Legacy

He doesn’t know whom he is, although he knows where he is from. His parents are dead. He was four during the genocide. He is twenty now, with one uncle, one aunt and some cousins. His relatives will not tell him his ethnicity or what happened to his parents. His uncle says, “You are Rwandan. That is all you need to know.” Is this an impulse for protection in an uncertain future or a proud belief in the new post-tribal Rwanda? He worries every night about survival, about having enough food. He yearns for love and friendship.

She sits on a low stool, outside her umugudu home. An umugudu is a built village that gathers rural residents together in new housing. This umugudu is a row of brick housing, each house with a living room, bedroom and a smoky kitchen where food is cooked on charcoal at a three-stone hearth. The house is high-ceilinged and cool. She sits on her stool, and says she is grateful for the home. But she has no plot to farm and so she is too poor. Her land is somewhere else and she cannot, will not go there; she does not feel safe. She wonders aloud why the government cannot trade land so that she can have a plot that she can walk too? Talking disturbs her and she gets off her stool and flees, crying.

They teach history, they teach about the genocide and about new ways of being together. They tell stories to bring their teaching alive, not their own stories although they have their own stories. Their stories are not buried deep and are easily activated. Sometimes she fights tears while talking; they are both exhausted at the end of the day. They need to reassemble themselves, over and over.

He is twenty-three now, he was seven then. His father died before the genocide; his mother, a Hutu, murdered while trying to protect Tutsi. He is a survivor, then, not of genocide itself as he is not a member of the group targeted for death but he is the survivor of a resistor, which unfortunately does not qualify him for survivor scholarship assistance for his medical studies.

They hang out at the shopping intersection where the bus drops me off after work, another generation of orphans. The dusty, dirty, ghostly children sidle up, speak in hoarse absent voices, in three languages, all languages conveying the imperative intonation of Kinyarwanda. “Madam, j’ai faim.” “Abafaranga.” “Give me money.”  We are told (is it really so) that at night they hide in underground pipes to avoid the army who sweep up the homeless, the beggars and those with simple misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time and take them to vocational re-education camps.

The legacy of violence and trauma. In one of Jean Hatzfeld’s books a survivor, Claudine, comments that marriage has made her “content in the present moment, but I already know that the past has ruined the future.”

As I write this, I hear three explosions. I cannot tell how far away they are or what they are, but I think, grenades.