Later, I met a white guy who seemed interested in me—until he said: “Sandra, you’re so pretty for a black girl.” What? There’s a difference between pretty black girls and pretty white girls? I wish I had said: “Wow, you’re pretty stupid for a college student.”
He hurt me with his remark. He didn’t see me, just my skin color. But my friends were there for me. When they heard what he said, they stopped talking to him.
I had heard similar comments about my looks before. I was learning about shades of black in America, and about how your skin tone determines where you stand on the beauty scale. Americans are so nutty about physical appearance and what defines beauty. Basically, the lighter skinned you are, and the smaller and straighter your nose is, the “prettier” you are.
I also began to understand why hair is such an important issue for African American women. I learned why the black girls in school didn’t let their hair grow naturally, but instead always straightened or relaxed it. My black friends explained that since they were already considered second tier to white women in the looks department, it was important not to have unruly hair. Black hair, in its natural state, is “nappy” and disorderly, they told me. They said, “You can’t have your natural hair out.” They said black women have to keep their hair tidy and straight, like white women, if they want to be taken seriously at work and in school. Again, I said, “What? This is crazy.”
These were issues I never had to deal with in Africa. There, my sisters and I wore our hair short and never gave it a second thought. We didn’t have to worry about natural hair versus straightened hair; we didn’t worry about our hair at all. But in America, it was a very big issue. And so, in order to fit in, as all teens want to do, I usually wore my hair in braids or straightened it with chemicals, sometimes burning my scalp if I left the chemicals on for too long.
I didn’t understand how the hair that grew out of my head could be considered messy. I occasionally wore my hair out in its natural state, big and puffy. I’ve come to love my hair, but at the time, when I wore it as an Afro, it sparked a lot of unwanted conversation. People thought I was making a statement, when I was simply wearing my natural hair. They would examine it and say things like:
“Do you tease your hair?”
“Ooh, your hair is so cool—can I touch it?”
“Oh wow, how do you get your hair to do that?”
White girls would sink their hands in my Afro and smile as if they were petting me. Not only did they make me feel like an exotic animal, but they also messed up my hair. How would they feel if I ran my fingers through their hair?
It was easiest to wear braids. I didn’t have the time or money to spend hours straightening my hair before class. Braids are easy to maintain, but they do hurt like mad for a few days until they settle. The first night after you have them done, you have to find a creative way to sleep, such as on your forehead. Of course, people thought I was making a statement by wearing braids too. They thought everything about my appearance was a statement, when I was simply wearing clothes, going to class, doing my daily routine. I really stuck out at Houghton. If I wore one of my African skirts or dresses, people would look me up and down and say things like:
“Oh wow, what’s the occasion?”
“You look like an African goddess.”
I wanted to say, “Come on now, it’s just a skirt. It’s not revolutionary.” I know that people meant well. I tried to laugh it off. Sometimes I just said, “Yeah, I’m an African goddess.”
To help us all understand one another, I became president of the Black History Club on campus. We decided to do a photo exhibit with some of the black students to help people get to know us a little better. We took portraits and did brief write-ups for everyone—little introductions with a few details about our lives and interests. We called the exhibit “Shades of Black.” When the exhibit opened, an idiot student decided it would be hilarious to change the sign to “50 Shades of Light Black” and drape paper chains all over the walls—a nod to the book Fifty Shades of Grey. But when the black students came in and saw the chains, as you can imagine, they felt incredibly insulted. We were trying to honor black students, and someone had filled the room with symbols of slavery. The kids started crying.
I went to the dean. He knew me by now. I had spoken with him before about inappropriate comments on campus and ways to make minorities feel more at home. When I arrived at his office, I could see from the look on his face that he was thinking, Uh-oh, what now? I told him about the chains strung across the portraits. I explained that this was devastating for the black students on campus. I said, “What are we going to do about this?” To add to the urgency, I said we needed to do something before everyone started tweeting about it. School officials promptly looked at the campus security cameras and figured out who did it, although they didn’t release the student’s name immediately. It was a white boy. He had to apologize and he got suspended, but that didn’t feel like enough. This student did something that he thought his peers were going to find funny. This was a small manifestation of a much larger issue on campus. These kinds of antics were not what I expected from my college experience.
After that, I called my mom and burst into tears.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Do you want to come home?”
“Mom, I don’t want to be here,” I said. “I don’t think they like black people.”
“We can come get you,” she said. I’m sure she was confused: She knew I never had any problems making friends.
Suddenly I didn’t feel like getting into all the details with her. I didn’t want to worry her, and I didn’t want her to think I couldn’t handle college. I calmed down and said I would be fine.
I really wanted to leave the school, but I stayed. Someone had to push for change.
I got more involved. I joined a committee with the dean and others to establish a diversity program. We held a range of cultural events, like a soul-food night, a movie night with films about civil-rights movements, a Caribbean night, a Motown dance. Our goal was to show people diversity within the black community. We also held weekly meetings to talk about current issues, and everyone was welcome to come and ask questions.
