From there you turn a corner and the walls are green, blank planes of gray and green, and there are just voices, disembodied voices, issuing commands. The voices, the commands, they make you feel small. You don’t see a man. You don’t see a person. You are not a person. You are just hearing a voice.
My shoes caused trouble. I was wearing black boots, almost like soldier boots, leather with a two-inch heel and a silver buckle on the side. I had worn the boots in Rwanda.
The guards at the gate wanted to know about my boots. The security agents at the airport did too. Those agents interrogated me for two hours. I cried much of the time. They wanted to know where I’d bought my boots. Where I wore them. What I was doing in Israel. What I was doing in Palestine. They made me take them off and they scanned them.
I was interested in why they cared—Sebald gave me that. What did my boots mean for them? What could the moment teach me?
After I got my boots back, I composed myself and ran to the gate. The guards stopped me again. They pulled me aside and dug through my carry-on bags. I was on my period. I had loose tampons and extra underwear in there. They pulled them out, regarded them. I felt humiliated.
By the time I boarded the plane I was crying, again. I cried all the time. I was flying first class, but no level of service or amount of champagne could shut down that whole nightmare.
Still, I had my American passport. I could get out of there.
19
The elementary school girls at the Palm Beach Day Academy all wore matching yellow jumpers. The boys wore white cotton polo shirts, each embroidered with PBDA in navy thread. I’d flown down to Palm Beach from New Haven to speak, and as always, for my talk, I dressed up: A-line dress, high heels. I did not look approachable; I looked commanding. And yet the students, all soft-cheeked and porous, looked at me with their full-moon eyes, so guileless and sweet.
After the assembly wrapped up and we all left the auditorium, I noticed, in the corridor, one little girl staring at me, unabashed. She began to walk toward me, then got shy and ducked behind her teacher, who, in turn, crouched beside the child and whispered with such gentleness, “You can go say hi.”
It was nothing, yet it shook something loose in me. I’d forgotten how tender adults could be with other people’s children. That girl felt safe, here in this lovely school, with no more protection than her teacher’s leg.
I have never been a gentle protectress. I love Claire’s kids, but I have actively, deliberately destroyed their tenderness. My way of caretaking was militarized. My job was to shield them from harm and death. I prepared them for the worst.
Those kids didn’t have a safety margin, no cushion, not even adequate supervision. Claire’s children and my younger siblings, plus a young cousin who also lived with Claire, they watched TV until 11:00 p.m. and fell asleep in class. They were the last kids picked up each day at their schools’ aftercare programs, due to Claire’s schedule, and if Claire’s boss kept her overtime, or if the train was slow, she was even later.
One Friday afternoon I came home and found Freddy and his friends sprawled on the couches after football practice, watching sports. I exploded. “Do you know someone else is taking practice SSAT tests right now? Why is your room not clean? Why are the dishes not washed?”
Freddy said, “It’s Friday.”
“I know it’s the weekend! I don’t care that it’s the weekend! Tell those kids to get out of the house.” I yelled at Freddy’s friends too. “Go home and read something. Don’t watch these stupid shows.” They all hated me.
We were all so broken. I was so broken. I should have been lashing out at the world, but I was yelling at these specific children. I was not safe. I was not gentle.
When I returned from Palm Beach Day Academy, I had a new mission: to get Claire’s kids away from us, at least part of the time. I was adept at working the system; I knew where to find scholarships, how to fill out the financial aid forms. I knew that if a school’s admissions committee had doubts about one of our kids’ academic preparedness, we could offer to repeat a grade.
So I set Claire’s children on the path I had followed: Mariette left to do a post-graduate semester at the African Leadership Academy in South Africa, then went to American University in Washington, DC; Freddy attended Mooseheart Child City & School near Chicago, and then enrolled at Milton Academy, a boarding school outside Boston; Michele followed Freddy to Milton three years later. When he was a freshman, Freddy was a star of the football team, roundly adored, and on the cover of the school magazine. We were good Americans, when we wanted to be.
* * *
I had no home of my own after I graduated from college. I could not return to the Thomases’. They had given me everything that they had given to their own children. Mrs. Thomas understood me at my most vulnerable and looked out for me. She knew if she moved the things in my room while I was away I’d have to rearrange them. She always had popcorn and chamomile tea. But I felt I had to move on, grow up. I could not live, again, in Kenilworth. I could not go back to Claire’s. I could not go live with my parents and define myself again as their child. Not even my younger siblings lived with my parents—they lived with Claire.
I did have options—gorgeous, generous options. I could fly to New York and stay for a month in a friend’s fancy apartment. I could fly to Palm Beach, be a guest at another lovely, glamorous home, and attend Gatsby-style parties and laugh with blond, tanned girls.
But then what? More travel? More luxury? More filling and refilling and sampling and imbibing, more saying “yes, please” and “thank you very much,” a cycle I now knew would never end because I still hadn’t filled, hadn’t even fully acknowledged, the vast emptiness inside me.
