Book Review:  ​https://wp.me/p3cyvH-LSi

Author Interview - Richard Scott Sacks

Sometimes great events touch us deeply.

Drinking from the Stream follows two young men in 1971 who are on the run and attempting to escape their pasts by traveling to East Africa, where their personal reckonings unfold alongside violence. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

In June 1972 when I was twenty-two years old and hitchhiking across Africa I was sitting in a student cafeteria at the University of Luanda reading the International Herald Tribune. Angola was then a Portuguese colony but armed African guerrillas in the countryside were fighting to overthrow white-minority rule. I had been hosted at the Zaire border by conscripted Portuguese soldiers who had seen combat with MPLA guerrillas. An article caught my eye that morning about ethnic killings in Burundi. I had been within fifty miles of Burundi, having hitchhiked from Ethiopia through Kenya, Uganda, and Rwanda, then to Zaire (Congo) and Angola. The article described a bloody uprising in late April 1972 where Hutu rebels had used pangas — machetes — to kill hundreds of unsuspecting Tutsi citizens with the idea of sparking a civil war to end Tutsi rule. Even more shocking were the slaughters by the Burundi army that followed. It turned out that unemployed Hutu school teachers — unable to find a job in Tutsi-ruled Burundi — had led the revolt. Burundi’s solution to  the unemployment problem was to kill all the educated Hutus they could find. The Tutsi-led army countered the Hutu death squads with a much bigger, much better organized ethnic bloodletting of their own, killing any Hutu who had completed the fourth grade. Tens of thousands were already dead, the report said, and the killings were gathering momentum with no end in sight. By 1973 well over 200,000 Hutus had been murdered.

This made a deep impression on me. How could so many people be murdered so quickly? More importantly, why was the world ignoring it? And why and how did it come about? What if I had decided, as was entirely possible, to visit Burundi myself? And if I had, I would have been on the spot when the killings broke out. What then? The entire African continent seemed to be on a bloody run. A year or two back, peace had been restored to Zaire, formerly the Democratic Republic of the Congo, after ten years of mayhem and revolt. Mass ethnic killings were in full swing in 1972 in Uganda, when I was there, led by the Ugandan army under Idi Amin. Rwanda had seen bloody spasms of anti-Tutsi violence even before independence in the early 1960s. And all of southern Africa, not just Angola, was in revolt against white minority rule. The 1994 Tutsi holocaust in Rwanda was still twenty-two years away.

This is a coming-of-age novel, but a harsh one. What does “growing up” mean here?

I spent three years in Africa when I was quite young. I worked construction jobs in the bush and at line camps I bumped into white supremacists. Basically, they were American nazis. I kept my distance even though they sometimes tried to recruit me. They spoke openly of violence against Jews and Blacks. Listening to them made me extremely angry. They had no idea I was Jewish. But what would happen if I wasn’t Jewish and one of them thought I was? That was the inspiration for Jake Ries.

The characters discover that their choices impose responsibility that must be faced and borne, there’s no magic that will make it disappear, and its weight increases over time. Knowledge imposes its own burden. And it doesn’t matter if they never wished to make those choices or learn those things in the first place. Maybe they never asked for them, but they still can’t put them down.

What scenes were hardest to write—not technically, but ethically?

This may sound funny, given the extent of political chicanery in the plot, but the parts of the book that gave me the most trouble were working out Karl’s relationships with his girlfriends, first Helen, then Swee’Pea. Karl might have been conflicted about both those relationships, particularly in combination, but I wanted to present them as believable dilemmas not only for Karl, but for both women, while trying to be fair to all three.

What lessons from the 1970s feel disturbingly contemporary?

What I see today is that resentments never cease, that humanity is easily misled and memories are short; that peace is fragile, something not to be taken for granted; that politicians can seduce thousands, or millions, to contemplate unspeakable acts; that the great issues of the past, which we thought were finally settled, are never really settled; and that active individuals following the ancient moral codes or their own personal compass to judge right from wrong can do a great deal of good.