The Past Prepares the Future: A Conversation with Burundian Novelist Roland Rugero

Abstract

12 worldliteraturetoday.org WLT interview A Conversation with Burundian Novelist Roland Rugero Emily Hunt & David Shook R oland Rugero (b. 1986) grew up in exile from his native Burundi but returned as soon as he could to pursue his education and eventually work as a professional journalist and writer. His second novel, Baho!, was published in France in 2012 and is forthcoming in English in 2015 (Phoneme Media), in a translation from the French by Christopher Schaefer. An active booster of Burundian literature, Rugero cofounded the Samandari literary workshop, which meets weekly in Bujumbura, and launched both the Frenchlanguage short-story Prix Michel Kayoya, now in its fourth year, and the English-language Andika Prize, now in its first. Rugero recently spent ten weeks at Iowa ’s International Writing Program. Shortly thereafter we corresponded about his upbringing as a refugee, the sociopolitical dimensions of his writing and being a writer, and the use of Kirundi in his writing. photo : creg bal The Past Prepares the Future September–October 2014 • 13 Emily Hunt & David Shook: How did your childhood as a refugee shape you as a writer? What about as a reader? How did you learn to read—and what—growing up between places, across borders? Roland Rugero: I left Burundi for the first time and became a refugee when I was seven. I left for Rwanda in September 1993, around the same time as the assassination of President Ndadaye. Three months later, I returned to Burundi before leaving again to Tanzania, around the time of President Ntaryamira’s death. I stayed there for four years. Even as a child, the exile was a very painful experience: Burundi was the home to which I truly wanted to return. I spent a lot of time staring at Lake Tanganyika. I really felt like a refugee, mkimbizi in Swahili (literally, “he who runs”). I wanted to run backward, like I did when I was returning home from Kinindo’s elementary school. Exile gave me time for my first silences, far from the silly games of my schoolmates at the Centre Scolaire Congolais, in Kigoma. The time for my first readings, for wanting to understand, through the rare newspapers that I would find from Burundi, what was happening, and why, and to what end. Otherwise, I technically learned to read as a little street urchin, at the Stella Matutina primary school. My father always wanted us to attend public school. Also, I had the fortune, as I understood it much later, to grow up without television in my family home: my time there was reserved for reading . I read children and young-adult books (OuiOui , Tom Sawyer, Robinson Crusoe, Jules Verne), some comic books, scientific journals, and soon after, crime novels, Hugo, a little philosophy . . . EH & DS: You also work as a journalist. How does that work interact with your work as a novelist ? What is the state of Burundian journalism today? RR: The journalist, like the author, is a griot of time. The difference between them? The former is more used to urgency, to time passing faster and faster. The rapid time of the journalist thus creates the literary account that I develop with the nonchalance of an author. In my opinion, Burundian journalism today suffers doubly: first, as journalism does throughout the world (albeit to different degrees), from predatory powers, and second, for not properly demonstrating and giving full justice to the formidable space of expression taking place in Burundi. EH & DS: When and why did you decide to become a novelist? Is writing fiction political? RR: Fiction that recounts the human, in all its forms, is always political. In my view, mankind is never alone in a novel, whatever he may be. He is at least two, with the author of the story. With this, a city of interactions thus forms, a polis springs up. But I never really decided to be a novelist. I just realized that I could write stories. EH & DS: If the action of eating is linked to the present, what does the feeling of hunger imply, and how does that motivate your novella’s characters? RR: Since eating is linked to the present, hunger becomes a motor that pushes the characters...