When the Hutu death machine hummed without check, when her own friends and neighbors were hunting her down, and when hope seemed like an impossible luxury, Immaculée turned to God:
“Seven weeks in the bathroom had left us all frighteningly gaunt… Sitting on the hard floor became increasingly uncomfortable as our muscle and fat disappeared, leaving us with no padding on our bottoms… the bathroom grew roomier ... We were shrinking… Since we hadn’t showered or changed our clothes since we arrived, we were plagued by a vicious infestation of body lice… We may not have been a pretty sight, but I’d never felt more beautiful. Each day I awoke and thanked God.” (113)
Left To Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust is a book about turning the other cheek even when that cheek is hollowed out with starvation and infested with bites from body lice.
We readers would have fallen in love with Immaculée even if her faith was all gone, driven away by her family’s murderers, by her loss of every right she ever enjoyed. It would have been okay with us if she had abandoned religion the way it seemed to abandon her. What other conclusion, as the world’s superpowers ignored her plight, could she have reached? Of course her faith was dead.
But it wasn’t dead. It lived. And it grew stronger. Mightier. Love was the key that unlocked her salvation and her survival. Can you imagine?
Day and night, hours upon hours a day, Immaculée whispered to God. A devout Catholic clutching the rosary her father had given her, she experienced dreams and visions in a heightened state of fervent prayer in her tiny prison that had become her sanctuary: (emphasis hers)
“The killers were in the [Pastor’s house]…I’m praying so hard, God, so hard… but they’re so close and I’m so tired! Oh God… I’m so tired… I felt faint… I floated like a feather above the other women… I looked up and saw Jesus hovering above me… Suddenly I was back on the floor again with the others. Their eyes were still closed, but mine were wide open, staring at a giant cross of brilliant white light stretching from wall to wall in front of the bathroom door… I knew instinctively that a kind of Divine force was emanating from the cross, which would repel the killers.” (131)
The killers did not find her then, nor ever. She seemed impervious to discovery. Who’s to say what was real in the midst of that terrible reality? Months ago, it would have seemed totally absurd for her not to know if her family was alive or dead.
“I was born in paradise.” This is the first sentence of Immaculée’s book. We can only assume that this is going to be a paradise lost story. But it’s the opposite—a paradise captured and expanded, a paradise glowing and growing. Immaculée is her own story’s paradise, the only place left for hope to hide out.
And paradise begins, of course, with a loving family in the beautiful hills of her village with a view of Lake Kivu. Neighbors and friends, even a boyfriend at school. She loses it all and we lose it with her.
