The Rebels’ Hour

By Lieve Joris
Translated from Dutch by Liz Waters
320 pp. Grove Press, 2008 $24

Reviewed by Kelly Stewart

Fourteen years ago in Rwanda, a plane carrying the country’s Hutu president is shot down. The event sparks a 100-day period of horrifying violence in which an estimated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus are killed. In the wake of the genocide, Rwanda’s neighboring countries are also thrown into turmoil. On Rwanda’s western border, in the Congo, rebels plot to overthrow their country’s dictator.

Amid this chaos, a young Tutsi from Congo’s eastern high plains is pulled into an all-consuming war machine – first as a rebel soldier and later as a general in the Congolese army. In The Rebels’ Hour, the Belgian writer Lieve Joris chronicles the life of this man, whom she calls Assani.

Though Joris is an authority on the Congo, having published two earlier books about the country, she has trouble cracking her subject’s defensive shell. After following him off and on for six years, “I’d done all I could to gain an insight into Assani’s life, but certain periods remained mysterious,” she writes in the book’s foreword. Later she writes, “The facts of this book are true, they’ve all been researched in minute detail, but in order to paint a realistic picture of my characters, I’ve had to fill in some parts of their lives from my own imagination.”

Writers of literary nonfiction must often work with sources reluctant to divulge personal information. Part of the genre’s allure is that writers have the freedom to discuss their own insights into their characters, based on research, observation and interviews with other sources. However, Joris’ statement in the foreword is troubling in light of a recent Publishers Weekly article reporting that The Rebels’ Hour was released as fiction in France but was published as nonfiction in the United States.

There is a gulf between literary nonfiction – an educated analysis of a subject based on reporting and observation – and fiction. From page to page of this book, the reader wonders what is and is not imagined. Yet even if a reader were to take this book at face value as nonfiction, Joris often leaves unanswered questions about Assani’s motivation and his actions as a rebel soldier.

Early in the book, Assani is a dedicated college student who would rather focus on his thesis than discuss the simmering political tension in the Congo. There is an unexplained transition between Assani’s professed disinterest in politics and his abrupt decision to abandon his studies and join the rebel movement. Assani may not have given Joris a clear reason for his decision, but the author should have provided some context to help the reader understand why he boarded a bus bound for a rebel camp.

Later, as a rebel leader with dozens of child soldiers at his command, Assani hardens a group of new recruits by instructing them to shoot and bayonet dead bodies. But Joris does not describe how Assani fought his enemies in the bush. This feels like an attempt to make him a more sympathetic character. Readers need to learn about the horrors Assani has seen and perpetrated to comprehend the panic he later feels when he realizes that he is trapped within Congo’s military structure.

Joris uses Assani to show the grim effect that war has on young men in Africa. And it is remarkable that she is able to develop a level of trust with an inherently suspicious soldier and describe the Congo’s political machinery from his perspective. As a nonfiction study of character, however, this book is less satisfying because the reader is left wondering what is true and what is Joris’ imagination.