But today I balk. Is revenge a triumph? To harm someone who has harmed you, is that not hypocrisy, perpetuating a wretched chain of wrongdoing? We justify legal violence with the word “deterrence,” but one would have a hard time arguing that it is effective, considering the fact that putting 2.3 million behind bars has hardly eradicated crime. This utilitarian approach to justice, using the lives of offenders as a means to our end—safety—is, as criminologist Deirdre Golash argues, vastly immoral. “We may require wrongdoers to compensate their victims for the harms that they have done,” she writes, “but we may not harm them in order to prevent future harms by others.”
I’ve been absorbed by Golash’s work lately, in my quest to unravel the dilemma of punishment. Turning off my iPod, sitting down on the side of the road, I start scanning my mental library, overloaded with the words of those grappling with the so-called problem of punishment. It’s a problem because, as sociologist Daniel Boonin aptly puts it, “How can the fact that a person has broken a just and reasonable law render it morally permissible for the state to treat him in ways that would otherwise be impermissible?” Prisons, see, are revenge on a grand scale. And while correction makes sense, is retribution ever a justifiable aim? Enter Seneca, another thinker populating my “punishment” library. “ ‘Retribution’—an inhuman word and, what is more, accepted as right—is not very different from wrongdoing, except in the order of events,” he says. “He who pays back pain with pain is doing wrong; it is only that he is more readily excused for it.” Finally, enter psychologist James Gilligan, who speaks of punishment as “that collective violence which any society defines as legal, just as crime is the individual violence that we define as illegal.” Punishment, he goes on, “does not prevent or inhibit further violence, it only stimulates it.”
Ultimately, revenge cannot undo; it merely does again. It arises from a feeling of helplessness, from the need to re-create a painful situation with roles reversed. It welcomes wrongdoers into our orbits and hands them tremendous power over our souls and spirits. Punishment is backward-looking. Forgiveness, on the other hand, is forward-looking, liberating us from a violent cycle and from the one who’s wronged us. He who forgives, goes the proverb, ends the quarrel.
I rise up, turn around, and jog back up the hill.
Ishmael and my Zayde. One exudes the freedom and serenity that come from letting go; the other, the injurious, contagious consequences of bitterly holding on. I’d read a multitude of studies about the value to human health of forgiveness and the damage done by vengeful unforgiving. But here were live case studies.
———
Later that week, still awaiting word from Never Again Rwanda about prison permissions, I anxiously await another result, the US presidential elections. At the Car Wash restaurant my friend Noreen and I join an all-night election party. I’d met her on my second night here, hanging out with a crew of expats working to get the national airline on its feet and living at Golf Hills. She’d seemed a mirage, this twenty-four-year-old Kigali local in towering heels and chic sundress, appearing in the crisp night.
Tonight Noreen throws back one too many drinks and begins to share her personal story. Her family is Pentecostal. They let her read nothing but the Bible and banned all secular music in the home. Her family is also Tutsi, one of many who fled to Uganda during the genocides prior to 1994, changed their name in order to pass as Hutu, and then returned years later, along with nearly a half million other exiles, to find whole family lines demolished.
Noreen speaks of her childhood as if recounting time served: hours locked in the bedroom crying, wishing for a normal teenage life. She eventually won a scholarship at a college in rural Canada and was overjoyed to leave the country, but then discovered, on arrival, that she was the only black person for miles. Alienated and alone, she fell into a deep depression and medicated herself with drugs and alcohol. She eventually gave up and came home but refused to move back into her parents’ home and is now finishing her degree at a local university.
As Noreen opens up to me, I contemplate the word “victim”—so misleading, so minimizing. It implies that crimes have a singular impact, when in fact their damage radiates outward, poisoning individuals, families, communities, a whole network of those wounded in myriad ways by the trickle-down effects of trauma.
“For so long I wanted to kill all Hutus,” Noreen admits. She still often feels angry. Sometimes she doesn’t even know why. There was the night she had to be escorted out of the club, after she got drunk and called someone who stepped on her toes “a fucking Hutu.” Clearly the healing process is still very much a work in progress.
