Outside, James glances at my book. “Excellent!” he proclaims. Then he proffers his story. Both of his parents were murdered in 1994 but he escaped to South Africa. He went to medical school in Kenya and worked in a bank, but corporate life bored him, so he moved back to Rwanda and started driving a taxi. It’s hard for me to wrap my brain around the idea that this jovial man is a genocide survivor. Clearly I needn’t have bought the book; personal testimonies are everywhere.
———
Over the weekend, I begin making friends. Through a New York connection, I’m put in touch with Eddy, an actor and activist. He shows up at Golf Hills in fitted black jeans, a leather jacket, and shades.
“You are welcome!” comes the outstretched hand. “You recognized me, did you?”
“Recognize you?”
“From the movie!” Eddy strikes a pose, arms crossed and face stern. Then he bursts into laughter.
Ah, yes. He played a prison guard in my friend’s film Kinyarwanda, the first feature about the genocide shot in Rwanda.
We zip into town, through tricolored landscapes of electric-orange earth, emerald hills, and cream-colored homes. The air is crisp with drizzle. Pristine, traffic-free streets are littered only with omnipresent motos—motorcycle taxis, perilously zipping to and fro.
I tag along on Eddy’s daily rounds. We visit a peace-building organization, a youth group whose logo reads Peace, Good Works and Patriotism, and a school, where he drops off donated books.
“Do you have a salary, Baz?” he asks on the drive back. Eddy has a disorienting habit of shifting emotional gears with zeal. One minute he’s all smiles and the next, grave, eyes aggressive. I do, yes, I tell him.
“Not me. I make my living by donation. By giving. I am also a writer, but I love acting. That is my love, apart from my wife, who is my first love.” The name of Eddy’s book, which he also performs as poetry, is Their Sin Is My Shame. Eddy is Hutu.
“There are many books by and about the survivors,” he explains. “But there is no voice for we who were the perpetrators, who did not kill but are stained by what our people did, the ones who did kill. The shame of it, that is our lives.”
It’s a profound point, and it makes me think of John Jay College, where I often show my students a documentary called Beyond Conviction, about three crime victims who choose to meet and dialogue with the men who wronged them. One is a woman who was raped by her brother, when he was high on psychedelics. Their meeting is wrenching to watch. She exhibits debilitating emotional scars and he convulses with sobs, so overwhelmed with shame and self-loathing that he cannot even glance at his sister. Finally he does, at her request. She hugs him. And through tears, in one of the most powerful, believable reconciliation scenes I’ve ever seen, she says that she forgives him and it will help her heal and move on, but he will also have to learn to forgive himself.
I ask my students an awful and ultimately unanswerable question: Whom would you rather be in that scene, the victim or the offender? The offender, of course, they all say. Who would choose to be a victim? I press them. Are you sure? You’d rather walk around for the rest of your life carrying that cross, knowing you committed a wholly revolting deed?
To recognize one’s sin and thus forever bear the burden of that horrific deed—this is natural justice, a prison truer than any manmade one. Being a victim is a nightmare, but there is at least honor in that nightmare. Being a sentient offender—in this there is only lifelong indignity.
I’d brought a copy of Beyond Conviction with me, along with a mini-library of books about victim–offender reconciliation dialogue. I’d thought they might come in handy during meetings about the prison visits. I give them all to Eddy, as he drops me off.
———
Do you want to talk about genocide?
It’s the first question on the list of talking points for today’s meeting with the prison-visiting group. Others include, Why are you here, and How do you feel about punishment? I’m nervous. How could I not be? I’m a mzungu. Yes, I have experience working in prisons and bringing young people inside them. But that’s America. This is Rwanda, and this is genocide.
When I show up at the Never Again Rwanda office, the students haven’t arrived yet but there’s a secretary at the front desk. Grace, twenty years old, works at NAR three days a week. I try to engage her in a chat but YouTube proves more engaging. Until I drop the right word.
“You are a writer. That is my dream!”
Soon we agree that she’ll write some essays for me, to practice her English, and her first assignment is to define her generation.
