Rwanda Journey: Bisesero

The first thing that struck me at Bisesero was the silence, a silence that took hold in my own heart. Not a silence of avoidance and denial but a sort of noble silence, a silence that tells all, if you are willing to listen. It has been weeks since my visit to this remote genocide memorial site and it is only now that a few words come to me.

An hour and a half of jolting travel on a rutted road from Kibuye, past endless terraced slopes, past a UNHCR camp for refugees from Burundi, and past expansive tea plantations, finally brought us to the Bisesero memorial site where we emerge into the quiet of rolling hills under a wide sky.

The silence here carries across the hills and valleys to the wild steep hill where for several months the Tutsi mounted a fierce resistance to the genocidaires before they were finally massacred.

This fight back is powerfully symbolic to post genocide Rwanda, perhaps comparable to the Warsaw Ghetto story. Here, in the early days, Hutu and Tutsi neighbours banded together, to defend their hills against outside attack (although this alliance later broke apart.) Appointed leaders developed a military strategy, striking first to gain advantage against a superior enemy and then retreating to their hilltop refuge. Their extraordinary courageous stance, in the face of hunger, an armed enemy and decimation, will not be forgotten.

Inside a simple shed the shutters are pulled back, allowing a breeze to come through the open window and showing the shivering green leaves of a young tree. The dirt-floored rectangular building is filled with a rickety pole structure supporting tables of planks that hold the pale reminders of the massacre. I move silently and slowly along rows and rows of skulls, stacks of leg and arm bones.

I give in to my desire to touch the remains and surreptitiously stroke a skull, just one, a delicate touch with the end of my finger over the slightly rough surface and I wonder about the story that brought this particular skull here.

Oddly, the rest of the skeletons are buried in a mass grave at the top of the hill, a peaceful spot surrounded by trees and nearby a thick grove of still and somehow enchanted pines.

I don’t know what to make of this separation of skeletons, part in the shed, part in the graves, the dead strangely dismembered for ritualized memorialization. The skulls and bones in the shed require care: regular two dusting and every six weeks or two months preservatives are brought up from Kigali and carefully applied.

We follow a paved path upwards to the mass graves. The path enters and exits several brick buildings with empty curved rooms off to both sides. One day these buildings will hold an exhibit about what happened at Bisesero: the long history of repelling attackers, how the Tutsi converged here believing they would be safe as they always had been before, the heroic resistance and the sorrowful ending.

An exhibit seems a good idea, there is nothing of the story told here other than that offered by the site guide. But perhaps pictures and words will make it impossible to hear what I hear now in the silence - the noise, the flaring agony, the gunshots, the explosions, the screams.

These buildings will also hold the bones now in the shed but I don’t like this plan at all. I don’t want the bones constrained. I don’t want them moved from the simplicity of the metal roof the dirt floor and the air blowing through the cracks. If they are not to be buried, I want them left in this building that feels part of the land. I want to feel the earth under my feet.

I don’t want these buildings at all, really. I would have preferred a dirt path to the mass graves. I want nothing to intrude on the silence except the beating of the heart so that a fierce imagination, a reverence and compassion can drift freely in the open air, under the expansive sky, amongst these hills, and so that the story is held in a vastness that is big enough for it.

The story needs to be told, of course, but I am glad that I know only the barest of plotlines while I am at Bisesero.

After coming home I wait for some weeks for the right time to learn more, perhaps afraid that the sacred silence I felt and that I still carry inside will disappear into words that cannot ever really tell what happened, what people suffered, what people did, how they lived and how they died and how, for the few survivors, they manage to continue.

For survivors there is always a tension. The story must be told; the story can never be fully told. I feel that tension in my conversations with survivors but at Bisesero I felt a somatic listening, the full surround of the past.

A week later, I take home from the memorial centre a book of testimony from Bisesero. It is in French, which is perfect because my French is elementary and so I am slowed down, don’t read more than a few pages at a time. Which is just right. (Thanks to Phil for contributing some words to this story.)

The terraced hillsides on the way to Bisesero