I wake up to good news and bad. CNN informs me that Obama is still my president. Eric’s news is far less promising. “Rwanda Correctional Service has said—they said no, it is not possible, our project,” he tells me. Procedure did us in. Corrections officials felt slighted by our approach. It is not our place to tell them what should be done. They are the arbiters of this. We should have come to them asking, not telling. I’m crushed. Eric had assured me, before I arrived in Rwanda, that permission would be sorted out, but we knew there was no guarantee.
“Maybe I can meet with Mary?” I implore. Mary is a top-level corrections official. Eric says he will try to organize a meeting for this afternoon.
Closing my laptop, I grab my purse for an excursion with Jean de Dieu, “Jean of God.” His organization? Shalom: Educating for Peace—yet another Hebraic connection. I’d been researching groups that do prison work here, because I was worried about precisely the disappointing news I got today. Jean and I had lunched at one of Rwanda’s ubiquitous buffets, and between gap-toothed smiles, he told me his story. Like countless others, he was making a living off peacemaking, or at least trying to. He’d completed his doctorate in South Africa, where he studied the relationship between justice, peace, and anticorruption efforts, and Shalom educates young people about such issues. I did not ask him directly, but later learned that Jean is “mixed”—his mother is Tutsi and his father Hutu. His wife, who lost her mother in 1994, whose brothers survived by hiding in a basement for weeks, is mixed, too.
“Would you like to see a peace village?” Jean had asked. I’d said yes, with no idea of what such a thing was.
This morning Jean picks me up in a 1981 Toyota that looks and sounds as if it can barely make it up the hill, let alone to Rulindo, two hours from Kigali. Sure enough, after we pick up Tarsis, a politician in charge of good governance for the Rulindo district, the car comes to a sputtering halt. It’s fine, Tarsis and Jean say. We will leave the car here and take the bus. A bead of sweat trails down my spine. You will definitely be back in time for your meeting with Mary at RCS, they assure me.
We cram ourselves into a minibus decked out with a Che Guevara logo, where I find myself all but sitting on my neighbor’s lap. The ride is jaw-droppingly beautiful, carrying us past Mount Kigali, up, up, and up into the lush greenery, ascending to what’s surely the most resplendent hill in the land of a thousand hills. The bus pulls into a clearing in the forest, encircled by lanky pine trees, and the rhythm of drums greets us.
Some three hundred people are assembled, seated on the ground, wearing voluminous T-shirts and colorful cloths. On chairs in front of them sit three men in baggy suits and cowboy hats. The village has been awaiting our arrival; singing and clapping commences. I clap, too, and make out the word amahoro, which means peace. Jean leans in with a translation. “Have peace, unity, reconciliation. The genocide ideology, root it up and burn it.”
“This is a village meeting,” Jean whispers. “They are planning activities for official reconciliation week, later this month. Tarsis is here to oversee.” I nod.
“He”—Jean points to the elderly villager speaking—“is describing what the village has planned. Planting trees. Food and drink. Celebration.” Tarsis, taking the floor, emphasizes the value of good governance. He goes on. And on. Jean rolls his eyes. “Politicians,” he murmurs.
&nbs
p; Suddenly, a dozen villagers stand up. The others applaud. They sit down.
“These people have now been forgiven, officially,” Jean explains. “They have paid off their debt. They have been forgiven and fully welcomed back into the community.”
I’m stunned. Nineteen years ago, this village was a slaughterhouse; these people, Hutu and Tutsi both, were murdering their neighbors. Now, thanks to confession, restitution, and vigilant efforts to promote peace as a community staple, they live together in harmony.
“You will speak next,” Jean whispers to me. I will? “It is a tradition. A foreigner comes to the village, they must speak.”
What does one say to a living miracle? First, drop a murakoze, an expression of thanks.
