I had a few floating fragments of memory, bits of seaweed in a fish tank. I remembered my mom folding things and putting things away in a way my mother did not fold things and put things away.
I remembered my grandmother burying objects in the ground, objects that nobody buried, and I remembered that when she saw me staring she shooed me inside.
I had been so absorbed, as a young child, in knowing the world, and then I’d lost the whole world that I knew. In the years that followed I wanted to piece that world back together, but the idea of one group of people killing another group of people—people they lived with, people they knew—that chunk of knowledge could never fit itself in my mind. It was categorically, dimensionally, fundamentally wrong. It was like trying to store a tornado in a chest of drawers. That was not how the universe worked.
Now I was sitting here, in Kenilworth, across a rift in the galaxy a million miles wide, learning about one group of people killing another group of people, people that they lived with and knew. This genocide, I read in very matter-of-fact terms, started on April 8, 1994, and lasted one hundred days. One group, the Hutus, killed another group, the Tutsis.
A radical fascist Hutu political movement called Hutu Power used the radio to spread its vile, cynical propaganda: the Tutsis were subhuman insects. The cockroaches—inyenzi—have no right to live here, they said. The cockroaches’ wealth is creating your poverty. The cockroaches are using their cunning and charm to steal and defile your women. They cannot be allowed to exist. The fascists would not tolerate anyone standing by, refusing to participate.
Everybody, all Hutus, must join the cause of killing the cockroaches, and raping cockroach women, and if a Hutu doesn’t perform his or her duty that Hutu will be killed or raped too. The leaders prepared for this savagery for years. They stockpiled weapons. They claimed killing cockroaches was necessary, a legitimate, honorable act of self-defense.
Just thinking about the radio, the physical object in my parents’ living room, felt cataclysmic. The radio just sat there, spewing hate.
I tried to read Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. The book is a meticulously reported account of what happened in Rwanda in 1994: the killers calmly working down their lists of victims; the massacres in churches; the intentional gruesomeness of Hutu Power leaders arming everyone with machetes—they wanted the Tutsi murders to be painful and grotesque. The Nazi death camps were too tidy for them. I filled up the first 135 pages with little blue and pink stickies. Then I couldn’t go on. The book’s cover photo shows an empty chair at the edge of a lake. If you know nothing, the water looks serene. Once you understand even a little bit, you know the apocalypse is underneath.
Still I kept seeking information, digging up and deflecting facts. Almost eighty years before the genocide, the Belgians colonized Rwanda and infected the country with their cruel, bogus science of eugenics. Before that, Rwandans lived together in relative peace. Then the Belgians racialized the country. They measured people’s noses and skulls. They created and consulted pigmentation charts, dividing the citizens into Tutsis, Hutus, and Twas. The Hutus made up the overwhelming majority, about 84 percent of the population; the Tutsis were 15 percent, the Twas 1 percent.
Then, three ethnicities established, the Belgians issued identity cards. Next they created social policy and propaganda campaigns designed to cause the races to antagonize each other, channeling Rwandan citizens’ hatred onto one another other and away from them. The Tutsis, the Belgians said, were more like Europeans. They deserved respect, power, education, and cattle. The Hutus, on the other hand, were stupid, childish, dirty, and lazy. The Belgians barely bothered themselves with the Twas.
The Belgians left Rwanda in 1961 and 1962, but the poisonous thinking had taken root. And in the intervening years we’d done something so horrible that we couldn’t even talk about it. The rest of the world fled Rwanda in its darkest hour and must live with that moral stain. On April 8, 1994, the day after the Rwandan president’s plane was shot down, ten Belgian soldiers who had remained in Rwanda to protect the prime minister were brought to an army base and shot, beaten, or hacked to death. And that was it. Ten lives, and UN peacekeepers left Rwanda. The international community left Rwanda. What was going on in the country was too ghastly, too crude, too dangerous. All those countries that ended World War II by saying never again turned their backs. We Africans could kill each other if we wanted. We were not anybody else’s problem.
Now, these many years later, I was in school in Kenilworth and the killers were being put on trial in hundreds and thousands of village tribunals called gacaca courts, as Rwanda’s existing judicial system could not possibly try so many cases. The goal was to convict and sentence as well as heal, in the manner of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, somehow to make it okay for you to coexist with the neighbors’ family who killed your family, with the neighbors’ sons, father, and brothers who raped your daughters, mothers, sisters, and wives. The facts about gacaca were reported, with alternating horror and equanimity, in the Chicago Tribune. In Kenilworth everyone read the articles and then looked at me, sad and alarmed, waiting for me to react.
My thoughts and senses became jumbled again. I felt dizzy. I felt hot. Time melted and oozed, then re-formed and solidified misshapen. The Chicago Tribune said 800,000 people. I could not begin to comprehend what that number meant as a number of people killed. My scale of reference was just so different. That could not be a number of people murdered. My teachers wanted to help. They invited me to ask questions about anything. I felt so tired.
* * *
I read Night in bed. It transfixed me. Mrs. Thomas called me to dinner but I told her I was sick and couldn’t eat.
