Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds

Description

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 by Kirkus • A New York Times Book Review Paperback Row Selection • Shortlisted for the Moore Prize for Human Rights Writing

A stunning and heartbreaking lens on the global refugee crisis, from a man who faced the very worst of humanity and survived to advocate for displaced people around the world

One day when Mondiant Dogon, a Bagogwe Tutsi born in the Democratic Republic of Congo, was only three years old, his father’s lifelong friend, a Hutu man, came to their home with a machete in his hand and warned the family they were to be killed within hours. Dogon’s family fled into the forest, initiating a long and dangerous journey into Rwanda. They made their way to the first of several UN tent cities in which they would spend decades. But their search for a safe haven had just begun.

Hideous violence stalked them in the camps. Even though Rwanda famously has a former refugee for a president in Paul Kagame, refugees in that country face enormous prejudice and acute want. For much of his life, Dogon and his family ate barely enough to keep themselves from starving. He fled back to Congo in search of the better life that had been lost, but there he was imprisoned and left without any option but to become a child soldier.

For most refugees, the camp starts as an oasis but soon becomes quicksand, impossible to leave. Yet Dogon managed to be one of the few refugees he knew to go to college. Though he hid his status from his fellow students out of shame, eventually he would emerge as an advocate for his people.

Rarely do refugees get to tell their own stories. We see them only for a moment, if at all, in flight: Syrians winding through the desert; children searching a Greek shore for their parents; families gathered at the southern border of the United States. But through his writing, Dogon took control of his own narrative and spoke up for forever refugees everywhere.

As Dogon once wrote in a poem, “Those we throw away are diamonds.”“Notwithstanding the brutality he describes, Dogon’s tale possesses a beguiling delicacy. We never lose sight of his humanity, even if he often doubts it himself . . . This book beautifully captures the colossal waste that the refugee experience—essentially a state of suspended animation—represents . . . refugees are engaged in a dogged battle to endow a modicum of dignity to lives over which they exert almost no control. Dogon rises to that challenge far better than most of us would.” —New York Times Book Review

“Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds is a jarring reminder that we must never forget the refugee . . . And this is what makes Those We Throw Are Diamonds spectacular: war destroys; war burns things to the ground; war strips us naked. But our ability to retain our humanity afterward is what keeps us going.” —Isele Magazine

“Throughout this memoir, Dogon shares stories about his family and their efforts to find safety. His plea is that the world does not forget the many refugees still living in stateless purgatory. Verdict: Those interested in international relations, immigration, and social work will find Dogon’s firsthand account essential reading.” —Library Journal

“An eloquent and necessary plea for compassion for war refugees everywhere . . . In a beautifully heartfelt, plainspoken account, a refugee from the Congo-Rwanda wars breaks his silence to reveal his family’s story of fleeing their home amid unimaginable violence . . . With the assistance of journalist Krajeski, Dogon movingly, tragically describes the trauma he and his family endured. The pain was so deep that even among them, they could not talk about what they had witnessed, which led to a terrible, debilitating silence . . . Now, Dogon is able to advocate for the plight of all who suffer the terrors of civil war. Throughout, he delivers effectively vivid details of his life and culture, and it’s clear that he is dedicated to helping others in similar terrible circumstances.” —Kirkus (starred)

“Searing debut memoir . . . The result is an immensely moving memorial to the Rwandan tragedy.” —Publishers Weekly (starred)

“In Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds we enter into the life and world of Mondiant Dogon, an exceptional young person, who has lived far beyond his years. The story is full of wisdom, goodwill, and the grace that human beings can deliver each other—even as the battles wage around us. It is a refusal to throw away memories of hardship and hope, of resilience and tragedies, of the conditions of our world and the circumstances that might lift us above the fray to offer kindness and care.” —Kao Kalia Yang, author of Somewhere in the Unknown World

“A difficult dive into one of the bloodiest genocides in modern history leading to years of continuous suffering as a refugee. Dogon brings back to life the inhumanity he faced in order to open the hearts and minds of its readers connecting them to those who have been disconnected by unimaginable tragedy.” —Atia Abawi, author of A Land of Permanent Goodbyes

“A harrowing story told with wisdom and grace, in a crisp, sensory style that instantly transports. From the first page, my heart was in my mouth.” —Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee

“Mondiant Dogon takes us on a journey through a heartrending window into the lives of the humans that live in Congo, Rwanda and Gihembe. Besides the heartbreaking accounts in the story, Mondiant also gives us the positive and human stories that do exist in his story, his family’s and his fellow refugees’. This book should be read world-wide to counter the rhetoric of refugees as nothing but helpless, unable to do anything for their lives. This book shows otherwise.” —Abdi Nor Iftin, author of Call Me American
 
