A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali

“Look, for people who’re going to be dead soon, we’re not doing too badly.”

“The novel of the year” is what La Presse called this extraordinary book, a love story that takes place in the days leading up to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. A first work of fiction by one of French Canada’s most admired journalists, Gil Courtemanche, it was first published in Quebec in 2000, spent more than a year on bestseller lists and won the Prix des Libraires, the booksellers’ award for outstanding book of the year. Rights were sold to publishers in over twenty countries in Europe and around the world. This humanist story of an unlikely love affair set against a holocaust has become an internationally acclaimed phenomenon, worthy of comparison with the work of Graham Greene and Albert Camus.

The swimming pool of the Mille-Collines hotel, Kigali, in the early 1990s, draws a regular crowd of assorted aid workers, strutting Rwandan officials, Belgian businessmen, French paratroops and Canadian expats. Among them is Bernard Valcourt, a documentary filmmaker from Quebec, on a mission to set up a television station in the capital. Valcourt, who for two decades has earned his living from wars and famines, lingers around the pool drinking warm beer and watching football; but most of all, watching Gentille, a beautiful young waitress, who is a Hutu but often mistaken for a Tutsi because of her family’s strange history.

The trouble coming stems from a long conflict, instigated in colonial times by Whites who treated Tutsis as superior to Hutus. The Hutu government is now openly encouraging violence against Tutsis. The physical traits of the Tutsis make them easy prey, but they are not the only ones in danger. Too many people are already dying in Rwanda daily: of AIDS, of malaria, and increasingly at roadblocks at the hands of drunken militia, or pulled from their homes. The hotel staff and prostitutes sense trouble and death drawing closer as they continue providing drinks and meals and sex.

The story of this developing catastrophe is revealed through the lives of a handful of Rwandans who befriend Valcourt. They confide in him because he listens, and because his interviews offer them a chance to try to change the way things are by telling the world. Their candour and warmth begin to make his heart glow. He meets people like Méthode, who knows a bloodbath is brewing and would rather die of AIDS in the comfort of a hotel room than by a machete. Threatened, frightened, sick, they don’t want to talk and act like they’re dying. Poor as they are, they want to have some moments of pleasure and celebrate life.

As Kigali life continues in its resourcefulness and persistence, Valcourt is falling in love with Rwanda, and with Gentille, who loves him because he sees her as no-one has seen her before. Even as the worst horrors begin, as friends are raped and murdered, he starts to feel a strange peace in this land of a thousand hills, though he repudiates the outside world for its failure to intervene. Because Gentille is thought to be Tutsi, her life is in danger. Still, no-one can believe that the extremists will go too far, that brothers and sisters will kill brothers and sisters, and that 800,000 civilians will be massacred.

A hard-hitting chronicle of an overlooked chapter of recent history, told with skill and compassion, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is also a celebration of living in the moment, of the integrity of friendship and the courage of everyday heroes. Harrowing, unsettling, challenging, but beautiful and moving, it is a book that cannot leave the reader untouched; as a Quill & Quire reviewer said, it is “full of real people that demand to be remembered.”

Gil Courtemanche is a well-respected journalist specializing in international and third world politics, and the author of several works of non-fiction in French including Québec and Nouvelles douces colères. His journalism in print and film has taken him to various war-torn countries including Lebanon and Haiti. He has worked in politics and journalism since the 1960s, and is also one of the writers of Moi et l’Autre, Quebec’s most successful sitcom.

“Very early I recognised that some things you could say in songs… some things you could say on radio and some things you could say in writing. So there are a lot of tools to do the same thing, which is being a witness and telling.” Courtemanche was first sent to Kigali by his newspaper in 1989 to research the problems for development being caused by AIDS in Africa. He travelled to Rwanda four times, spending a total of a year in the country, and produced an award-winning TV documentary, The Gospel of AIDS. It was ten years after his first trip to Rwanda that he wrote the first chapter of this, his first novel.

He based the characters in the novel on people he met in Rwanda, most of whom died in the genocide. By giving them voices again through fiction, he helps outsiders to understand the desperate realities of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and to see beyond the horrors to the human face of the tragedy. “It is easy for us in the West to blame it on tribalism and thus exonerate ourselves from guilt,” Courtemanche has said. He shows the conflict in Rwanda to be not simply “ethnic” but catalyzed by the West and the forces of capitalism.

As the novel progresses, protagonist Bernard Valcourt finds himself strangely more at home in Rwanda, and enraged with the outside world: global apathy, media blindness, arms suppliers, the foreign aid donors afraid to offend the corrupt Rwandan government, the UN officials who do nothing, the International Monetary Fund’s complicity in the country’s social crises, the first-world’s inability to comprehend the realities of third-world poverty. At times it rails against the injustice of what was allowed to happen, challenging us to take action rather than allow injustice to flourish. Courtemanche, a campaigner for action in the third world, is fascinated by the potential for an alternative global economy, and our capacity to change the world. “I use journalism as a political tool to change things,” he says.

Yet A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is not journalism, and Courtemanche also gives voice to his characters’ lust for life. “My job is to talk about awful things so we don’t do them again. But I know all the beautiful things. That’s why in the novel I put dinners and parties.” He wanted to write a book about beautiful people who lived through terrible things and yet were full of lust for life.

Patricia Claxton, who translated the novel into English and is twice a winner of the Governor General’s Award for translation, describes Courtemanche as someone who writes in a café and doesn’t come home much. David Homel in Books in Canada described him as a “take-no-prisoners kind of writer, a man who can be found in his favourite café in Montreal… surrounded by an overflowing ashtray and several cups of black coffee.” His literary heroes include John le Carré, Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. He calls himself a “pervasive romantic” and says, “There is nothing in life but love that is important.”

He is a columnist with the Montreal daily newspaper Le Devoir, and is writing a second novel. A French feature film production of A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is underway.