95 pages • 3 hours read
Immaculée IlibagizaLeft to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 9-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary: “Into the Bathroom”
After Immaculée says her goodbye to Vianney, Pastor Murinzi leads the Tutsi women “down a dark hallway” to his bedroom, where he ushers them into the small private bathroom: “‘This is where you’ll stay,’ he said, swinging the door open to reveal our new home: a small bathroom about four feet long and three feet wide” (73). The pastor explains the rules that the women will have to follow in order to stay safe: They must remain absolutely quiet at all times, because no one is to know they are here—not even the pastor’s own children. If they need to use the toilet, they will have to wait to flush until someone else in the house flushes, to conceal the noise.
Night falls, and Immaculée makes note of her companions in the bathroom: There is Athanasia, “a pretty, dark-skinned 14-year-old with big beautiful eyes” (74). There is Beata, a 12-year-old still wearing her school uniform. Therese is the eldest of the group at 55 years old, wearing a colorful traditional Rwandan wrap-dress. Claire and Sanda are Therese’s two children: Claire is about 21, and Sanda is the youngest of the group at just 7. The pastor’s warnings for them to remain absolutely quiet have terrified them, and at first they do not move:
We sat in an uncomfortable heap, too afraid to adjust our positions or to even breathe too heavily. We waited for the gray light of dawn to fill the room, then carefully pried ourselves apart to take turns standing or stretching. A two-or three-minute break was all we allowed ourselves before resuming our awkward positions on the floor (75).
In the early evening, Immaculée hears Pastor Murinzi telling a Hutu military man that he wants no trouble with the government—he says he is a good Hutu and would never hide Tutsis in his home. This assuages the military man, and he leaves. The Tutsi women all breathe a sigh of relief. The women quickly develop a sign language to avoid making noise talking to one another. Later in the evening, another frenzy of enraged Hutus gathers around the pastor’s home:
Hundreds of people surrounded the house, many of whom were dressed like devils, wearing skirts of tree bark and shirts of dried banana leaves, and some even had goat horns strapped onto their heads. Despite their demonic costumes, their faces were easily recognizable and there was murder in their eyes (77).
They group—made up of regular civilians, not military personnel—are chanting “kill them, kill them, kill them all; kill them big and kill them small!” (77). Immaculée is shocked that the neighbors she had once lived so peacefully with could have turned so manically anti-Tutsi. At this moment, Immaculée experiences a crisis of faith: She wonders how God could have let this happen. The mob pushes their way into the pastor’s home, searching it top to bottom. The women are frozen in complete terror behind the bathroom wall. When the angry Hutus finally disperse, the pastor comes to check on the women, and they are in a trance-like state, shocked and horrified about the angry mob.
The following day, Pastor Murinzi tells the women in a panic that the Hutu militiamen will return to search again because there are suspicions that Tutsi women are still in the house. After praying on the matter, Immaculée has an idea: There is a wardrobe in Pastor Murinzi’s bedroom that can be moved in front of the bathroom door so that it is completely concealed. The pastor is resistant to the idea, but Immaculée is persistent. She informs him that God has told her that this plan is the only way to keep the women safe from death as the Interahamwe search the home. Finally, the pastor agrees: “He disappeared, and a moment later we heard the wardrobe sliding in front of the bathroom door” (82). The other women are pleased with Immaculée’s idea.
Chapter 10 Summary: “Confronting My Anger”
About a week passes without incident. The women follow Pastor Murinzi’s rules, staying completely silent by not talking, not showering, and only flushing the toilet when another member of his household flushes. Immaculée recalls how the women dealt with bodily functions in such close quarters: “Oddly in all the time that we were in the bathroom, I can’t recall actually seeing someone else use the toilet, even though it was in the middle of our little space, nor do I recall being bothered by ay odors” (83). Food is limited there in the bathroom, and the women are only given table scraps and garbage, so as not to rouse suspicion among other members of the household about missing food.
Pastor Murinzi’s house is subject to be searched by the Interahamwe at any time, so the women are in constant mental anguish and fear that they will be found. To cope with the incessant stress, Immaculée “resolved to pray every waking moment, beginning as soon as my eyes opened at 4 or 5 a.m. My first prayer was always to thank God that the pastor’s home had been built so it could shelter us during the genocide” (84). After her morning prayers, she recites her rosary and then meditates on her favorite Bible passages. All that has happened to Immaculée during the genocide has made her feel as though her faith is under attack, and so she must pray doubly hard to uphold her belief in God: “Sometimes I prayed so intensely that I broke out in a sweat” (84). Immaculée thinks about the nature of faith and the nature of genocide (recalling Nazi Germany.
