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7
‘We were going '\ around pretending .to help Africa and all the numbers were saying the contrary’
GIL COURTEMANCHE
Romance and revolt in Rwanda
Reader, I have failed you. Had I been faster off the mark (and, I guess, female), I could have been the journalist who set off to interview Gil Courtemanche about his compelling novel, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali, and ended up married to him. But that was a couple of years ago when the book was first published. Now, the word on Courtemanche is well and truly out with translations being published around the world.
If i tell you it’s a story set in Rwanda at the time of the 1994 genocide and that those characters who don’t die of AIDS tend to get viciously beaten to death, you might think it's not the book for you. Think again. For all its devastatingly bleak moments, it‘s a powerful celebration of life and love. That’s why it stayed on Quebec’s best seller list for a year: it’s a rich, nourishing, heartbreaking work.
Meeting Courtemanche for lunch in Montreal, I find out why. He's had a varied career from sitcom scriptwriter to chat show host - his expertise on Rwanda stems from making an AIDS documentary there just before the massacre - but underlying all his work is a sensitivity to injustice and a passionate desire to make things better. His unyielding quest for the truth has led to him being sacked from state broadcaster CBC five times. ‘We were not telling things as they were,’ he says. ‘The corruption, the failure of what we call “development nationale", going around pretending we were helping Africa and all the numbers were saying the contrary; they still are.’
TV’s loss is literature‘s gain. But what does this deeply political man, who was a ‘fellow traveller' during the early resurgence of Quebecois nationalism, learn from the implosion of a country when Hutu fought Tutsi? ‘In countries that are rich like Quebec, it's a luxury issue,’ he says. ‘You can afford to play with the idea. The Hutus and the Tutsis lived alongside each other for 500 years. They had this economic social arrangement that was working quite well. There‘s less difference between a Hutu and a Tutsi than there is between an English-speaking Montrealer and a French-speaking Montrealer and we don't go around killing each other. It must be that someone would exploit the only slight difference that there is between us to push us to those extremities of war.’ (Mark Fisher)
I T/m Bind/rig, Gr/ COL/rtemanche <9 Andrew O'Hagan. 74 Aug. 3pm, ‘2 7 (£5).
16 THE LIST FESTIVAL GUIDE 7—1.1 Aug 230.3
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