What the breeze carries

African gospel music

Smell of honey

Dragon flies

Dust

Stories

A firefinch's song

Wound

The word that most Rwandans use to describe to me the horrors that were left after the genocide is “wound.” The translation comes from the Kinyarwandan ibikomere which means a deep pain. But I have to say that I appreciate the use of wound in contextualizing such an atrocity. To me, a wound sounds like something corporal, something of the flesh that can be fixed with some of mama’s spit and stitches. Even the sound of the word seems destined to wholeness – with your mouth formed in a round soft circle.

But what deep wounds they are.

This morning I was told two stories of female survivors of the genocide. Such stories are not told, or heard, lightly. But nevertheless, they are relatively common to hear and then to share. Sometimes I feel like they are heavy bowling balls which, upon hearing their contents, one has to carry around until they find someone else to give it to temporarily. You literally heave with the effort of telling it and then passing it to the next person. The stories flesh out the specific horrors of the genocide. That it was not only “a genocide” but also 800,000 singular murders. The stories also demonstrate how the most common tools of the genocide were the machete and the rape. Many women and girls were murdered after being raped, but some went on to live and to give new life.

The first story I heard today was told on the radio by a young woman of 22. She had been 6 in 1994 when the Interhamwe raped her and her mother then murdered her mother as she stood next to her, holding her hand. When the little girl cried out in despair, only able to utter to her mother’s murderers that she was thirsty, the murderers slit her mother’s wrist and forced the young girl to drink her own mother’s dying blood. The second was a story of a young couple in love. They became engaged with plans to marry. But when the genocide began, the man told his fiancé to put on trousers to appear as a man so that they could escape through the night. But they were soon found and the young man was murdered while his fiancé was raped repeatedly. And then they raped her with the gun they had just used to murder her fiancé. Months later she realized she was pregnant.

Well, this woman raised the son she was forced to have. And she loved him. And she still does love him, 15 years later. That is the good news of the story.

But what about the bad news? The news that still bleeds and cries and scabs over and scars and aches with each memory? What mama's spit can possibly heal this wound?

"I am not divisible"

“I am not divisible” were the words that Shalom Director Jean de Dieu used to describe his mixed Hutu-Tutsi parentage. “I just am who I am, I’m Rwandan, I’m not divisible.”

How do you tell that to a genocide? I am not divisible.

It reminds me of a quote I read in John Paul Lederach’s “Building Peace: Sustainable Reconciliation in Divided Societies.” Lederach describes the characteristics of contemporary armed conflict - they are increasingly more internal than international in cause and response, they are based on narrowing concepts of identity, they are fueled by Cold War small weapon production, and, finally, they are “by nature lodged in long-standing relationships.”

Long-standing relationships. Conflicts lodged in long-standing relationships.

Like the Serbs, Bosnians, and Croats. Like the members of the FARC and the Colombian army. Like the long-term inhabitants of Israel and Palestine. Like the Tutsis and Hutus. These are all groups that have been and are in long-standing relationships. Just saying the name of one group is often enough to evoke the name of the other.

But doesn’t it sound so much more difficult to justify violence when you speak of the two conflicting parties as being in a relationship? People who are in relationship seek to understand each other. People who are in relationship try to compromise. People who are in relationship learn to accept one another's faults. And naturally, sometimes people in relationship divorce, move away, lose contact, disagree, neglect, and ignore one another. They grow divided by interests or attitudes, priorities or locations. But does the relationship end there? Or does it stall? Does it die or does it go into hibernation? Do we bring in a third party to fix things? Do we go to a counselor?

Something that has fascinated me about Rwanda post-genocide has been the government’s insistence that all Rwandan refugees return to Rwanda. There are various reasons for this insistence. For one, many refugees were continuing to organize Hutu Power (anti-Tutsi) campaigns in the refugee camps in the Democratic Republic of Congo and other neighboring countries, essentially continuing to be a danger to Rwandan society. Some will also say that the goal of getting genocidaires back into the country is to punish them either through vengeance killings or through prison time. Whatever the intention of the reuniting of the country, it is an interesting phenomenon to me to declare “we are all going to go through this process together.” And they have. Gone through it together. Like the gacaca local judicial tribunals. The community work day, umaganda, where all are requested to chop down overgrowth on roads or dig ditches. The 2,000+ economic cooperatives that have surged post-genocide to incorporate survivors and perpetrators of the genocide into responsible business models. And the thousands of Rwandan homes cohabitated by widowed and orphaned, Tutsi and Hutu. (Philip Gourevitch's book, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow we Will be Killed with our Families, has many interesting cases of this last phenomenon.)

President Kagame has asked the people of Rwanda to 1) start wearing shoes and 2) forgive one another. And we are all waiting to see what happens when a people comes together to do just that.