The past prepares the future: a conversation with Burundian Novelist Roland Rugero.

Hunt, Emily ; Shook, David

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Roland Rugero (b. 1986) grew up in exile from his native Burundi but returned as soon as he could to pursue his education and eventually work as a professional journalist and writer. His second novel, Baho!, was published in France in 2012 and is forthcoming in English in 2015 (Phoneme Media), in a translation from the French by Christopher Schaefer. An active booster of Burundian literature, Rugero cofounded the Samandari literary workshop, which r meets weekly in Bujumbura, and launched both the French-language short-story Prix Michel Kayoya, now in its fourth year, and the English-language Andika Prize, now in its first. Rugero recently spent ten weeks at Iowa's International Writing Program. Shortly thereafter we corresponded about his upbringing as a refugee, the sociopolitical dimensions of his writing and being a writer, and the use of Kirundi in his writing.

Emily Hunt & David Shook: How did your childhood as a refugee shape you as a writer? What about as a reader? How did you learn to read--and what--growing up between places, across borders?

Roland Rugero: I left Burundi for the first time and became a refugee when I was seven. I left for Rwanda in September 1993, around the same time as the assassination of President Ndadaye. Three months later, I returned to Burundi before leaving again to Tanzania, around the time of President Ntaryamira's death. I stayed there for four years. Even as a child, the exile was a very painful experience: Burundi was the home to which I truly wanted to return. I spent a lot of time staring at Lake Tanganyika. I really felt like a refugee, mkimbizi in Swahili (literally, "he who runs"). I wanted to run backward, like I did when I was returning home from Kinindo's elementary school. Exile gave me time for my first silences, far from the silly games of my schoolmates at the Centre Scolaire Congolais, in Kigoma. The time for my first readings, for wanting to understand, through the rare newspapers that I would find from Burundi, what was happening, and why, and to what end.

Otherwise, I technically learned to read as a little street urchin, at the Stella Matutina primary school. My father always wanted us to attend public school. Also, I had the fortune, as I understood it much later, to grow up without television in my family home: my time there was reserved for reading. I read children and young-adult books (Oui-Oui, Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, Jules Verne), some comic books, scientific journals, and soon after, crime novels, Hugo, a little philosophy ...

EH & DS: You also work as a journalist. How does that work interact with your work as a novelist? What is the state of Burundian journalism today?

RR: The journalist, like the author, is a griot of time. The difference between them? The former is more used to urgency, to time passing faster and faster. The rapid time of the journalist thus creates the literary account that I develop with the nonchalance of an author.

In my opinion, Burundian journalism today suffers doubly: first, as journalism does throughout the world (albeit to different degrees), from predatory powers, and second, for not properly demonstrating and giving full justice to the formidable space of expression taking place in Burundi.

EH & DS: When and why did you decide to become a novelist? Is writing fiction political?

RR: Fiction that recounts the human, in all its forms, is always political. In my view, mankind is never alone in a novel, whatever he may be. He is at least two, with the author of the story. With this, a city of interactions thus forms, a polis springs up. But I never really decided to be a novelist. I just realized that I could write stories.

EH & DS: If the action of eating is linked to the present, what does the feeling of hunger imply, and how does that motivate your novella's characters?

RR: Since eating is linked to the present, hunger becomes a motor that pushes the characters of a novel to transcend time. They are constantly used to this impression of weakness, of emptying, of leaving, of being incessantly watched by an omnipotent force. Also, they do everything to gain fortune, stopping their sacrifice of Nyamuragi on the altar of a collective good conscience.

EH & DS: You describe the moment after eating as an artistic moment, a point in time where one can find a safe sort of solitude. What makes this moment so safe and pleasurable? Are there any other human moments like this?

RR: I don't necessarily adhere to everything my characters say. I think, in trying to understand the pleasure of life in the moment, that there are certain equivalents to the instant when an artist is about to create, to produce something, as in the satiety tied to physical fullness (being too full, that is).

EH & DS: We see the slow devaluation of speech throughout the novel, especially within the character of Nyamuragi. Yet it is ultimately the power of speech and the gravity of it that condemns him. Why is speech no longer valued by this community? And how does this relate to the act of penning a novel, a labor of words and communication?

RR: It's a little the drama of society in which the story unravels: if speech has no more "value" as the good it had before, it hasn't quite lost its ability to bring destruction, to bring death. You see why, anyway, the population of Hariho is wary of such speech, and believes more in the sacrificial effect in the act of hanging Nyamuragi.

Writing a novel within this transformation challenges the characters' consciences to retrieve what originally gave speech its referent weight. The work of observation gives speech back a little of its beauty, and in the act of writing, words no longer kill--they are shared.

EH & DS: "La clarte de ce matin s'est transformee en une sanglante lueur qui perce" reminds us of Cesaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and the repetition of "au bout du petit matin." Who were your literary influences for Baho?

RR: It would be a lie if I cited the name of an author who influenced me in writing this book. In fact, the constant reference in this story is to my maternal language. I wrote this novel doubly: by imagining it taking place in Kirundi before transcribing the words into French. Sometimes, this seemed false, bizarre, funny. In that event, I let myself play with the two.