“My generation?” she asks. Then, “Oh, you mean the genocide?” She says this casually, offhandedly. “Me, I lost both my parents.”
Such words crash instantly and ferociously to the floor, even when coolly uttered. I hear them again and again from the fifteen youth members in our group. They trickle in and shyly shake my hand.
I introduce myself, with a staff member translating. There seem to be five Kinyarwanda words for a single English one, making me feel as if I’m missing half the conversation. I tell them about John Jay and the Prison-to-College Pipeline. As part of it, I escort undergraduates into prison once a month to take class alongside the incarcerated students. These learning exchanges, as we call them, have a profound impact on both sets of students; the incarcerated ones are inspired to experience a “normal” college classroom while the outsiders are usually stunned to discover that their “inside” counterparts are a lot more like them than they’d imagined. The Rwandan students’ ears perk up. We want to meet them, they tell me. Let’s set up a joint Facebook account.
I ask the students what they want to do during their prison visits. They look at me in silence. Santos jumps in and explains that behind bars, he doesn’t want to talk about genocide. We are tired of talking about it. We do not want to address the crime but to come as a gesture of peace and reconciliation. This is the explanation that slowly emerges. So what do they want to do? More silence. Write it down, I say. In any language.
This works. They scribble away, producing a list of suggestions: Play football. Sing. Dance. Have debates. Watch movies. Comedy. At our next meeting we’ll vote on which activities make sense for the monthly visits. We choose a name for the program: Never Again Rwanda’s Prison Visiting Project, aka NAR’s PVP. This is the land of youth groups and peace-making organizations, all wearing acronyms.
———
Santos, fresh from church, is in his Sunday best. I’m wearing jeans and sneakers. Before our Sunday meeting with the PVP group, we sit down to discuss the selection process for prisoners who’ll participate in the visits. I write down “reentry,” a prison buzzword used to sum up the process by which people in prison return home after serving their time. Santos nods animatedly.
“Yes, Baz. We can select the ones who are soon coming home.” He eyes me, coyly. “Baz, I can ask you something?”
“Sure,” I say.
“Baz, what is the name—‘Baz’?” I explain that it’s a nickname, given to me by my sisters when I was a baby. My real name, which no one ever uses, is Bathsheba, from the Bible.
“That is a queen!” declares Santos.
King David, I joke, always steals the spotlight—everyone knows his name but not that of his wife, mother of Solomon. “In Hebrew it actually means ‘daughter of seven’ or ‘daughter of good fortune,’ ” I tell him.
Santos likes this. He takes my notebook and, in block letters, slowly prints a word, UMUNYAMAHIRWE.
“This is your Kinyarwanda name,” he says. “Daughter of good fortune.”
The group trickles in, all of them, too, in church wear. Eugene, who speaks the best English in the group and is the least timid, tells me that his mother works in Shalom Village, a sizable orphanage two hours from Kigali. In the corner sit Jean and Nathalie, coupled up and giggling; like many of the others, Nathalie is a business management and economics student at Kigali University.
The stud
ents are again reticent, and the translation, by Santos and Eugene, comes haltingly. We’re still debating the activity game plan for the prison visits, and soon I’m left out entirely; the democratic process takes over and everyone is vigorously deliberating. Every now and then Santos lets me know what’s being agreed on. One part of the visit will involve discussion groups around current events. They like my suggestion about breaking off into smaller groups that mix the incarcerated with the nonincarcerated, an approach I use in my American program.
Suddenly things become animated. The students are listing topics for the discussion groups, and Santos has proposed “How to keep the country peaceful.” Matthew, who led last year’s visit to the TIG camp, is glaring at Santos, squinty-eyed. He hasn’t come to any of our meetings until today, and he’s said little until now. Finally, he spills forth a question in English, directed at me: “How can I ask these criminals, these genocidaires, about how to keep the country peaceful?”
The elephant lands, with a thud, in the center of the room.
Criminals. Genocidaires. Words that have thus far been drowned out by prettier ones. Peace. Forgiveness.
