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A review by liralen
The Tears of a Man Flow Inward: Growing Up in the Civil War in Burundi by Pacifique Irankunda
3.0
I find it hard to look back because most of what I see when I look back is painful. One doctrine of Western psychology has long held that the cure for the pain of memory is a return to the past itself. Burundian culture holds an opposite view. I now realize that each approach has its own wisdom. But for me the past is inescapable. (xv)
Irankunda was a young child when civil war broke out in Burundi, and that war stretched to encompass his entire childhood and coming of age. His family was on and off separated and internally displaced: staying with relatives in safer areas, sleeping in the forest night after night, living with the fear that comes of not knowing whether the neighbour you help this week will be the same one to come to your house with a machete next week.
I've read a handful of memoirs about the war in Burundi, and this is one of the first in which the writer was a child—not a teenager, not an adult—when war broke out. Time has passed, but some wounds cannot heal completely, and some memories are with you forever. But it's also striking that Irankunda and his family stayed largely in their home: even as their world fell apart around them, his mother tried to hold on to what they knew. Later, and I'm not sure when exactly this was relative to the end of the war but it would have been very close to it, Irankunda studied at the same school where many of his brother's classmates had been massacred. There's so much to unpack there—it's hard to compute.
Structure-wise, I found the book to be a bit scattered, drifting between present and various points in the past. I would have liked some more concrete details, and more of a sense of what happened to the rest of his family, during the war or in general. But it ends up being a very thoughtful, painful look at culture and trauma.
Irankunda was a young child when civil war broke out in Burundi, and that war stretched to encompass his entire childhood and coming of age. His family was on and off separated and internally displaced: staying with relatives in safer areas, sleeping in the forest night after night, living with the fear that comes of not knowing whether the neighbour you help this week will be the same one to come to your house with a machete next week.
I've read a handful of memoirs about the war in Burundi, and this is one of the first in which the writer was a child—not a teenager, not an adult—when war broke out. Time has passed, but some wounds cannot heal completely, and some memories are with you forever. But it's also striking that Irankunda and his family stayed largely in their home: even as their world fell apart around them, his mother tried to hold on to what they knew. Later, and I'm not sure when exactly this was relative to the end of the war but it would have been very close to it, Irankunda studied at the same school where many of his brother's classmates had been massacred. There's so much to unpack there—it's hard to compute.
Structure-wise, I found the book to be a bit scattered, drifting between present and various points in the past. I would have liked some more concrete details, and more of a sense of what happened to the rest of his family, during the war or in general. But it ends up being a very thoughtful, painful look at culture and trauma.