The other night I watched a DVD, Earth Made of Glass (produced by Deborah Scranton). Subtitled Rwanda After The Genocide, it braids three narratives. One is background and context of the Rwanda genocide, better told elsewhere. The second thread is President Paul Kagame speaking about reconciliation – the difficulties, the challenges, the necessity of living together. He is reflective, even personal. I want so much to believe in him.
The third narrative is the one I want to tell you about. It is the story of a young man, the father of three, who survived the genocide. His father, a doctor, was killed at a roadblock. The narrator, the survivor, is desperate to find someone who will tell him what happened.
He parks his car where the roadblock was and he asks the passing villagers, do you know how the doctor died? He was killed at this roadblock but how, what happened, by whom? The villagers remember the doctor but they say they were not there. They say, I was sick that day, I was sick, until the doctor’s son erupts, was everyone sick that day?
It was an epidemic, says one woman. (An epidemic of denial, an epidemic of murder.)
Eventually, the murderer is named. The murderer is a thin man in a loose white shirt and he sits on a low bench in a house (his house?) while the doctor’s son leans against a wall, leans away, tears in his eyes. The thin man says, he was killed with a hoe. The room is filled with what is unsaid.
I am thinking, this country. This meeting of perpetrator and survivors, this necessity that Kagame speaks of to come together and speak truth. This is not reconciliation but it is something. The room is filled with pain. The thin man says what he is able to say, the doctor’s son hears what he is able to hear. This is a stark room, a poor person’s room, light filtered through agony.
The thin man takes the doctor’s son and the doctor’s grandson, a serious boy, to where the killing happened. The villagers have come around, some of them, in some way, and they have come with hoes. They dig. They find bones. They put down their hoes and put their hands in the soft red earth. They speak in hushed tones. Look, here are ribs. We must get a sack. We can get one in the market, Look here is the skull.
The doctor’s son looks away. His tears fall again. I look at the careful hands parting the earth with reverence (what have these hands done, whom have they injured).
What is happening here? A murderer leads the son of his victim to the grave. There are no police standing by, no justice representatives. There are only villagers with hoes and a confessed murderer, carefully putting into a sack the disintegrating remains of a man murdered here fifteen years ago.
It is raining as the doctor’s son drives away with his sack. The thin man stands in the rain by the roadside.
There is much that is not said, there are questions that are not answered, but something has happened. What? Forgiveness has not happened, friendship has not happened, but survivor and perpetrator have met. With the release of the bones from the roadside into the blessed Rwandan rain, something has happened. Perpetrator and survivor have met. They have a relationship now.
The bones are buried with dignity at a memorial site. The doctor’s grandson will not seek revenge. He says, I am Rwandan.
You can read a review of this film at:
http://genevaanderson.wordpress.com/2010/09/28/film-review-earth-made-of-glass-15-years-later-rwandan-genocide-survivors-share-their-bitter-unending-quest-for-truth/
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