Review: Running the rift

Naomi Benaron’s first novel, Running the Rift, is a courageous and spectacular  leap into the complex landscape of Rwanda, a tiny landlocked country in the heart of the African continent that is best know for the 1994 genocide that resulted in over 800,000 deaths. It is the story of Jean Patrick Nkuba, a Tutsi boy who runs fast enough to qualify for a place on Rwanda’s Olympic team. His talent and focused determination take him from a village near the lakeside town of Cyangugu where he fishes with his uncle to the university centre of Butare but as his athletic potential grows, discrimination against the Tutsi hardens. When the Tutsi rebel army crosses from Uganda into Rwanda in 1990 and war begins, hate screams from Rwanda’s airwaves and in backrooms genocide is carefully, deliberately planned.  Jean Patrick tries to ignore politics but is swept up reluctantly and often naively into the unfolding events. His older brother Roger joins the rebel army, his best friend Daniel is a Hutu whose father is a dissenting military man, and his relationship to his coach becomes fraught with uncertainty. The lives of his family and the family of his girlfriend are increasingly at risk.

From the beginning of the book the reader knows the genocide is coming. We are led there inexorably, taken through a child’s growing awareness of Hutu and Tutsi, through revealed secrets about past massacres, through the narrowing of lives, the terror of road blocks and painful choices, none of which will likely have a good ending. Should Jean Patrick accept a Hutu identity card in order to further his running career and his personal safety?  Should his family flee Cyangugu for Burundi?  Should Jean Patrick and his Hutu girlfriend, Bea, attempt a dangerous escape from Butare? What will happen to Bea’s family who are activists against the genocidal regime?  I worried over these characters; I feared for them, I puzzled over them. Who was Coach and why did Jean Patrick’s brother warn Jean Patrick about him?

I had hesitated before reading this book.  To set a novel in Rwanda’s tangled and easily misunderstood history is both ambitious and daunting.  To fictionalize the genocide, an event for which language is impoverished and impossible, and then to find a way forward to a place in which the reader can believe a future is possible after all that killing seemed fraught with so many potential missteps that I avoided this book, afraid that Benaron would somehow get it all wrong.

I recently returned from two years in Rwanda, working at the Kigali Genocide Memorial on peace education projects, work which required bearing witness to Rwanda’s past and present.  This experience sensitized me to the wounds now less visible but trembling still under the smiling faces that tourists always comment on; it exposed me to the complexity of history both in the grand sense and in the individual life, and to the tentativeness of the peace below Rwanda’s dramatic development.  And one odd quirk of working at a genocide memorial was seeing the, well, the fascination of the genocide to outsiders, sometimes verging on voyeurism, as if wandering amongst mass graves at the Kigali memorial or staring at the still blood soaked wall of a church where a horrific massacre took place, gave a vicarious thrill. Death, horrendous death, has the capacity to make the onlooker feel alive. Exposure to the perceptions of many westerners had made me cautious.

But once I started to read Running the Rift I could not put it down. I was in Rwanda again, recognizing the beautifully evoked landscape of hills and rain and red earth, the fishing pirogues on Lake Kivu and the men singing as they brought in the catch, old buses on muddy roads. The quirky expressions of speech, the Kinyarwanda words flowing through the English, the proverbs.

Benaron’s voice is not voyeuristic, not condescending, not colonial. It is not reductionist of Rwanda’s pain to misconceived notions of tribal violence. It is not written from guilt about how the west failed Rwanda although she conveys that.  Benaron’s writing is honest and informed and infused with her passion and compassion for Rwanda and its people. 

The story is historically accurate to the best of my understanding and enough background is woven into the story to keep the reader aware of what is going on. The reader is caught up in an emotional journey that explores the impact and legacy of discrimination (but less of the underlying causes). Overall there is enough context to guide an uninformed reader through the devastating events. Jean Patrick’s naivety about the coming cataclysm serves the purpose of educating the reader as others are attempting to wake him up to the danger around him. This device feels a bit forced at times but in the end we learn with Jean Patrick and so we can forgive him his blindness.

We don’t get to the genocide itself until far along in the story. Reader be warned. There is violence in this book. Every writer courageous to write about such horrendous happenings must wrestle with how much violence to show and in how much detail, knowing that he or she can never tell the truth of how it was for those who were there but knowing also that horror must be moderated. The writer faces the necessity and the impossibility of words. “The words to bring them back across the chasm of so much death had not yet been invented,” writes Benaron in a scene towards the end of the novel when two survivors meet again.

We are not spared and we should not be spared, yet there is nothing gratuitous about the violence. It is matter of fact. This is how it happened. In the book, a UN protected convoy of vehicles is on the way to Burundi, taking foreigners to safety and beating off desperate people. We are not separate from the scene: we are so inside the story that we can identify with the mama trying to thrust her baby into an open truck, with the dead bodies along the roadside, with the foreign child with a dog in a cage, a child who won’t look away, who makes eye contact while tears roll down her cheeks as she mouths the word imbazazi, forgive me, over and over again.  The UN failure to protect is our shame.

I thought that the Rwandan women in my Kigali book club might say, she did okay, we appreciate how she has told Rwanda’s story. Although they might have refused to read it at all, or might have put the book down the closer it got to when Rwanda exploded in April, 1994. I couldn’t find a Rwandan review of the book.

A haunting familiarity crept over me while reading this book.  The people I know who have lived these events seemed to be reading with me.  Running the Rift opened my heart once again to what they had endured, to what they hold inside while they work so hard to create a future.  I felt what I was holding tight within: grief and anguish and love, fear and hope. This is a good thing. And it tells me that Naomi Benaron got it right.

 Running the Rift won the PEN/Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction.

HarperCollins Publishers

2012