This became a kind of madness, a repetition dysfunction, a way to keep the story in motion, keep smiling the beads, but never settle on a denouement. I needed to pause. I needed stability. My boyfriend, Ryan, an East Coast hockey player I started dating at Yale after Zach and I split up, wanted to move to California. He was gentle, patient, and good to me. He also had no interest in Sebald, no compulsion to interrogate the details of his life. This annoyed me at times, but mostly it made me feel safe and in control. So I moved, we moved.
I rented a place near Lafayette Park, in one of San Francisco’s few classic old apartment buildings. I did yoga, sometimes twice a day. I walked in the Berkeley Hills. Those hills looked like Rwanda.
* * *
In public, I played the part of myself. I wore the right makeup, the right jewelry, the right dress. I was nobody and I was everybody. But no role felt exactly right. Each performance felt distancing, a ruse.
I stood in front of audiences and tried to package my story in a way that mattered. Sometimes people listened, sometimes they didn’t listen. Some people seemed amazed and moved, and some looked bored and proud of themselves, like they were checking a box.
“Here’s my story,” I said. “Use it now or later. When you need it, it’ll be there for you. Maybe someday you’ll be facing a challenge, and you’ll think of my story. You’ll think of Claire. You’ll remember to put your ego in a bag and throw that bag away. You’ll remember to be kind and generous and a better human. Maybe you’ll realize that you need to learn to tell your own. You’ll start thinking: How did I come to have my possessions? How did I come to believe in my God?
“I know it is a privilege to have the safety, time, comfort, and education to try to shape my experience into something coherent, to think critically and creatively about my life. There’s a difference between story and experience. Experience is the whole mess, all that actually happened; a story is the pieces you string together, what you make of it, a guide to your own existence. Experience is the scars on my legs. My story is that they’re proof that I’m alive. Your story, the meaning you choose to take when you listen to me, might be different. Your story might be that my scars are my fault and I
should feel shame.”
Onstage, I tried to be relevant and not too frightening. If I was speaking to my peers, I’d say, “I totally freaked out watching The Hunger Games. Maybe you did too? District Nine looked like Zaire during the war.” It was true: the feral cats in the ruined buildings, the world drenched in blood and sooty gray.
Almost always I wore my five-inch heels. No doubt people wondered, Why is a humanitarian speaker wearing those shoes? But I needed to be stared at, to be admired and loved. I needed to confound people’s expectations. I needed to be my own creation: specific, alarming, unique.
The transaction that resulted from sharing my story often bothered me. Some wanted to help me, and could not stand the idea that I was not defeated. Panic flashed across their faces when I suggested to those who considered themselves more powerful than me that the transaction could go both ways. That I could help them too.
I was often cast as a martyr or a saint. I was special, very special. So strong, so brave, a genocide princess, definitely not just one of the many dozens of dark migrant bodies crammed into a flimsy boat, the ones they saw in those horrifying images on the front page of the New York Times. But I was still a character out of their imagination, a prisoner of their assumptions. I was not their equal. On occasion I was asked if I felt guilty for surviving.
“Uh, no,” I answered. “I did everything I could to survive. Do you think I should feel guilty for surviving? Do you feel guilty that on 9/11 you weren’t in one of the Twin Towers?”
* * *
One winter evening, a year or so into my San Francisco tenure, I sat on a panel for an international nonprofit that wanted to partner with thought leaders to innovate, or something like that. I was often invited to mingle with haute Silicon Valley. I was a woman—check. Black—check. A refugee—check-plus.
This nonprofit thought they wanted to hear my story and I thought I wanted to tell them. They had declared it Refugee Week. I would be the representative refugee conversing with the great minds of the new economy about what we should do to help solve the refugee crisis.
The world cared deeply about refugees, for that thirty seconds. Aleppo was under siege. Migrants kept dying in the Mediterranean. Everybody’s Instagram and Facebook feeds were lit up with that searing photograph of the drowned baby boy on a beach. The photo was so powerful that whenever I heard the word “refugee” I saw that baby. I saw baby, beach, water, boat, bright blue.
Punctuating this filtered, curated horror was the occasional hero YouTubing from the rubble in Syria. Some of these YouTubing men were born social media stars—so handsome, so articulate, so courageous, so special. This look-how-compassionate-I-am social media extravaganza was certainly better than disregard.
But it was hard to keep all of the many individual lives in focus. Tens of thousands were dying way over there, and look, here is this one precious baby or this one outstanding adult. I understood this. I did it myself. It’s truly impossible to hold all the single experiences of suffering in the world in your mind at the same time. The human brain can’t handle that much pain. You cannot differentiate and empathize with each of those distinct people. You cannot hear each of their stories and recognize every individual as strong and special, and continue on with your day.
* * *
On the panel we discussed the Red Cross and how they should intervene. Then one of my co-panelists mentioned something that he found funny: refugees had started telling aid workers that, in addition to food, water, and shelter, they wanted a way to store photos.
To him this was a laugh line, a classic comedy setup: here we’re talking about this big, terrible weighty issue and oh, can we pivot for just a second to this petty first-world concern?