Wiesel packed in so much, so efficiently. He loses his name. He loses all sense of himself. The depravity of his tormentors makes him depraved. “Bread, soup—these were my whole life. I was a body. Perhaps less than that even: a starved stomach.”
I was fascinated, perhaps most of all, by his willingness to question the existence of God. No one in my life did that. Not my mother, not Claire. The only book that either of them ever read anymore was the Bible. Even in Kigali, my mother kept a shrine of saints and none of them had skin that looked like hers. The Thomases, the Beckers, the Beasleys, they did not question God either. They praised him daily. They never doubted his wisdom. Yet how could God exist?
Wiesel had the only possible answer: God was cruel. “Where is He?” Wiesel writes. “Here He is—He is hanging here on this gallows….Praised be Thy Holy Name, Thou Who hast chosen us to be butchered here at Thine altar.”
I could not absorb the book and I could not put it down. Wiesel was—I was—nothing, reduced to nothing, and yet still contained a galaxy of horrors. “I was dragging with me this skeletal body which weighed so much.”
“The days were like nights, and the nights left dregs of their darkness in our souls.”
Wiesel’s father falls ill with dysentery, just as Claire did. Wiesel’s father dies in the bunk above him at Buchenwald, and Wiesel feels nothing but relief—relief at being released from the burden of love in such a blackened world. “I did not weep, and it pained me that I could not weep. But I had no more tears. And, in the depths of my being, in the recesses of my weakened conscience, could I have searched for it, I might perhaps have found something like—free at last!”
* * *
I finished Night in two days. The following afternoon, during a free period, I sat on the classroom couch of my English teacher, Mrs. Ledbetter, and waited.
“This is exactly what happened to us,” I said when she entered the room. “The walking. Everything. Strip, strip, strip, then you’re nobody.”
I showed Mrs. Ledbetter my copy of Night. I had underlined or highlighted ten sentences or phrases on each page.
I read the book a second, then a third
time, to make sure I wasn’t crazy. I listened to the book on tape. I was fascinated by Wiesel’s determination to view himself without pity, shame, or sentimentality, to spell out the horrors he lived through and place himself in the fallen world.
I had no language to describe the atrocities of my life—not then. I think I barely do now. But after reading Night I remembered people in Kigali calling each other snakes and cockroaches.
I remembered people walking with luggage on their heads. People dropping their belongings on the side of the road and collapsing beside them. Panicked voices mixed with silence. People asking, “Did you see him?” Children crying, “Where’s my mom?”
I remembered people snickering, dismantling each other. Look how they walk. Look at their little legs. Look at their wide hips. I’d learned a one-word label for the war, or conflict, or whatever it was: intambara. That was the hook on which I tried, for years, to hang all this in my mind. Just that one slippery hook. It was not enough. There is never just one word.
* * *
I needed official identification. The entire eighth grade was flying to Washington, DC, to learn about the Civil and Vietnam Wars, and to join my classmates I needed documents. I was sixteen, with no birth certificate and no passport. Claire and I had tried twice to get IDs. We’d stood in line at the DMV to apply for Illinois State ID cards, but each time, when we reached the counter, a clerk glanced at our tattered I-94 immigration forms and pushed them back to us, saying, “Next.”
But without an ID I couldn’t go. The state did not recognize me as a full person, with equal freedoms and rights. Mr. Thomas decided to get involved.
As a rule, Mrs. Thomas provided my care, the deluxe suburban middle-school package: the endless driving to and from school, the laundry, the meals, the lessons, the check-ins, and the thousand other kindnesses I absorbed every day. Mrs. Thomas made it her mission to take away my pain, at least the pain I displayed to the world. If I was sick, she brought me soup and saltines. If someone looked at us funny, she said, in her drawl, “She’s my other daughter, my African daughter.”
Mr. Thomas was a lawyer. This was his department. So one Saturday morning he woke me at 6:00 a.m. and we drove to the secretary of state’s office, where Illinois issues driver’s licenses. He planned to try his luck as an upstanding white American. Other than my I-94, the only official-seeming paper with my name was an exit visa from Burundi, undoubtedly fake. We arrived at the office and waited. At 7:30 a.m., when it opened, we received a number.
An hour later I stood at the counter, silent, while Mr. Thomas talked. “This young lady is from Rwanda,” he said, launching into my story. “When she was six she got out the back door just in time to not be killed in the genocide. She lived in refugee camps for six years before settling in Chicago and living in our home. She has an opportunity to go Washington, DC, with her eighth-grade class. I think the state of Illinois would want to be supportive of her going to Washington to learn about our democracy and continue on her upward path. She’s come twice before to get an ID and been unsuccessful.”
The clerk behind the counter looked up. Mr. Thomas appeared to be such a perfect citizen, tall, clean-shaven, and distinguished. “Sir, what papers does she have?” the clerk asked him.
Mr. Thomas slid her my I-94 and my Burundi visa and the clerk looked them over, bewildered. But Mr. Thomas’s story grabbed her just enough not to reject us outright. She told us to wait for her supervisor. We lined up again a few booths over.