Thankfully, Santos jumps in, in Kinyarwanda, and the discussion flows on. We draft an agenda. Later, Santos tells me what he said to Matthew to quiet the storm.
“Baz, I told him, I said, ‘We are visiting—because we want to move past what has happened, to give them second chance.’ Because they will come out of prison one day. Do we want them to be angry and full of haine? They will live avec nous, together in our villages with us. Like you say, reentry.”
Again I must convince myself: Is Santos a figment of my liberal imagination?
———
Days pass and I settle into Kigalife. “The world comes to Kigali,” reads the Heineken billboard up the road from Golf Hills. It’s true. And they come, mostly, as volunteers. I meet them at Golf Hills and at local hangouts: the doctor from New York, here to train Rwandans in sonogram use; my new friend from Holland, working on a microfinancing project involving local women; the Canadian-Somalian doctor pursuing real estate opportunities.
I spend my afternoons at NAR, most evenings with friends, and my mornings on the balcony at Golf Hills, where I grow accustomed to hanging out with my laptop, sipping pungent Rwandan coffee and reading the local paper. There’s at least one genocide-related story per day, whether about proposed amendments to the law against genocide ideology or the trial of Jean Uwinkindi, a former pastor responsible for the death of thousands. It’s as if 1994 was yesterday.
Between NAR visits I try to get a handle on the cultural life here by seeking out musicians and talking music with everyone I meet, for an NPR story. It proves yet another way of talking peace and reconciliation. Again and again, musicians in their twenties describe their songs as perpetually positive, sans talk of politics, genocide, or anything too solemn.
“Love. We sing about love,” says Kamichi, a gently handsome, soft-spoken Afrobeat star. “I was there, I survived—I saw everything. Why would I want to sing about that? I would go crazy if I did. And who wants to be always reminded?”
Even the rappers I speak to, performing in a genre known for voicing what no one else wants to say, argue that they’d rather not wax lyrical about politics. No country knows the value of silence like Rwanda, where speaking the wrong way about ethnic groups is a crime, because not too long ago, speaking the wrong way about ethnic groups produced the unspeakable.
“Freedom of speech can be overrated,” Kamichi declares. “Before the genocide, people said what they wanted—and almost a million were slaughtered because of it. So, you know, not everything needs to be said.” Indeed, renowned musicians were prosecuted for their hateful anti-Tutsi lyrics, and even today, people are careful not to be in contempt of laws against genocide ideology. After the genocide, the National Unity and Reconciliation Commission created ingando, national solidarity camps. Released prisoners spent months there before gacaca, getting indoctrinated in Rwandan ideals of peace, unity, reconciliation, and antivengeance. These days the government encourages and sometimes requires Rwandan citizens from diverse walks of life—students, politicians, church leaders, prostitutes, ex-soldiers, ex-combatants, genocidaires, gacaca judges—to attend ingando for periods ranging from days to months.
Some have called this brainwashing, or political propaganda. I try my best to put my skeptic’s cap on and see things from this angle, to muster up my American freedom-of-speech self. I scour every conversation for what isn’t being said, for moments of mental programming, but in the context of genocide, “brainwashing” loses some of its negative connotation. The line between education and indoctrination can be thin. If Rwanda created a peace-loving national narrative by dabbling in censorship and tampering with freedom of speech just a tad—given the circumstances and the miraculously harmonious end, is all of that such a dreadful compromise?
Finally, the big news comes from Eric at Never Again Rwanda. He and Santos have a meeting at the Correctional Service tomorrow and will have in hand the proposal and letter I’ve drafted.
“But it is better if you don’t come with us,” he says. “If they see you, they may grow—” He pauses. “Maybe concerned. Who is this American professor and what does she want?” I nod. Keep me posted, I say. I’ll be anxiously awaiting word.
In the meantime, at Bourbon Coffee, the Starbucks of Rwanda, I chat with Eddy’s perfect foil of a best friend, Ishmael. Like Eddy, he’s an artist, a filmmaker working on a film called The Divorce, about the rift between his and his parents’ generation. Unlike Eddy, though, he’s Muslim, and a survivor.
“You are really going inside the prison?” he asks me, as I explain why I’m here.