“She is Joan?” one of the villagers calls out. No, Jean explains. Joan was another mzungu, last month.
I conjure up Zayde, welcoming his spirit to this sacred space. I claim a status I have never claimed before, telling the villagers that I am, in some very small and distant way, also a victim, a survivor. And through Rwanda I have come to unprecedented empathy for my ancestors. But the survival I grew up with did not feel as this place does. Forgiving. Peaceful. Benevolent. There was love, yes, but much bitterness and pain in my living room. Inherited scars remained raw. No one stood up and sat down, as they do today. I wish they had.
I wish, too, for my country to be as forgiving as this village. In America we prefer punishment. Our grudges take the form of millions of prison cells, a culture of incarceration that Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave Beaumont, who visited the United States in 1831 and marveled at our prison population, dubbed a national ritual that Americans see as “a remedy for all the evils of society.” It’s true that, as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas put it, “a world where forgiveness is almighty becomes inhuman,” but a world where punishment is almighty becomes barbaric. In America we don’t brainwash in peace; we mostly make justice a synonym for revenge.
Alas, the pillars of this place are not the pillars of the place I call home. These pillars are literal. I discover this after the meeting is over, as Jean and I pose for photos by the village’s peace pole, planted in the heart of the circle where village meetings take place. Amahoro N’aganze Kw’isi Hose, reads the pillar. May Peace Prevail on Earth.
The journey back is sticky and dusty. I join Tarsis and Jean for a buffet lunch near the bus station, and before I run off to my meeting with RCS, Tarsis jots something down in my notebook: Umugabo mbwa aseka umbohe.
“It is a Rwandese expression,” he explains. “It means, ‘A foolish man laughs at prisons.’ You have a serious job to do.”
The clock is ticking as I meet Santos at NAR. Another crowded minivan ride later, we are late, trekking up the stairs of a concrete slab of a building. “Justice, Corrections, Knowledge, and Production,” goes the RCS motto, which strikes me as impressively progressive, efficiency-minded—in other words, classically Rwandan. Rwanda’s “poo-powered prisons,” as BBC News dubbed them, are a prime example of such enlightened thinking: some are 75 percent powered by human waste.
“No ID, no entrance,” proclaims the stern, stolid woman at the door.
“But please, we have an appointment,” I implore. Santos gently lets forth a fountain of Kinyarwanda. I smile sweetly and mentally bow before this woman.
She relents. We climb the next set of stairs and await Mary, whose office is adorned by a giant portrait of President Kagame.
“This is not how things are done here,” comes Mary’s pronouncement, after I explain what was already said in the letter about our intentions.
“Your permission is denied.” She delivers this with stern finality.
Santos leans forward to respond; I cut him off.
“Yes, you are right,” I concur. Santos looks at me, confused. “We have done this wrong. You have procedure; we violated it. We are very sorry for this.” I take out my John Jay College business card and place it on the glass coffee table between us.
“But I do hope that when you come to New York, you will come visit my university, and give a talk to our faculty about the progressive work you do here. You are a leader in the field.”
Mary picks up my card and inspects it. “John Jay,” she says to herself quietly. To me she says, “That is a prestigious school, yes?”
“One of the top criminal justice programs in the country. I do hope you will be in New York soon.”
“John Jay,” Mary repeats.
I’d told her which university I was from before, and it was also stated in our request letter, but it’s visibly sinking in right at this moment, card in hand. Pause. Then, miracle.
“Let the professor in,” she declares to her assistant. “It is not about victim and offender, not one person but a whole community harmed, and a whole community that must be put back together,” she says. Santos’s eyes grow wide.
“Your program is needed because it is about restoring communities. Yes, we will let the professor and the students inside. Friday.”
“Actually, might tomorrow be possible?” I entreat. “I unfortunately leave Friday.”
Yes, it is possible. Mary and her assistant exit the room and go next door. Santos gives me a look that walks the line between confusion and awe.
“I am so happy right now, Baz. My heart is—it is—very full. I don’t know how it is—how you did that.”
