Quotes from Boubacar Boris Diop

I don't listen to the radio to find out what's happened. I listen to it to find out how the happenings have been distorted.

You cannot imagine how much the presidents of the entire world hate each other.

He would tirelessly recount the horror. With machete words, club words, words studded with nails, naked words and—despite Gérard—words covered with blood and shit. That he could do, because he saw in the genocide of Rwandan Tutsis a great lesson in simplicity. Every chronicler could at least learn—something essential to his art—to call a monster by its name.

It was astounding to Cornelius to note that the events of 1994 had left no visible traces anywhere. Where on this avenue had they set up the famous Nyamirambo barricade? Was it there, right at the entrance to the Café des Grands Lacs, where there had been corpses that dogs and vultures came to devour? Only the city herself could have answered these questions he still couldn't ask anyone. But the city refused to show her wounds. Besides, she didn't have many.

I refuse to ask of the past more meaning than it can give to the present.

He had to see her face, listen to her voice. She had no reason to hide, and it was his duty to get as close as he could to all suffering. He wanted to say to the woman in black—as he would later to Zakya's children—that the dead of Murambi, too, had dreams, and that their most ardent desire was for the resurrection of the living.

After a genocide, the real problem is not the victims but the executioners. To kill almost a million people in three months took a lot of people. There were tens or hundreds of thousands of killers. Many of them were fathers. And you, you're just the son of one of them.

He consumed the city with his gaze, trying to fathom intuitively the secret relationship between the trees standing still on the side of the road and the barbarous scenes that had stupefied the entire world during the genocide.

In this place, amid sorrow and shame, his own life and the tragic history of his country met. Nothing spoke to him of himself as much as these remains scattered on the naked ground.

Ndumbe stares at me. Before answering, he wants to know if I woke up on the right side of the bed. Of course, he's going to lie, but he doesn't want to tell the wrong lie. That's his forte.

Pierre Castaneda has always taken good care of his image. I've known him a long time. Even his small everyday gestures show that he comes from another world, and in that world of conquerors, he deserves fear and respect. How can I explain this impression he gives of always putting on a show? To be at the same time himself and someone else, amongst us and elsewhere?

Only here's the thing: there is no law that forbids a citizen to speak to his president. Apparently, in a democracy it's even recommended.

Words are what drives the world. Don't ever forget that, boy. People want words, and the less they understand them, the more effective they are.

Murigande was a tough opponent, the kind you were obliged to respect while dreaming every night of cutting him into little pieces.

Our lives are brief, they are like strings of illusions that die, like little bubbles in our entrails. We don't even know what game it's playing at with us, but we have nothing else. It's the only thing that's more or less certain on this earth.

What a bad god is yours, white man, that you can make me worship him only by force and not by persuasion!

The genocide didn't begin on the sixth of April 1994, but in 1959 through little massacres that no-one paid attention to.

He felt his solitude like the muffled echo of that of the victims. Well before the Interahamwe arrived, everyone was already alone, torn between anguish and absurd hopes.

And all the beautiful words of the poets, Cornelius, can say nothing, I swear to you, of the fifty thousand ways to die like a dog, within a few hours.

Loneliness was also the young woman in black who came almost every day to the Polytechnic. She knew exactly which of all the tangled skeletons lying on the cold concrete were those of her little girl and her husband. She would go straight to one of the sixty-four doors of Murambi and stand in the middle of the room before two intertwined corpses: a man clutching a decapitated child against him. The young woman in black prayed in silence, and then left.