Only it wasn’t a laugh line to those involved. I had only those two pictures total of myself in Rwanda. I had only a few photographs of anybody at all in my family from before 2000. This was a never-ending wellspring of confusion. I wanted to see the people I came from. I wanted pictures of those people to help me figure out the person I was and the person I might have been.
But digital storage was not what my co-panelists wanted to discuss. They came here to rescue. They planned on being saviors.
I breathed in and out. I kept my poise. I was extremely good at sitting before a group and keeping my poise. Then, midway through the evening, another one of my co-panelists, a big mensch-y billionaire, turned to me and asked: “So how does it feel to be one of us?”
I recoiled. I had worn purple lipstick that night, just on the inside of my lips. People found that very interesting. “One of us”—what did that mean? One of the rich people? One of the white people? One of the people who’d never been kicked out of the kingdom? One of the people on the top of humanity’s heap? One of the people who gives, not takes? One of the people who never suffered? I did not know what he meant by “us” and I did not want to live in his story.
“Actually, I’d rather you ask me how I got to sit here,” I said, still poised, still smiling, but no longer playing my expected role. “Ask me about my journey,” I said. “Ask me why I’m sitting here—what do I know that other refugees don’t know, that people suffering from homelessness don’t know. What do I know that you don’t know. I hacked into your system.”
“Let’s talk about that after,” the billionaire said, uncomfortable that I’d diverged from the check-plus former refugee script. The moderator moved us along.
After the panel, I found the billionaire and asked him if he would like to meet for tea so that we could have that talk. He said to email him to set up a date. I had his email address from the panel organizers.
I wrote but he didn’t respond.
20
I was still a hard person to love. I wanted to be adored and admired but not needed. I wanted to retain the right to disappear. Remaining in place, nesting—it set off fears that somebody would yank me away. To counter it, I had to flee. I had to reassure myself that I still knew how to escape.
My body itself remained alien, a burden. I’d had to carry this thing around with me—this body, with its dark skin, unruly hair, and narrow feet; this body, with its liabilities, this body that had been vandalized, stolen. This was the hardest thing in the world: to remember the ravagement and still believe my body was magic, to remember the shattering and still believe my body was spectacular, holy, and capable of creation.
There are moments for which I still have no vocabulary. My mind bounces from the terror and havoc into colors. I say, It was blue. It was green. The memory makes me want to burn everything, raze the whole galaxy, and my brain won’t hold the plot. But I have to keep trying—we have to keep trying. I have to find a way to tell you: This happened. Men came, seeking to destroy my body and demolish my future. But I cannot be ruined.
Rape is the story of women and war, girls and war, hundreds of thousands of mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, cousins, and aunts in my country alone, hundreds of millions across the world. So many men were murdered in the massacre. So many women later died of HIV. Rape, ruin—corporeal, psychological, social—lingered in even the most polished, sophisticated, private spaces decades after the war. Night is not a woman’s story. Rwandans believe we’re comfortable with silence. But silence accommodates hate.
I try to put myself back together, so that I don’t fear men or need them to protect me, so I can reclaim my power. These days I read Audre Lorde. She is my light. “We have been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t.” “I feel, therefore I can be free.” “The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings.” Any man I invite into my heart and my life needs to understand the magnitude of emotion inside a woman who has gone through war.
When Ryan first told me that he loved me, I was harsh. I said, “Excuse me, what does that even mean? I. Love. YOU. Really, what does that mean?” I thought, at the time, that
he was imposing his will. I thought, at the time, that his remark was selfish. “Well, if that’s the story that you’re going to tell yourself, that you love me, I guess you love me,” I said.
* * *
Ryan was so patient, so kind, so white and jocky, so detached from my whole African genocide-survivor-girl drama, which was probably the point. His mother had programmed him to be a good Catholic. He played roller hockey. He drove for Uber and Lyft. He sat on the couch in our shared apartment all day on Sunday and watched football or basketball or baseball or movies. He ate chips. I was constantly taking notes.
We spent five years together, Ryan and I. He protected me, adored me, tolerated me. I had lots of rules. He could not call me cupcake, sugar, or any food name. He could not describe me as bossy, sassy, bitchy, or anything negative.
I needed him, I truly did. Friends asked me to join them at Burning Man. I went, Ryan stayed home. Immediately I realized I’d set myself up. This is where people went to experience ecstasy but also to get closer to suffering—elective, luxury suffering. The desert was hot and dusty, filled with tents. The first morning I woke up and said, What have I done? Where’s the food? I felt cold. I’d left my blue blanket at home.
That day and night, I wore costumes. I drank, danced, looked at art, and I became disoriented. Time and space became kaleidoscopic, colors spinning, no fixed base. I wanted to return to my tent, so I pulled out my bewildering map. The camp was laid out like a clock. Nothing made sense. The journey back to the tent took hours, days, maybe years. I finally did make it to our camp, and the next morning I woke up and said to myself, Okay, another day to survive.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 20