AUTHOR: Thierry Manirambona
PUBLISHER: Pauline Publication Africa/St. Paul Communications
No. OF PAGES: 94 pages
ISBN: 9966-08-651-X
YEAR PUBLISHED: 2012
REVIEWED BY: Matthew Ujah-Peter
''March is in full swing. the mornings are so cold. The flowers have blossomed and the grass is growing, luxuriously green. At night, insects flocks to the lamps, and especially to the candle in my room. It rains often at night, so softly. It rains for so long that the drops seep into the drinking earth. Behind my window are beautiful, happy flowers. The tinkling of evening bells fills my room; faraway birds-calls break the silence. And close by, in the trees, from leaf to leaf, tardy raindrops joins their predecessors, dripping in shimmering silence unto the leaves carpeting the ground.
I am so weak. I am too week to get water for papa's orchids. It is so cold outside, but I cannot find the strength to get out of bed to shut the window.''
It's exactly 20 years ago when the Rwandan genocide took place. As the world, and indeed the people of Rwanda, remember and pay tributes to the victims and heroes of the genocide, I want to use this book as a reminder to all of us and especially the people of Africa that when we kill one another it's indeed our own elves that we are killing.
When you look at the dailies each morning at the news stand, you are depressed by the figures-figures that represents lives of real humans beings but snuffed out, not by natural disasters or accidents but by fellow humans who believe that there is noble purpose to their acts. As Roberts Czerny remarked in the foreword of this book, '' I look at the numbers. I count the zeros. The more zeros I see, the more shocked I feel, or depressed and helpless, or perplexed. But people are not zeros.''
The Orchids is about one of the people behind those zeros: Lucille. Lucille didn't die during the genocide but she was a victim who lived long enough to tell her own side of the story. Lucille is a real person with real experiences of sufferings and pains brought about by atrocities and senseless killings by fellow humans. But the story of Lucille is not about sufferings and pains alone. It's also about bravery, courage, kindness and triumph. Anytime you read or hear news of sufferings from distance lands or from nearby lands about figures of the victims with few or many zeros, it's about people like Lucille - people with vision and ambitions, people with hopes and dreams - who are behind those zeros.
Meet Lucille as she takes you by the hand on a journey through her world of innocence, beauty, love pains, shame, and the triumph of love and faith. Right from her childhood period to her young adulthood. Born in 1982, Lucille comes across at the beginning, as your average young African girl growing up from childhood to womanhood but the genocide that took place in the land of her birth in 1994 when she was only 12 changed all that.
Lucille will tell you of her experience and ordeals as she and her family moved from place to place to escape the throes of death. Lucille also tells of her quest to make meaning out of life in the midst of the sufferings, dislocation and hopelessness that were the natural fruits of wars and genocide such that took place in April 1994 in Rwanda.You will break a tear or too as Lucille enraptures you with her descriptions of her native lands, her love of literature and as she expresses her deepest feelings with her poetic prowess.
The Orchids is Thiery Manirambora's effort that helps the reader go on a journey alongside a real person who has seen it all and has knows the hell and horror of human suffering brought about by hatred, prejudice, racism and violence.
Beginning from chapter one, The Good Old Days, Lucille relates her story from childhood experiences in Byimana in Gitarama, southern Rwanda to chapter twenty seven - the last chapter titled Into Your Hands, Lord... where she tells of friends in school when she was only a girl of eight growing up. She recounts her ordeals in Rwanda, Congo, Burundi and back to Rwanda as she ran in the company of others from place to place, lands to lands, country to country to escape the throes of death.
Some of the most touching parts of The Orchids are the poetic ways Lucille expresses her thoughts and feelings. To one of her late female friend Assia, she expresses her feelings with this lines:
Assia, your eyes are ocean of friendship. On each shore of your gaze, there are words that sail over to the other side. Chirping birds swim airily in the clouds and inscribe paths in the middle of the desert. Migrating birds flee the winter of my heart for the warmth of your eyes. At the bottom of your silence you will see path that lead straight towards a new year. no matter how hard it is for you to believe it.
Lucille at the end challenges us all to rise above and beyond cruelties that life throws at us. She is the example of the heroes that resides in each one of us. She urges us to fight on as far as there's breath in our nostrils - to fight on and fulfil the beauties that lies within and ahead of us all. The Orchids will leave you re-evaluating your attitudes to living, obligations to fellow suffering humans and the overall big picture.
This is one book that will take you on an emotion-filled tour of the life of a young woman who know what it mean to suffer, to love, to be loved, to loose loved ones to war and to loose one's home to an unneeded and meaningless genocide. A young woman who will tell you her side of the hell that broke loose 20 years ago in the Land of a Thousand Hills.This is the story of sufferings and pains and of courage and of resilience.
As the world remembers the Rwandan genocide of April 1994, we use this to commensurate with all those who have lost loved ones in one crises or another presently across the world, especially in Nigeria.
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