“This incandescent book will transform you. Those We Throw Away Are Diamonds offers an immersive, riveting look at one Bagogwe man’s singular journey from war in Congo to safety, in which good and evil are relative when war offers no good choices to anyone, when safety is an illusion, and when forgiveness is fraught. It is an uncompromising study in colonial powers as the root cause of rising displacement after centuries of redrawing boundaries, fomenting ethnic crises, and robbing regions of natural resources. But even as it offers high-level, international context, the book remains focused on the people whose lives are destroyed by war and policies, by disinterest and pity. Mondiant Dogon writes the stories of his community with such candor, compassion, and love that they can never be erased. I know I will never forget them.” —Jessica Goudeau, author of After the Last BorderMondiant Nshimiyimana Dogon is a Congolese author, human rights activist, and refugee ambassador. He is the founder and Executive Director of Mondiant Initiative, a nonprofit organization providing scholarships and support services to empower, educate, and engage refugees. Born into a Congolese Tutsi family in Bagogwe tribe in North Kivu province, he was forced to leave his home village, Bikenke, at the age of three because of the Rwandan genocide against Tutsis that spilled over into Congo.

Jenna Krajeski is a reporter for The Fuller Project whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Nation, among other publications. She is the coauthor of Nobel laureate Nadia Murad’s memoir, The Last Girl, and was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan.

One

When I was a child in Bikenke, a village in northeast Congo, my grandmother told terrifying stories in an attempt to teach me about the world. Fierce animals and venomous snakes are waiting in the forest nearby, she told me, so be careful where you walk alone. Don’t get close to the fire or a snapping turtle will come out of the flames and bite you. From far away, a chimpanzee looks like a person. Keep your distance from anyone you don’t recognize.

Her stories sent me whimpering to bed. But nothing could have prepared me for how scared I was the morning my father showed up at the door to our house, bleeding from the head.

I was a child; I didn’t understand what was happening. The mat I sat on, like always, smelled of sharp eucalyptus because it was woven from eucalyptus leaves. Fruit weighed down the branches of the mango tree that grew by our front door; because a year had passed since we last ate them, they were ripe again and would taste sweet. My baby sister, Patience, full of milk, was quiet in my mother’s arms. Outside, the rain had turned our roads into pits of mud that came up to our knees if we tried to run on them. Would we have to run now?

My mother turned away from me. She couldn’t stop my father from bleeding. “I’ll get some herbs,” she said. “Wait here.” Watching her leave, I felt fear creep into my chest. Would she also be bleeding when she returned? Would she be gone forever? Soon she came back through our door carrying some small green plants that were sprouting yellow flowers.

Despite feeling as though, at three years old, I had explored all of Congo with my little fingers, I had never seen those plants before. I watched while she pounded the plants into a yellow paste and spread it over my father’s face. It mixed with his blood to become a disgusting dark orange. I looked away.

“Last night I was drinking with Mbashagure,” my father said. “He warned me that Bagogwe were going to be attacked.”

Mbashagure was my father’s closest Hutu friend and one of our many Hutu neighbors. His ethnicity, like mine as a Bagogwe, a community of Tutsis who lived in both eastern Congo and western Rwanda, was meaningless to me. I was a child and the fighting in Congo-at the time called Zaire-and across the border in Rwanda wasn’t a part of my life, although the adults followed it as closely as was possible in our rural village. They tuned an old radio to Voice of America, where journalists reported attacks on Tutsis-a slaughter near the border, a village burned in the center of the country-in mechanical, unemotional tones. Helicopters sometimes flew overhead. Every weekend Bagogwe adults gathered around a large fire to trade stories and warnings. “This village was attacked,” they would say. “That family was killed,” another reported, sounding like a more exhausted version of the Voice of America reporters. Because we were Tutsi, we had to keep keenly aware of what was happening so close by. We didn’t have a plan, though. Leaving Bikenke was inconceivable. There was nowhere for us to go.

A loud thump at the door made Patience begin to whimper. My father reached for his spear. “I heard you were attacked.” Mbashagure stood in the doorway looking stricken, wincing at the sight of my strong father, a leader in the village, sitting weakened on the floor with his face covered in the sickly orange paste. “I am so sorry.”