EH & DS: There is a certain fluidity between past and present events in Baho!; past explanations join present actions and vice versa. Talk about the concept of time in your book and how this concept of ejo (the Kirundi word for both "yesterday" and "tomorrow," a time both past and present) strengthened your storytelling.

RR: The fluidity between past and present has less to do with my ability to strengthen the tale than it does to a certain unity, a logic of envisioning the world that exists in the first language of my novel, Kirundi. We say, Akahise gategura kazoza (the past prepares the future), Ukora iciza ukagisanga imhere, wakora inabi naho ikaguherekeza (You do good, and you find it ahead, you do evil, and it accompanies you): in our culture, there is no isolated act. Everything coheres. The present always starts out being linked with the past and the future. Ejo is that which will be, or that which has happened: this dual tension simplifies the end of the story, since it suffices to recount the present to uncoil the threads of time. One must be patient, to travel through time in detail, with this slowness that the one-eyed woman praises in the beginning of the tale.

EH & DS: Similarly, ejo is one of the many examples of a word or words that is not translated from Kirundi to French in the book. Could you talk about the linguistic choices you made when deciding what to keep in Kirundi?

RR: I translated the word like others, but at the same time I prefer to keep it as is when it's used by a character in the novel. I find that it gives the word a weight, a visibility in the text which, in the end, is the desired effect. That is to say, next to the language of the tale's telling, which is French, runs the other language, in which the details, the characters, the events of the story interact with one another: Kirundi. The Burundian proverbs were useful tools for the chants at the beginning of each chapter, the axiological summary that brings oral wisdom toward its everyday practice.

EH & DS: You've done a lot to promote contemporary writing in Burundi, from founding the literary workshop Samandari to organizing the Prix Michel Kayoya. What is the state of Burundian literature today? Who are your favorite Burundian authors? How many of them write in Kirundi? Is it possible for a Kirundi-language literature to coexist with a literature in French, the language of Burundi's colonizer?

RR: Let's say, to evoke the terms of Ketty Nivyabandi, a Burundian poet with whom I launched the cafe-litteraire Samandari, that our literature has undergone a renaissance since 2010. This new movement coincided with the arrival of Samandari, a literary meeting held weekly for three years, but also with an entire series of individuals who actively involved themselves in bringing reading and writing to Burundian public spaces. I think of the extraordinary work of Thierry Manirambona, the Jesuit novelist and poet; to Ketty; to the dozens of youths who participate each year in the Prix Michel Kayoya and now in an English literary award, the Andika Prize. I think of the formation of Sembura, the platform that federates the authors of the Grands Lacs countries (Burundi, Rwanda, and Democratic Republic of the Congo), which also helps bring literary awareness to our country. I also think of the remarkable work of Juvenal Ngorwanubusa, a scholar from the national university who published the first ever anthology of francophone Burundian literature in 2013.

In this scene, few if any of the works are in Kirundi, essentially for structural reasons linked to publication and distribution of books written in the local language of francophone Africa. It should also be noted that, unlike certain African countries where French is a bridge between many communities speaking different languages, in Burundi there is a certain communion around Kirundi, the unique mother tongue spoken and understood by all Burundians. Perhaps this is the principal reason for the weakness of Burundian literature, since Kirundi is more spoken than written.

EH & DS: Le borgne, le muet (the one-eyed woman, the mute). There's a mood of discomfort surrounding many of your characters, due to the simple fact that they have some kind of physical disability or lack. The old woman lacks sight, Nyamuragi lacks speech. What inspired you to incorporate this repetition of physical deformity or disability?

RR: Because I think that every human being has, in one form or another, an infirmity. Fiction just allows us to emphasize them more when we write. To speak of the imperfect human body is to evoke the human condition that is simultaneously host to both the beautiful and the wretched.

EH & DS: You're also now directing films. How did you move into that field? Do you find that films connect with a wider audience within Burundi?

RR: It's true that to work in cinema is often the antithesis to the solitude of the writer. I found myself working as a director somewhat by chance, but I eventually realized that it's infinitely more practical when one hopes to meet rural populations as an artist. There is almost no market for books in the Burundian hills, so an open-air projection can spontaneously attract hundreds of people.

EH & DS: Where are you finding inspiration lately?

RR: In three trips: a writing residency at La Rochelle, France, in 2012; then during ten weeks I recently spent at the University of Iowa in the International Writing Program; and two weeks in August 2013 while promoting Sembura's anthology of Grands Lacs authors. There is so much to write, so much to be read.

December 2013

Translation form the French By Emily Hunt

Emily Hunt is a writer and editor living in Los Angeles. She graduated from University of California, Santa Barbara, with a degree in comparative literature with a focus on the French language and thesis research in the gender archetypes of fairy tales. She currently works with the Los Angeles Review of Books.

A WLT contributing editor, David Shook's most recent translation is Tedi Lopez Mills's Death on Rua Augusta (Eyewear, 2014), an excerpt of which appeared in the September 2010 issue of WLT. Turn to page 5 to read his city profile of Goma, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.