Ten minutes later Mr. Thomas started once more. “This young lady is from Rwanda. When she was six she got out the back door just in time…” Mr. Thomas was now practiced at his great American tale. He finished and stood silent, leaving it to the manager to weigh his perfect looks against my imperfect appearance, and to weigh her allegiance to humanity against standard procedure.
“Interesting story,” the manager said, and then she smiled. “Good luck, young lady. Take this slip and return to the photo line downstairs.”
This left me with a crucial decision: how to spell my last name. In Rwanda my baptismal name had been Uwamariya. The U at the start meant “I am of” Wamariya. But on my exit visa my name was spelled Wamariya, with no U attached. Wamariya had been my name in my American schools.
Claire’s last name was different: Mukundente. It means, How much do I love?
As far as I knew, my last name was mine and mine alone. Mr. Thomas’s mindset was practical, as always. “This is the moment to change back, if you think you’ll want to. It’ll be much more difficult later.”
I stuck with Wamariya.
* * *
I stood on the battlefield at Antietam and listened to the guide say that 23,000 people died, were wounded, or went missing there in a single day. Twenty-three thousand people. In one day. In a civil war. There was no blood anywhere. No women crying because their children had been killed. No grandmothers burned. The spring grass looked so fresh, so gentle. The field had once been stained red.
The next day we visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial—all those names, each for a soldier destroyed. I’d been living in my armor, trying to maintain a fantasy that I now inhabited a better world. I lived in a country that told itself that it did not have wars at home. Now I broke down. So many named young dead men on that Vietnam memorial. No memorials or walls dedicated to dead Vietnamese civilians. I ached with jealousy for those named. I walked around the low black monument, sobbing. A teacher tried to comfort me but I still couldn’t stand to be hugged. She encouraged me to return to the hotel but I didn’t want to.
Meanwhile, my classmates took pictures. They were so lucky. They did not identify with the dead.
* * *
At the Holocaust Memorial Museum, a docent handed me an identity card.
On it was a picture of a bald German man with round glasses—Jacob Unger, a salesman. He was gassed in the Sobibór extermination camp in 1943. Before that, he had a wife named Erna and two children, Max and Dora. He taught Hebrew in the evenings. The Unger family fled to the Netherlands, as refugees, in 1938. Five years later Jacob and his wife were sent to Westerbork, a Dutch labor camp. A week later he was sent to Sobibór, in Poland. He was seventy-two years old.
Later that semester, in Chicago, a Holocaust survivor came to speak to our class. She showed us the number tattooed on her arm. I envied that she had a language for talking about what had been done to her, a way of describing and ordering a world that had tried to reduce her to nothing.
Claire maintained order in her world by believing that God had a plan. Other Rwandans we knew in America partied too much, or drank too much, or watched endless Nigerian soap operas. They shut out the reality of the 800,000, the fact that members of their families and friends had been killed by other members of their families and other friends. They attempted to blot out the past and push on with their lives.
No one I knew acknowledged, as Elie Wiesel and other Holocaust survivors did, Yes, this happened. Yes, people destroy each other. Yes, it is intolerable and turns you into a corpse. But still you must remember and you must carry on.
* * *
In 2004, when the movie Hotel Rwanda came out, a student in my class asked me if I had been scared during the war. He was the first peer to ask me that question directly. I took offense. You want me to tell you how I felt? How dare you ask me to return to that place.
Soon the questions grew worse. People wanted to know if anyone in my family had been murdered, and if I had seen people get killed. I could not believe their sense of entitlement. These people did not have the right to my pain. They did not even realize that they wanted it, that they saw my life as a movie. Their questions felt prurient, violating, evidence of their inability to see me as fully human.
I understand fear of and fascination with death are central to the human condition, but I didn’t want to be asked about death. I did not want to be a tool or a case
study. I did not want to be that Rwandan girl.
Yet inevitably I was a curiosity, an emissary from suffering’s far edge. People asked me to speak at church youth groups. They asked me to speak at Catholic charities. The requests came through Mrs. Thomas, who declined most of them for me. The events broke me down.
I did agree to speak to a class at New Trier High School, since it was the high school I’d be attending the following year. “Just talk about your childhood,” the teacher said. I wasn’t ready to do that. I felt scared and out of control at the idea of sharing my interior life.
So when I walked into the classroom of half-interested freshmen I asked the teacher to pull down the wall map of Africa. That way I could stick to the itinerary. My character would be unimportant. “I was born here,” I began, pointing to Rwanda. The country looked to me like a gallstone in the center of the African body, a ball of pain. “We had a wonderful life and all of a sudden everything started to change.”
I narrated my life as an adventure. I learned to speak seven languages. I wandered across a continent. I told a true story, though one that conveyed nearly nothing.
In return, the class reacted without pity, which was the point. They just thought I was cool. I hadn’t known that was possible—that I could gain social status if I told my story in the right way.
When I finished, one of the students asked, “Did you have any animals? Like did you have elephants?”
I tried to spin the query into what seemed like a cultural exchange, asking, “Why do you have those metal things on your teeth?”
Another girl called out: “You didn’t shower for days? Gross!”
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 9