Gil Courtemanche walks past me a couple of times as I’m sitting in the lobby of the Windsor, but I don’t recognise him—there is no author photo in the back of his multi-award-winning novel A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali. In the end he sees me chatting with a girl whose T-shirt logo proclaims her links to the Melbourne Writers’ Festival and he approaches. His English is excellent, and with the kind of French-Canadian accent that sounds hip. Gauloises and cognac. This is his first novel but he has been a journalist for many years. We’re both early, but he is flying out to Spain in two hours and needs to get things over with.
What is real and what is fiction in your novel? I ask. Clearly we don’t need to do the ritual conversational dance of what does ‘real’ mean, yada yada. He smiles, a little tiredly. Everyone must ask him that, but each questioner needs an individual answer. He says it’s a fair question and that the Rwandan political background, the sequence of public events, the facts about the killings and cruelties and the way they were carried out are all real. The moment a village or region was liberated from the grip of the Interahamwe, the murderous Hutu militias, the new government would interview the survivors while the memories were fresh.
There is no way to re-create genocide, but I wanted to work through the people I’ve known, trying to imagine how they lived and died, he said. I tell him that some of his details are terrible; I can’t get them out of my mind. They really happened, he says. Those details are not the product of my imagination. What was it about the Belgians, I ask. He looks at me. I try to explain: the book has some instances of Belgians behaving very badly. And they made particularly bad colonists, didn’t they? They caused the enmity between the Hutus and the Tutsis by favouring the latter, didn’t they?
The French were just as bad, he says. The French embassy was evacuated just before the massacres, and they left their Tutsi employees to the machetes of the Interahamwe. You have to understand, he says, that in this very small world, this microcosme, those who worked at that time in Rwanda—he shakes his head. They sent the worst, most inept diplomats there, their worst international ‘experts’ and accountants