It helped me survive my freshman year. But a much bigger battle was yet to come.
TWENTY-EIGHT
WHEN I WENT BACK TO SCHOOL FOR MY sophomore year, I did so with dread. I was exhausted by the thought of dealing with more racial chasms. I tried to remind myself that getting my education was the top priority and that I should stay focused. My parents had always stressed the importance of my studies. I agreed that getting my college degree was paramount, but I wanted to do it in an environment where I could feel comfortable.
This was the year my past caught up with me.
I had experienced nightmares in the past, but they began to grow stronger—shattering images flooding back from the massacre. I would wake up screaming. In one dream, I visited the remains of the refugee camp at Gatumba with Mom, and I sobbed at seeing the bloody scene. I walked alongside a row of caskets, trying to feel my sister Deborah’s energy. But I couldn’t, so Mom showed me a casket with her remains. I leaned over it and cried. I hugged the casket and refused to leave. When I woke up, my whole body was aching. It felt as if I had been crying all night. Of course, Deborah never even had a casket: Her remains were scooped up and thrown in a plastic bag. Who knows where that bag wound up; probably in a ditch somewhere with a pile of other bags of bones.
Another night, a dream took me right back to the night we were attacked. I was there in the camp, surrounded by men with torches and machetes. I woke up screaming. My friend Shannon, who was now my roommate, heard me. She and Kaya stayed up with me all night long, trying to make me feel safe. They were my two closest friends, so loyal and loving.
Pretty soon the nightmares hit during the day—flashbacks. I would be sitting in class and a bloody image from the massacre would come, assaulting my mind. I would enter another zone, wrapped in des
pair. My friend Philip saw it happen to me and said I looked like a zombie. I lost sleep. I tried to stay up all night, afraid to let the nightmares get me in bed. But they got to me anyway, at all times of the day and night. I was worn out. My personality changed. I became depressed, lethargic. My friends asked where my bubbly personality had gone. My grades started slipping. I had always been a good student, but I began doing terribly in school. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I became paralyzed by worries of when the flashbacks would come. They took over my life.
I didn’t tell my parents. They had always been so strong. They had been through a lifetime of tragedy and war, and they always managed to keep going. I was afraid they would be disappointed. They had worked hard to give me opportunities in life. I couldn’t let them down. I thought I should be strong like them. I should be embracing my chance to get a college degree, not melting down about my past. I didn’t think my parents would understand.
I just didn’t know how to tell them what was happening. We didn’t even have the language to talk about mental illness in my culture. The idea of talking to a therapist about our feelings was foreign. Some of my friends in high school had talked to therapists, and I had always thought that was odd. I didn’t understand the concept of paying a stranger to listen to you. It’s not something we did. And my family had never talked about the massacre, even among ourselves. So I kept it all to myself.
But I couldn’t keep it from my closest friends. They saw me sinking. Shannon would go to class and return to find me lying in bed. She would ask if I had gone to class myself, and I would say, “No. Just turn off the lights.” I stopped going out with my friends, and they started taking turns staying in with me at night, babysitting me. One day I told Shannon I didn’t know why I was alive, and she got so worried about me, she reported me to the residency director. I was mad at her for doing that, but I know she did it because she cared. She did not know what else to do. She told me she was afraid I was going to commit suicide. I didn’t want to kill myself, but I didn’t really want to exist either. It felt like that the first month after the massacre, like it was too exhausting to exist. I was sleepless but tired, all the time. If someone came up behind me suddenly or startled me, I jumped out of my skin. The residency director began checking on me three times a day, and said I needed to see a counselor.
Here’s the thing about flashbacks: They don’t give warnings. They just show up, unannounced, unprovoked. You could be having a great day, and then, out of nowhere, dreadful images start filling your head. The next thing you know, you’re on the floor, curled up in the fetal position, unable to remember how you got there. Your limbs ache and your ears ring, as if you were right back in that awful place you tried so hard to forget. Your body shivers, even when you’re indoors and the temperature is seventy-five degrees. You don’t want to call anyone who might understand, like your mom or your siblings, because you don’t want to ruin their day. So you end up crying to your friends. But you can’t find the words to explain that you can never visit your sister’s grave, because she has no grave. It feels like you want to scream, but your lungs fail. How do you explain to someone that you’re grieving now because you never had the chance to do so as a child?
I started seeing a campus counselor, because the residency director had said it was necessary. I was reluctant to talk to him at first. What could he possibly know about what I had been through? I showed up for the first session, determined to tell him nothing. I decided I would sit there until the time was up.
“Hi, Sandra,” he said. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Your friends don’t think you are,” he said.
I smiled, implying that my friends were being silly. “I’m fine,” I said again.
“Just so you know, you don’t need to be fine in this office,” he said.
“Really, I’m fine.”
