Page 45 Review by Stephen
Heartening to know this has sold enough copies elsewhere to merit a second printing within a year, because although I'm overjoyed at how well Sacco, Delisle etc. sell at Page 45, we've barely gone through half a dozen of this magnificently moving book which doesn't take the obvious route in telling its story.
Deogratias has seen things he should never have seen; he's been coerced into doing things he should never have done. Now he wanders the township's streets in a torn, white t-shirt, his haunted eyes scanning for banana beer, the one thing that can calm his inner demons. Sometimes he thinks he's a dog. Some of the locals think that's funny, sometimes they take pity, but when a returning soldier - once sent there to "keep the peace" during the Tutsis' massacre at the hands of the Hutu majority - bumps into Deogratias again, we start to learn what made him this way.
Stassen's singular account of the fate of three individuals before, during, then after the genocidal fury in Rwanda comes with many surprises, not least of which is the eventual way that Deogratia's paranoia at being poisoned plays out. The flashback reveries, distinguishable by the lack of panel borders and Deogratia's clean, whole t-shirt, depict a society already obsessed with the hierarchy of race (as taught them by their Belgian colonialists), but the wider political history is wisely confined to the excellent introduction by the book's translator. Instead you follow the young lad Deogratias and his unfaithful romancing of two young Tutsi girls, one of whom is said to be the love-child of the resident white minister, before things get very, very ugly.
The blue and sandy colours of the countryside here, seldom less than beautiful, serve to contrast with what's going on within them. Apart from the two girls - and perhaps the naive, visiting padre - almost everyone has a twisted snarl to their faces. It's a book you'll never forget, that's for sure. The only thing it doesn't do is convey the scale of the horror, but it does everything it should to convey its nature.
Random sentence from the introduction for you: "In 1993 the government ordered from China enough machetes to distribute to every third adult Rwandan Hutu male." They weren't for agriculture, and it was pre-planned.