Soon after, the women hear grenade explosions outside the house, along with the chant of the Interwahame: “Kill them big, kill them small, kill them, kill them, kill them all!” (86). The women steel themselves in the bathroom, bracing for the worst. When the commotion has passed, Pastor Murinzi comes to the bathroom and reports that, even though he saw similar killing sprees in 1959 and 1973, this one is far worse. All of the village has been shut down; schools and markets have been closed for the time being. The pastor reports seeing bodies piled as high as his home outside a nearby church, where the government radio had instructed Tutsis to go for shelter—it turns out that this was a trap, and when Tutsis arrived at this church, they were killed. The women cry at the pastor’s description of life outside the bathroom. They are given some small hope, however, when they turn on a non-Rwandan radio station, one that does not simply spew propaganda—the BBC News—and discover that a group of Tutsi rebels called the Rwandan Patriotic Front are en route to Kigali, with plans to put a stop to the killings.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Struggling to Forgive”
Immaculée is deep in prayer when the Hutu militiamen come to search the pastor’s house, yet again. They come very close to the women huddled in the bathroom when they search the pastor’s bedroom: “They were rummaging through his belongings, ripping things from the wall, lifting up the bed, and overturning chairs” (91). Immaculée estimates that there are forty or fifty militiamen in the pastor’s room at one point, all jeering and yelling. Immaculée’s faith is tested, and she has an internal dialogue in which she asks God why she must forgive the Interwahame, the Hutu militiamen, and all those who played a role in the genocide. She tries to pray, but her prayers “feel hollow.” She prays to God again, asking him to teach her how to forgive.
In between prayers, Immaculée overhears a baby crying, clearly having been abandoned on the roadside beneath the bathroom window. After several hours, the baby’s cries cease—Immaculée presumes it is dead. Immaculée continues praying, and eventually she receives an answer about why she should forgive the Interwahame: “I heard His answer as clearly as if we’d been sitting in the same room chatting: You are all my children…and the baby is with Me now. It was such a simple sentence, but it was the answer to the prayers I’d been lost in for days” (94). Immaculée comes to understand that even the Interwahame are God’s children, and although “their minds had been infected with the evil that had spread across the country…their souls weren’t evil” (94).
Chapter 12 Summary: “No Friends to Turn To”
Immaculée immerses herself in prayer. She prays nearly constantly and finds communion with God is the only respite from the traumas that surround her. One evening near the end of her first full month of hiding, Pastor Murinzi snaps at Immaculée when he comes to the bathroom to deliver scraps of food to the women, saying that her father was a Tutsi and very bad. He then reports a rumor he has heard—that Immaculée’s father had been hiding an enormous quantity of guns and ammunition in their home. Immaculée does not believe a word of what the pastor says and tells him that he must be mistaken.
Immaculée even becomes enraged that the pastor could ignore many years of friendship with her father and believe these lies. When she asks the pastor pressing questions to find out if these rumors are true, he admits that he did not see the guns with his own eyes and therefore cannot verify the truth of the rumors.
Meanwhile, the radio reports that more Tutsis have been killed in Immaculée’s province of Kibuye than in any other. The women are in despair at this news, as it likely means that all their Tutsi friends and family are dead: “There were more than a quarter million Tutsis in Kibuye…how could this be? What about our families?” (99). Soon after the broadcast, Immaculée hears the voice of her old friend Janet—a Hutu—beneath the bathroom window. To Immaculée’s dismay, she is denouncing their entire friendship:
She [Janet] was standing in the yard on the other side of the bathroom wall, and she was talking about me. ‘Immaculée?’ she said. ‘Nobody has found her yet. I thought she was a friend of mine, but she was a liar. She just pretended to like me to trick me into feeling safe. She knew that her father was planning to kill my family…I really don’t care if they find her and kill her’ (99).
After Janet’s renunciation and news that there has been a massacre in Butare on Immaculée’s college campus, Immaculée’s only refuge is found in her prayers.
Chapters 9-12 Analysis
In these chapters, Immaculée enters the bathroom, the location where she will spend the majority of the genocide. The bathroom is almost unthinkably small for even one person, let alone seven, to spend three entire months:
The light shimmered as it bounced off the white enamel tiles on the bottom half of the walls. There was a shower stall at one end and a toilet at the other—the room wasn’t big enough for a sink. And there was a small air vent/window near the ceiling that was covered with a piece of red cloth, which somehow made the room feel smaller (73).
This level of detail demonstrates the trauma Immaculée endures. Her confinement is emphasized when Immaculée describes scenes from the natural world, as she experiences them from inside the bathroom: “When morning broke, the birds in the pastor’s shade tree began singing. I was jealous of them, thinking, How lucky you are to have been born birds and have freedom—after all, look at what we humans are doing to ourselves”(75).
The other element of Immaculée’s trauma is that even the bathroom does not provide full safety from the genocide—danger lurks at all times, and at any moment, Immaculée and the Tutsi women alongside her could be killed: “Any fantasy we had of finding some peace of mind in that bathroom evaporated. Our anxiety about the killers’ return was constant mental and physical torture” (84). Life in the bathroom is physically difficult, but also mentally exhausting. The nonstop anxiety is relieved for Immaculée only through prayer.
Immaculée grapples with why the Rwandan genocide happened. She places her story in a larger historical context, with a nod to the Jewish Holocaust in the 1930s to make the point that history repeats itself:
Young Hutus were taught from an early age that Tutsis were inferior and not to be trusted, and they didn’t belong in Rwanda […] The world had seen the same thing happen many times before. After it happened in Nazi Germany, all the big, powerful countries swore, “Never again!” But here we are, seven harmless females huddled in darkness, marked for execution because we were born Tutsi (86).
Immaculée also notes how quickly the perception of Tutsis changed with ordinary Hutu citizens. Even Pastor Murinzi, who for the most part is sympathetic to the Tutsis, is susceptible to believing the Hutu extremists’ hateful rhetoric: “Now he [Pastor Murinzi] viewed us the way the killers did: as nonhumans, cockroaches that were destined to be exterminated before the war was over” (97). These are the conditions that laid the groundwork for Rwanda’s ethnic cleansing.
