Speak Rwanda

Traces the interlinked lives of several characters as they try to survive the civil war in Rwanda, one of the most violent and deeply disturbing acts of genocide since World War II

Since 1994, several books of nonfiction, and now Pierce's debut novel, have tried to comprehend how an estimated one million Tutsi men, women and children came to be slaughtered by their Hutu neighbors in a chilling episode of modern genocide. Pierce, who has worked and traveled in Africa, divides his unbiased novel into the short internal narratives of 10 different figures from all sides of the conflictATutsis and Hutus, murderers and victims, refugees and good SamaritansAwhose lives are threaded together by chance and violence. Characters include Silas Bagambiki, a local Hutu petty official who sees slaughter as a way to consolidate power; Augustin Makizimana, a foolish young Hutu who is drawn quickly and unthinkingly into committing atrocities; and Innocent Karangwa, a Tutsi boy who escapes Bagambiki's militia only to become an opportunistic war urchin in Rwanda's capital of Kigali. In the midst of this graphically violent history, a few characters are able to preserve their moral centers, among them Hutu nurse Agn?s Mujawanaliya and the Tutsi Uganda-born guerrilla Capt. Stephen Mazimpaka, who, by falling in love with each other at the book's end, serve as an example of Rwanda's best hopes. Despite Pierce's painstaking depiction of small-scale politics and his plain-spoken and informative incorporation of local color, the flatness of his prose and the identical, unnuanced voices of the characters make it difficult for this well-intentioned novel to match up to such works of nonfiction as Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A somewhat muted but well-informed fictional exploration of the genocide in Rwanda that left, by some estimates, at least 800,000 dead. Newcomer Pierce isn't interested so much in a litany of horrors as he is in getting at the causes, and at some understanding of how human beings can perpetrate such obscenities. He uses a half-dozen first-person narrators to re-create the events leading up to the period of genocidal frenzy during which the majority Hutu people turned on their old adversaries, the Tutsi, to settle scores. Several of Pierces Hutu, including a power-hungry, small-time politician and a young thug, nurse a fierce hatred of the Tutsi, based on decades of tension between the two peoples, and it doesn't take much for them (urged on by national political figures) to enthusiastically support a genocidal campaign against the Tutsi and those Hutu suspected of favoring coexistence. Another narrator, a Tutsi woman, dies with most of her family in a graphically described slaughter at a Catholic church. One of her children, a boy, survives, and wanders the backroads of Rwanda, reduced to silence by the horrors (stacks of bodies, emptied villages, a river choked with thousands of corpses) that he witnesses. Pierce seems to place his hope for the future of Rwanda in the example of two his narrators, a young Hutu nurse who defies her people to save a Tutsi boy, and a Tutsi soldier who, after the Hutu army is driven out, resigns his commission to work with refugees from both tribes. The two become lovers, providing an example of a life free of the old tribal enmities. While the book offers a powerful portrait of a country coming unhinged, it may be that events in Rwanda were so unimaginably vicious that they can never be entirely explained. Pierce's characters sometimes seem more emblems than individuals, and there are times when the plot and the need to introduce facts and figures don't coalesce. Nonetheless, a heartfelt first effort, often quite moving and always instructive. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This heart-wrenching and exceptional first collection of linked stories powerfully captures the horror of the 1994 Rwandan genocide and gives an all-too-human face to the headlines. Ten charactersAmen, women, and children, Hutus and Tutsis, victims and murderersAtell their individual stories. From the first massacres and flight to refugee camps to a tentative peace and the struggle to return home, each witnesses the madness, sorrow, and faint hope of a nation drowning in centuries-old hate. Pierce's graphic accounts of atrocities are harrowing, as are his descriptions of life in camps filled with disease and starvation. He gives each character, even the despicable ones, a depth and uniqueness that balance the terror, creating a universal story of tragedy and survival. While recent events will spark interest, the strong story, involving characters, and good writing make this a novel that will last. Recommended for all libraries.AEllen Flexman, Indianapolis-Marion Cty. P.L.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.