May 5: Chance or Destiny?

Sunday (May 4) I had the pleasure of reading from The Violets of Usambara at the Blue Metropolis International Literary Festival in Montreal. It was a treat to take part in Blue Met’s 10th anniversary version because the festival was deeply involved in its genesis. A former Blue Met staffer, killed in a tragic accident shortly afterwards, helped me greatly before I went to Burundi to research the novel.

Violets—my tenth book—takes place over five days in March 1997, when Thomas Brossard, a Canadian politician, goes missing on a fact-finding mission to Burundi. When his wife Louise back in Montreal gets the news, she frets while she tries to ferret out more information. The novel grew out of the horror I (and the rest of the world) felt in 1994 when Hutus killed Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda. How to understand what had happened? As I looked for an answer, I learned hat Rwanda has a non-identical twin, another small country in the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa, where ethnic divisions are also acute. Burundi’s president was killed in the same plane crash which killed Rwanda’s president, but unlike Rwanda, Burundi was not plunged into genocide by the event. What made the difference? Do Europeans and North Americans bear a responsibility for what goes on in Africa today?

By 1997 I began to understand a bit of what was going on. Burundi has not been spared horrendous massacres, although none have been of the scale of Rwanda’s, I learned for starters. But other countries in Africa had begun to pressure Burundi’s Tutsi leaders toward a peace process by then, notably through a trade embargo. At the same time I found myself being haunted by a character—a Canadian politician turfed out of office when the Conservatives lost to Jean Chrétien’s Liberals. He had a wife who helped guide his political career and who was mad about African violets. Maybe, I thought, there was a story worth telling there.

There was. A short story, “Violettes d’Usambara,” was published in a literary magazine in 1999, and shortly thereafter I got a grant from the Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec to work on expanding the story into something bigger.

Bonaventure Murigande, a Hutu from Rwanda, was part of the communications staff for Blue Met’s fourth version in 2001. He was very busy during the festival, but I introduced myself and asked if I could ask him some questions when things quieted down. He graciously agreed and gave me much valuable information that helped prepare me for the research trip to Burundi. He is one of the people I thank abundantly in the acknowledgements at the back of the finished novel.

Unfortunately though I haven’t been able to thank him in person. After escaping from genocide, making a great start on building a new life in Canada, and finally getting approval to bring his wife and children here too, he was drowned in an accident on a lake north of Montreal a few years after he helped me. The ironies are as disturbing as the history of his region is tragic. If I were a mystic, I’d wonder about the hand of destiny…

Photo: Bujumbura, the capitol of Burundi, rises into the hills on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika