Julia Marble Emerson '65 helps a survivor of the Rwandan killing fields bring her story to the English-speaking world.
By Regan Eberhart
Sociologist Marie Béatrice Umutesi was living and working in Rwanda in 1994 when her life plunged into peril as civil war overran the country. While violence raged between Hutu and Tutsi and warring political factions, hundreds of thousands of people were massacred and millions more displaced. Umutesi, a Hutu and native Rwandan, was one who was forced to flee. Ultimately she spent four years as a refugee and walked 2,000 kilometers. She, along with thousands of others, witnessed innumerable deaths and suffered excruciating deprivation. No government, no organization, no humanitarian agency intervened.
Surviving the Slaughter (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004) is Umutesi's story about her years as a refugee. Translated into English from the original French by Julia Marble Emerson '65, the book is a searing account of Umutesi's experiences. "I have been through Hell, have known horror, and now that I have escaped," Umutesi says. "I want to testify in the name of all the men and women who did not have my luck and who died in Hell."
Emerson says that translating this book profoundly altered how she looks at the world. When an associate first asked her to take on the job, she rather casually agreed. However, she soon found herself "living, breathing, and sleeping with the book," she explains. "I mulled over every word and sentence, draft after draft; corresponded with academics in the field of African studies; talked to people who had visited the camps and who had worked with Béatrice; checked facts and dates." Emerson says that Umutesi, who can read but not speak English, later told her that she had "gotten inside her head and translated the book in just the way she would have liked."
Umutesi's writing is beautiful in its simplicity. She begins her story with some history about the Tutsi-Hutu ethnic conflicts and the social, economic, and political environment that brought Rwanda to anarchy. She describes her first awareness of being Hutu, at age four, and what it was like for a family member to grow up years earlier and challenge the system of oppression. Oppressors and victims changed places; there were periods of reconciliation and times of relative peace. Yet the old animosities lingered.
For two years, Umutesi lived in refugee camps along the Zaire border. She attempted to care for abandoned children and to improve conditions for her fellow sufferers. When the camps were destroyed amidst more fighting and political wrangling, many refugees were forcibly returned to Rwanda. Others, Umutesi and children she was caring for among them, endured a grueling march across Zaire in advance of rebels and government troops. When Umutesi, then age 38, was rescued by a Dutch friend who had been looking for her, she was half of her former weight and "wrinkled like an old woman."
Surviving the Slaughter would be unbearable to read if it were not for the many people and their acts of kindness that Umutesi describes, examples of humanity's best in contrast to its worst: a man sharing his only bowl of beans with the starving author, villagers sheltering refugees as armed men prowl the streets. Throughout the ordeal, Umutesi maintained an unshakeable belief in human kindness—she always expected to "meet charitable souls on the road."
For the record it leaves and for the humanity it reveals, Umutesi's book is empowering. "My friends wondered why I was working so hard on this book," Emerson observes. "I felt that it was important for this story to be available to the widest possible audience. In retrospect, it was an incredible gift—to be given an opportunity to be part of a larger and very important conversation."
For more than a century, explorers tried and failed to find a vast, legendary waterfall concealed within one of the wildest and deepest chasms on Earth—Tibet's Tsangpo gorge. Tibetan Buddhists have long believed these falls lead to a sacred realm, where physical and spiritual worlds overlap. In 1998, after years of searching, Ian Baker '79 and his National Geographic-sponsored team descended into the depths of the gorge and stood before the waterfall.
Baker's quest was a true pilgrimage, with demanding physical and spiritual dimensions. Torrential downpours, a jungle teeming with leeches, treacherous cliffs, and impassable and densely overgrown terrain would make the quest hard enough. But Baker's mentors had primed him to understand that even if he found the place he sought, without spiritual enlightenment, it would stay hidden.
He describes his journey in The Heart of the World: A Journey to the Last Secret Place (Penguin Press, 2004). An adventurer, climber, Buddhist scholar, and longtime resident of Nepal, Baker began his groundwork years earlier, when he set out to learn the truth behind the legends. He read ancient texts, consulted with lamas and wise elders, explored the gorge, and challenged his mind through extreme exercises, such as a monthlong meditation in
a cave.
Baker juxtaposes his narrative with observations by people who preceded him on similar expeditions, including the 19th-century spies sent to Tibet by the British Survey of India. Tibet was cut off to Westerners, and the surveyors masqueraded as pilgrims in order to explore the region. In 1924, explorer Frank Kingdon Ward collected the seeds of rhododendrons and other plants from the profusion of species that blaze across the mountains. While he happily sought out new plants, his traveling companion miserably wrote about how he wanted to go home.
The Heart of the World provides a look into the heart of a modern-day pilgrim. Baker has a poet's sensibility, a philosopher's vision, and a historian's perspective.
When Jack Sidford saw a jack-o-lantern for the first time, he asked his mother what it was—was it a bad boy? She marveled at his interpretation, and her husband reminded her to write it down. Jennifer Karin Sidford '85 did more than that: using her three sons as inspiration, she created The Bear Who Loves Halloween, a gorgeous picture book about a young bear's first Halloween. It is sweet and decidedly unscary. Then she chose Sam Kimball, an artist whose work she admires, to illustrate the book, worked with him to make each page reflect her vision, and published the hardcover volume herself. She did the same with a second project, Letters to a Girl, a gift book, containing letters from everyday women to important girls in their lives, about life and growing up female.
Like more and more authors, Sidford opted to self-publish the books. Her thoughts on self-publishing:
You get the bear you want: "The artist and I chatted about every single page, and I was able to get little touches that I wanted. Jack, my middle child, is bearlike. His hair is caramel colored. His eyes are blue. So the bear is caramel and has blue eyes."
Amazon.com is your friend: "I would have to print 10,000 copies and send them to Barnes & Noble to put in their stores. But Amazon.com provides immediate access, and I send copies as they get orders."
Paul Newman shouldn't have all the fun: "One dollar from the profits of each bear book benefits One Family, an organization devoted to ending family homelessness, and all profits from Letters to a Girl benefit the YWCA, the oldest women's organization in the country."