April 2012

Here it is April again. April 6th, and tomorrow the 18th commemoration of the 1994 genocide begins. Here at Kigali Genocide Memorial, a barefoot man stands on the cement cover of one of the mass graves, wielding a long handled brush and scrubbing hard. Behind him the purple banner marking the genocide against the Tutsi has been attached to bamboo mats fastened to a fence and several people are eyeing the banner from a distance. There is a group of military men, practicing their steps and swinging their arms in unison as they prepare for tomorrow’s formal event. Purple and white tents are being erected in the flat grassy area that faces the fountain that holds the flame that will be lit tomorrow morning. Hedges and climbing bushes are being clipped at a ferocious rate, fences are being painted and new signage erected. Flower baskets, wrapped entirely in cellophane that makes it difficult for the flowers to breathe, increasingly dot the grave coverings, as do carefully laid lone red roses. Visitors move through the gardens and amongst the graves, clutching roses or audio guides or each other’s hands.

They come now, the Rwandans. Yesterday at Murambi Genocide Memorial, a group of twenty-five men and women, all with a purple neckerchief, approach the mass graves. There faces are subdued, somber, their stories hidden but for splashes of pain that somehow emerge from a posture, a glance, an avoidance, a turning inward. There is a moment of silence and then they head down the new paving stone path towards the rooms where the exhumed, somewhat preserved bodies are laid out. They come because their memory propels them, because they are compelled from inside or outside to do so. They come together, stand together with their private stories.

Here in Kigali, at the memorial centre, the scrubbing continues. Some of the centre’s staff supervise these preparations. Others keep as busy as possible in order to keep memory at bay, while others take solace in long coffee breaks. They have to remember but they don’t want to remember to deeply. It is a tight balance, uses a lot of psychic energy.

I stand on the open patio on the second floor of the centre’s main building and watch the activity. I want to be here and I don’t want to be here. I look over the graves and I am filled with a deep sadness that I both welcome and avoid. I want to connect and I don’t want to connect to the stories I have witnessed here, to the people whose pain emerges more visibly the longer I am here, to the unfathomable atrocity that happened here, to the terrible legacy that the country still suffers. One can see the elements of how the genocide happened, poverty, history, colonialism, manipulation, but no matter how you add up the causes, the steps towards that precipitous moment, none of it computes. The rationale mind can provide an explanation of sorts, the heart cannot.

It has rained the past two days. It is supposed to rain in April, the time of the long rains. It rained during the genocide, keeping some safe because the killers took rain votes, deciding it was too much effort, too uncomfortable to go ‘to work’ on such days. Now, the rain has stopped, leaving a grayness of sky but now there is a kind of rain drizzling onto my heart, telling me to open to what is here, even if it becomes a thunderstorm, telling me to allow the lightning to flash from far to near, bringing clear seeing.