I don’t know how, either. But as thrilled as I am that permission has been granted, I’m saddened by how it happened. Prison decisions—life-and-death decisions—can be as arbitrary as this. I’ve seen it back home, again and again, parole rulings holding my students’ futures in their hands, made with no apparent rationale or explicit justification. Beyond the force of my status, there’s no rhyme or reason here in Rwanda today, just as there is no rhyme or reason why Theo from New York, who’s served twenty-two years with perfect behavior, who has a job and a college game plan lined up for release, who has three children waiting for their father to come home, is denied parole, while Steven, who bears the very same rap sheet, is granted it. “Nature of the crime,” the parole board stamps, with cold finality.
Mary returns with an official letter on the stationery of the commissioner general.
Reference is made to the letter dated 5 November 2012 from the office of Never Again Rwanda, requesting Rwanda Correctional Service to facilitate your team of eleven people to visit Gasabo Prison with the purpose of rehabilitative impact on the prison population throughout the country. I wish to inform you that you have been granted permission to visit Gasabo Prison during the normal visit hours.
———
There is an agenda. Santos has printed it, I discover on arrival at NAR the next day. The students, giggling and joking, load boxes of water into the van.
“This is le jour—the day,” he greets me. He wears a white polo shirt with an NAR logo that reads, across its back, Empowering Youth with Opportunities to Become Active Citizens.
Forty minutes later we have arrived. Gasabo Prison is a stately orange-brick structure, laced in barbed wire and crowned by a turretlike guard tower, rising from the back alley of a suburban Kigali neighborhood. It looks medieval, much like the prisons of upstate New York. This is no accident. African prisons are Western impositions with roots in various colonial sources: “gaols” set up in coastal forts and garrisons by trading Europeans in the sixteenth century, devices of bodily restraint and confinement used in the slave trade, military lockups used in imperial conquests since the 1880s. Early twentieth-century prison building across the continent represented colonial efforts to exert control and reinforce hierarchies in the most literal of ways, creating dramatic, segregated spaces in which black bodies were contained, subjugated, and humiliated. The very look of prisons spoke a thousand words. Orderly, Western-looking edifices sought to impose order on those unruly natives, amassed in collective cells. This building I’m looking at, then, is a classic instance of prison as brutal Western imposition, left to fester even after the colonia
l masters took their leave, declining to clean up the carceral mess they made.
Our stroll through the gates is smooth and casual. We’re permitted cameras and cell phones and ushered into the superintendent’s office to await instructions. The students chat animatedly, unruffled. On the wall is a framed portrait of President Kagame, a map of Rwanda with the location of its prisons marked, a chart detailing the chain of command here, and a chalkboard listing a series of numbers. As Eric and Santos converse with the officials, I pick out the English words “never again,” “genocide,” and “peace building.”
The superintendent, a vigorous woman, enters and beams as she says, “Professor Baz, you are welcome.” Hands are extended. She points to a number on the chalkboard, 4,528, and explains that it represents today’s Gasabo population.
The superintendent leads us out of her office, through the prison, and into a warehouselike space annexed off to the side, like a garage. As we walk, throngs of prisoners, strolling about, throw barely a glance in our direction. They wear candy-colored uniforms, tangerine orange for those who have been sentenced and cotton-candy pink for those awaiting trial. The place feels calm and controlled. I sense none of the tension that lurks in furtively eyed hallways behind the walls of American prisons.
Inside the annex, nearly one hundred prisoners sit serenely on long wooden benches, some looking as young as twenty and others well past middle age. We sit on benches directly facing them. Eric takes the microphone and offers a greeting filled with murakozes. Next comes singing and clapping. One curly-haired, sweet-faced corrections officer, handsome in his khaki uniform, introduces himself to me as Rolfe and appoints himself my translator. He murmurs in my ear.
“We come because of love,” Santos announces. Applause. “Today we will talk with you about current events. We will discuss the topic of gender. What is the meaning of equal rights?”
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