“I like this,” he says with a nod, his tender eyes fringed by long lashes. “I do not want to go in, if I went to the prison, and see angry, miserable people. They will come home, and then they will be angry and miserable in our communities.”
Ishmael was inspired to make his film, he explains, because he felt that genocide was something his generation should not dwell on, as the older generation does.
As Ishmael reflects on his childhood, I have my own flashbacks. I am eleven years old. It’s the night before Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. This means a big day ahead, at Hebrew school tomorrow. Dress code is all black. No regular classes, just Holocaust-themed workshops and films. Every hour on the hour activities will come to a halt and over the loudspeaker, the principal will read a litany of names, student family members who were murdered and the concentration camps in which they perished. Compiling our list, my parents are arguing about who was slaughtered where.
“No, no. Rachel Surah was in Auschwitz, not Buchenwald,” insists my mother.
“I’m staying home,” I announce.
My father spins around to glare at me.
“I don’t have anything black to wear,” comes my protest.
“You don’t have anything to wear?” shouts my father. “Do you know how much of your blood was spilled, how many slaughtered, and you have nothing to wear?”
I knew how many, all too well. Six million ghosts occupied our home. Auschwitz nightmares were a regular part of my sleeping life. I’d grown up in a household where my mother regularly played the Schindler’s List soundtrack in the living room. Where Zayde, my omnipresent grandfather, who lost his entire family in the Holocaust, instructed us to never, ever set foot in Hungary because the Hungarians were worse than the Nazis—The land is soaked with your blood, he said. I can count the times I saw Zayde smile, and the times he hugged me; I cannot count the times he argued viciously in Yiddish with my father, howling across the Sabbath table, or told us the story of the Hungarian Nazi sympathizers who dragged his father out of the yeshiva and literally beat him to death on the street. Zayde’s cousin was the only one in the family to survive the camps, and she grew up in my father’s house; I knew the story of how her twin brother didn’t make it, but she, with the right combination of guile and luck,
did. When I went to Europe, I lied to my parents about going to Germany. I still taste the guilt that seeped down my spine during that train ride across the border.
I was tired of the Holocaust.
Not tired—exhausted. Haunted. Enslaved. It hung like a sinister cloud of mental illness over my family.
I share my flashback with Ishmael. The look in his eyes tells me he knows much, much better than I how this feels.
“Many times I say I would rather be a victim than a survivor,” he admits. “I’m a survivor, I know this, but I don’t want to be a survivor for life. I’m a survivor for my history, but not for life. So let me enjoy my life, let me hold my life in my hand.” He goes on, voice slow and trembling. “Members of the family cannot be replaced. I will never find someone to replace my mom. I will never find someone to replace my dad. Never. But I don’t have them now. Who is my mom, who is my dad? My country. So let me enjoy my country—let me enjoy what is there. I don’t want to forget that person but I don’t want to always sit in a room and cry. I need to live.”
The next morning, as I strap on my iPod, set out on my daily run, and marvel at the picture-perfection of my route—implausibly rich orange soil, women peddling clay pottery and guerrilla sculptures on the roadside, flamboyant Skol beer ads—I cannot banish Ishmael from my thoughts.
Ishmael and my Zayde. Survivors, victims. I run. Tears stream down my face. It’s the first time I’ve felt visceral empathy for Zayde, mourning his—our—loss. Ishmael and my grandfather: both survivors, yet such radically different spirits.
“Man to man is so unjust,” sings Bob Marley in my ear.
I have another childhood flashback, to the holiday of Purim, which celebrates the time Jews eluded the potential genocidal plot of evil Haman, adviser to King Ahasuerus. Our house is congested with shalach manot, celebratory gift baskets from the community, brimming with food, wine, and grape juice. My father is doing a public reading in our living room of the Book of Esther. Each time Haman’s name is read, we shake our noisemakers as if to cuss him out, per Jewish tradition. And when my father reaches the part where Haman is eventually caught and hanged, along with his ten sons, he reads loudly and in one breath, another tradition meant to underscore the triumph of revenge.
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