He started asking questions—about my relationship with my family, about why my friends were concerned about me. I kept smiling, trying to act casual, giving simple yes or no answers and saying I was fine.
“This is just between you and me,” he said, attempting to get me to open up. “No one at the school needs to know that we are talking.”
“I’m fine,” I said.
I didn’t look him in the face. I looked everywhere but there. I looked at a decorative fountain in his office—a mini waterfall trickling over rocks. I played with a little sandbox on the table next to me, drawing swirls in the sand with my fingers.
Pretty soon, the first session was up. But he was patient and persistent. At the next session, he said he knew about my activism, and he asked me about that. We talked about the Foundation of Hope Ministries, and he asked if I saw myself doing more humanitarian work in the future. At first I continued to give him brief answers, but then I started talking a little more, telling him about how I would like to help displaced people.
Gradually, he put me at ease by simply listening.
Worries and doubts began spilling forth that I didn’t even know had been lodged deep inside of my mind. I talked about how I didn’t understand why I had survived the massacre when Deborah had not. I said that sometimes I feared that my parents blamed me for Deborah’s death. I don’t know where I got that idea, but it was there. I expressed how much I hated being called the youngest in my family because it implied that Deborah never existed. I hated the fact that my whole family was treating her like some distant figure from our past, when her energy, memories, and face were all I thought about. Every time Mom introduced me as her youngest, I died a little inside. I felt so guilty, like I was taking Deborah’s place—something I would never dream of doing. My parents behaved like she was really dead, and I wasn’t ready for that. I didn’t want her to be dead to us; I wanted to keep her memory alive. I wanted everyone I met to know that there was a beautiful little girl whose life was stolen and that she is my little sister—she would always be my little sister.
After the sessions, I would feel so tired and drained, I would go back to my dorm room and sleep.
Amid all of this emotional chaos, I received an invitation to speak to the United Nations Security Council about children and armed conflict. The invitation came through a group called RefugePoint, which works on behalf of global refugees. The cofounder, Sasha Chanoff, has been a vocal advocate for the Banyamulenge. After the Gatumba massacre, he went to the State Department to propose that the survivors be resettled. I had met him at one of the annual reunions of my people.
Sasha asked if I would like to speak to the UN. It was an intimidating prospect—I would be talking to people who make decisions for the entire world. But I knew it was a powerful platform, and I wanted to tell my story. And so I did.
When I sat down before the council, Samantha Power, the United States Ambassador to the UN, introduced me to the audience. Trying to remain calm, I started by talking about my history. “My ancestors are from Rwanda. For many generations, my family lived in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where I was born. Still, many Congolese considered my people to be Rwandan because of the language that we speak and the way that we look,” I said.
“We were born into war,” I continued, describing my childhood. “I got used to dropping out of school and fleeing every time a new war broke out.” Then I recalled the terrors of the camp in Gatumba. “I was about ten years old. We had been there for a few months when it happened. I remember it vividly. It’s nighttime. I am woken up with what sounds like popcorn popping. My mother is frantically telling me to wake up. I open my eyes and I see fear in her face. Then I see my aunt standing next to her, blood running down her arm like a stream and gushing onto my leg.”
As I concluded, I said, “That is my story. I will tell it to anyone who will listen. Not because it is easy. Every time I tell it, I am back in Gatumba, a ten-year-old burning in a tent. But as long as the criminal who admitted to leading that massacre continues to walk freely in the streets of Burundi, I have no choice. I m
ust keep telling it, until the international community proves my words are not only worthy of empathy, but also of accountability. Until leaders like you and the countries that you represent show me that my family and all others are not disposable.”
I called on the council to bring the killers to justice. “Only then will millions of survivors like me hear loud and clear that our lives have value,” I said. “Until there is justice, the nightmares will never stop.”
And then I went back to school, back to the nightmares.
My friends tried to help me through it. They would leave funny little Post-it Notes around the room to cheer me up. Girls on my floor wrote me letters too, expressing their love and support. They could see the change in me. I kept spiraling, and I kept going to the counselor.
In late December, the time came to go home for Christmas break. But when I talked to Dad on the phone about it, I panicked. If I went home, my parents would see that I had become an emotional mess. They would wonder what was going on and ask a million questions. I was afraid to tell them about the flashbacks. I was flunking out of my classes. I did not want to return to school for the second semester, but I couldn’t imagine telling my parents such a thing. Education meant the world to them. I feared they would not understand.
I told my counselor I did not want to go home. I asked him if he would send my parents a reassuring note, explaining that I would be staying with a friend for Christmas break. He did so. Later, I texted my dad, who was confused. I had never been away from home for Christmas.
“Hey, Dad, don’t pick me up. I’m not coming home,” I said. “I just need to go somewhere else. I just need to go get better.”
“Get better from what?” Dad asked. “What are you talking about? You need to come home. We’ll pray for you.” To my dad, prayers can fix everything.
How Dare the Sun Rise Page 15