to a logic of identity and segregation. It is the complete antithesis of the abstracted ‘mass man’ of totalitarianism so powerfully theorised by Hannah Arendt. It is, thus, a powerful and enabling conception for an ethics of non-violent and transcultural relationality in an age of terror.