Mbashagure was a good man. His family was like a part of our family, and he told us what was coming. Hutus in northeast Congo-some of whom had escaped or been expelled from Rwanda because of their role in the genocide-had been collecting weapons, intending to attack Tutsis. They considered us strangers in our own home. For generations, we had been told that Belgian colonists, eager to exploit the land for their own wealth and establish a hierarchy that they could control, brought Tutsis to Congo from Ethiopia or Rwanda to manage the land they had stolen. As we farmed the land and took care of the cattle, we tried to ignore the accusation that we didn’t belong there. Traditionally Bagogwe were nomadic, traveling between Congo and Rwanda; before colonialism, those geographical differences hadn’t mattered. We were Congolese. This was as much our land as anyone’s, we thought.

Even before the genocide began in Rwanda, Tutsis were targets of mass killing within Congo. When the genocide began and spilled across the border, the hatred became impossible to ignore. Neighbor turned against neighbor; friend against friend; family member against family member. That genocide is a familiar story now, and by the time it crossed into Congo perhaps people had already grown weary of it. This wave of violence was new-terrifying, spontaneous, life-changing-but our cries fell on a world of deaf ears. Our Hutu neighbors told us that it was time for us to leave and return our land to the people they considered the real Congolese. To me-then as a young child, and still today-the idea of leaving our home was absurd. My family was Congolese and had been for as long as anyone could remember. Where would we go?

By the time my father was attacked, it was too late to try to reason with our neighbors. The people who hated us had already collected weapons of all kinds. I recognized most of these weapons. Some were normally used on the farm. They were the everyday tools that were supposed to help feed us. There were also weapons men carried with them in case they encountered a leopard or a lion, meant to protect us. Then there were weapons people kept in case they were attacked by other men, like guns and grenades. I was a child, but I knew what these objects meant. They filled me with dread. If you had them, it meant you were scared of something.

“I gave them weapons, too.” Mbashagure hung his head, ashamed. “I didn’t have a choice. You need to leave. They are planning to attack your house at six in the evening.” It was late afternoon, almost time for my sister Furaha and my brother, Faustin, to come home from the fields where they were taking care of the cows.

“I’m telling you this because you have been my best friend since we were kids,” Mbashagure said to my father. I noticed that he carried a machete in his left hand. “I don’t want to see you killed in front of my own eyes.”

I think that every refugee can identify the moment their life changed forever: a final attack that drives you from your home near Damascus, the impossible stab of hunger that causes you to board a rubber dinghy from Libya to Italy, the realization that your religion may force you across the border from Myanmar into Bangladesh. Before I saw my father appear at our front door, bleeding from the head, I was the son of Congolese cattle ranchers, a child content to grow in the shade of our house until I was big enough to help on the farm. After my father was attacked, I became a homeless, displaced person, at the beginning of a long journey to a refugee camp that most of us would never leave. It was one unexpected moment that changed everything, and I have spent the two and a half decades since thinking about it.

As he ran, my father’s face swelled and the veins on his neck bulged. Rain, sweat, and blood covered him almost to his waist. In one arm he carried the small amount of food we had grabbed before racing out of our house, and in the other he carried me. My mother, at our side, had Patience strapped to her back in a brightly colored kitenge sling. With every step my cheek banged against my father’s wet shoulder. His blood ran onto my head and dripped down my face and neck. I must have looked like I had also been attacked, although I was healthy, fat even, and without a single bruise on my smooth skin. Soon my father’s legs began to buckle, and his arm wilted around my back. “I’m weak,” he told my mother, putting me down. My mother caught me and ran with me into the forest. My father collapsed on the road behind us.

Once, after my grandmother had finished telling us a story about a disobedient boy who had been attacked by a ferocious animal, I asked her to tell me what a dead person looked like. She didn’t think that children should be sheltered from the world, and so she did. A dead person was limp and unmoving, she said. It was just a body, empty of blood and spirit, deflated as though ready to blow away but heavy like butchered meat. It was important to understand that a dead body is no longer a person, and to bury it quickly so that what you remember is the soul of the person who once lived inside.

Lying there, bleeding in the muck of the drenched road, my father looked like the dead person my grandmother had described. He was vanishing, his flesh unmoving except to cough out the last little bits of who he was. Why had my mother left him there? As though sensing my rage, she dashed out of the forest and dragged him to safety. Oh, I understood, she wasn’t strong enough to carry all three of us at once. I felt my little heart soften toward her again.

Crouching in the forest, we heard laughter and talking in the distance. “Keep quiet,” my mother said to my father, who was groaning. “People are coming to kill us. Keep quiet.” He didn’t stop, deaf with pain. With one hand she covered his mouth, and with the other cradled Patience up to her chest, feeding her to keep her from crying. I was so young, but I knew enough about war to know to keep my mouth shut and hold my breath.

