Bernard Valcourt est journaliste. Il a été témoin de la famine en Ethiopie. Il a vu la guerre au Liban. Il n'a plus rien à apprendre au sujet de l'horreur dont les hommes sont capables. Et c'est par désœuvrement qu'il accepte, au début des années 90, de se rendre au Rwanda pour mettre sur pied un service de télévision digne d'un pays démocratique et développé. Sa mission est un échec, mais il fait la connaissance de Gentille. Gentille est si belle que la regarder fait mal. Gentille est une Hutue qui vit dans un corps de Tutsie. Valcourt en vient à aimer et la femme et le pays. Pourtant, il s'était juré que cela ne lui arriverait plus jamais. Et, lui qui n'était plus qu'une terre stérile, il se sent enfin revivre. Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali retrace de façon saisissante l'histoire récente du Rwanda et parvient à nous faire comprendre les mécanismes du génocide mieux que tous les bulletins de nouvelles. Mais il s'agit bel et bien d'un roman, et la littérature arrive à faire ce que le reportage ne pourra jamais : elle donne un visage humain aux bourreaux et aux victimes. C'est avec une œuvre troublante, aux accents céliniens, que Gil Courtemanche fait son entrée en littérature. Comme toute œuvre littéraire, Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali pose les seules questions qui comptent : Comment mourir ? Comment vivre ?

A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali is a moving, passionate love story set amid the turmoil and terror of Rwanda’s genocide. All manner of Kigali residents pass their time by the pool of the Mille-Collines hotel: aid workers, Rwandan bourgeoisie, expatriates, UN peacekeepers, prostitutes. Keeping a watchful eye is Bernard Valcourt, a jaded foreign journalist, but his closest attention is devoted to Gentille, a hotel waitress with the slender, elegant build of a Tutsi. As they slip into an intense, improbable affair, the delicately balanced world around them–already devastated by AIDS–erupts in a Hutu-led genocide against the Tutsi people. Valcourt’s efforts to spirit Gentille to safety end in their separation. It will be months before he learns of his lover’s shocking fate.

The swimming pool of the Mille-Collines hotel is a magnet for a discrete group of Kigali residents: aid workers, Rwandan bourgeoisie, expatriates and prostitutes. Among these patrons is the hotel waitress Gentille, a beautiful Hutu often mistaken for a Tutsi, who has long been admired by Bernard Valcourt, a foreign journalist. As the two slide into a love affair and prepare for their wedding, we see the world around them coming apart. This landmark novel confronts the nightmare that ravaged Rwanda in April 1994, when the Hutu-led government orchestrated genocide against the Tutsi people. A denunciation of poverty, ignorance, global apathy and media blindness, A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali has at its heart a shattering love story, told with profound compassion and consummate control.

This collection of essays derives from a conference on Violence, Culture and Identity held in St. Andrews in June 2003. It examines postcolonial cultures and identities by investigating the way in which violence is represented by Francophone creative artists.

In the 1994 Rwanda genocide, around 1 million people were brutally murdered in just thirteen weeks. This book offers an in-depth study of posttraumatic growth in the testimonies of the men and women who survived, highlighting the ways in which they were able to build a new, and often enhanced, way of life. In so doing, Caroline Williamson Sinalo advocates a new reading of trauma: one that recognises not just the negative, but also the positive responses to traumatic experiences. Through an analysis of testimonies recorded in Kinyarwanda by the Genocide Archive of Rwanda, the book focuses particularly on the relationship between posttraumatic growth and gender and examines it within the wider frames of colonialism and traditional cultural practices. Offering a striking alternative to dominant paradigms on trauma, the book reveals that, notwithstanding the countless tales of horror, pain, and loss in Rwanda, there are also stories of strength, recovery, and growth.