“There’s blood.” A man stopped on the road only a few feet from where we were hiding, pointing at the red stain where my father had been. He walked with a group, all carrying weapons. Some had grenades strapped to their belts, others carried long guns capped with sharp bayonets. One had a red bandanna tied around his head, and some wore banana tree fronds around their waists. The airy swish of the fronds as they walked terrified me.

“I smell it,” one of his companions said.

“Maybe it was an animal,” another said. “Let’s look around and see if we can find it.”

“Let me,” said the man in the red bandanna. By the tone of his voice and the way the other men parted to let him through, I could tell that he was the commander. “I will know whether it’s man or animal,” he said.

The commander knelt on the road and ran his cupped hands through the red puddle, then brought them up to his face. Slowly, like someone taking the first sip of hot tea, he drank. Then he shook the rest of my father’s blood back onto the road. “It’s salty,” he said. “It belongs to a man. He must have been bleeding here just a few minutes ago.”

“I see a line of blood going into those bushes,” another said, pointing in our direction. They walked toward us and peered through the thick trees to where we sat. Their eyes were impatient, like mine when I was begging my mother for something sweet. I was sure that they saw us and I held my breath to keep it from shaking the leaves and giving us away. My mother hung her head and closed her eyes, praying, maybe. Patience cooed and sucked at her breast. My father swallowed his groans.

Every second of my father’s life up to this point had been a miracle. He was born early, a tiny, doomed baby, and his mother died moments after. Without milk to feed him, his family was forced to contemplate sparing him the torture of slow starvation. There were impossible but ultimately merciful decisions that Bagogwe, who didn’t have access to formula to feed their babies or hospitals to incubate them, had to make. But my father was lucky. Word of this tiny, motherless baby spread throughout Bikenke until a woman-a righteous, aging, childless woman and inspired storyteller-heard it and volunteered to take him in.

My grandmother loved my father from the moment she saw him, producing her own milk to feed him, and as he grew, she gave him opportunities that other boys didn’t have. She and my grandfather owned cows and land, and they sent my father to a boarding school until he was sixteen; afterward he got an apprenticeship on a Belgian estate, where he studied veterinary medicine. Once a week he walked for two full days between Bikenke and the Belgian estate, hiding from large animals and eating fruit from trees along with whatever food he brought from home. Congo then was still under Belgian occupation, and although eventually we would all come to celebrate our independence and understand colonialism as slavery, my father knew that the apprenticeship was the best way for him to learn a trade.

As he got older, he acquired more land and more livestock, which he kept healthy on his own, and built a reputation in the region for his skill with animals. By the time I was born, he had become a chief, a leader often called upon to resolve disputes and help make important decisions within Bikenke. He was a person other villagers looked up to. Now it seemed likely he would be killed by these laughing men, a casualty of incomprehensible hatred.

For a reason I could not fathom, the men turned away from the forest that concealed us. Maybe they couldn’t make out our faces. Maybe they were daunted by the mess the rain had made, and the hassle of wrestling through the wet plants and deep mud to reach us. That effort, I thought, might take time away from their joyous, murderous spree. For a moment, we felt saved. Then the commander spoke. “Let’s go,” he said. “I’m sure we can follow this blood to Bikenke. We have orders. We have to find Sedigi and kill him first.” Sedigi was my father’s name.

My life has often felt like a series of stories, half remembered and half told to me. One was about my father’s ambition, another about my grandmother’s bottomless love. There was a time when I had many brothers and sisters and, because my father had been married before, many half brothers and sisters as well. Our home was sometimes so busy it felt like a village market, but we were mostly joyful, and we lived with purpose. We had jobs to do. Those of us who were old enough took turns working on the farm, taking care of the cattle and tending to vegetables and sugarcane. Young children made a job of absorbing my grandmother’s wisdom, listening to her fables and stories and preparing mentally for the rigors of the grown-up world. The children in the middle were asked to gather water and firewood. Both jobs could be risky-children did, as my grandmother warned, fall into the river and drown-but, at the same time, as long as you were careful, you could return home with a hero’s cargo.

US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.6800 × 5.4500 × 8.3100 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09781984881304
ISBN-10	1984881302
Author	Jenna Krajeski, Mondiant Dogon
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BIO032000, SOC066000
Subjects	autobiographies, refugee, true stories, biographies, inspirational books, motivational books, memoirs, book club recommendations, SOC066000, refugees, autobiography, political books, rwanda, biographies of famous people, autobiography books, sociology books, memoir books, biographies and memoirs, refugee books, social activists, military, inspirational, politics, immigration, war, inspiration, family, social justice, biography, Memoir, history, BIO032000, activists, medicine, survival, Sociology, activism, true story, activist, history books