Inspired by the quiet homage to the 1994 Rwanda Genocide that Wangechi Mutu started posting on social media on April 6, I decided to respond. I offer these poetic pieces as a way to think about the way in which we navigate through knowing about and understanding the genocide and other wars that endure.
Here are Days 41-50 as they come
Day 41
If justice was in a race with time
Peace would have no medal to offer
If peace sat at the table with justice
Time wouldn’t be served
If time wanted justice, so bad, so bad
There would be nothing that peace could offer
Either by seduction or reason
Day 42
I kneel before you
I kneel before you but this is not an act of supplication
I kneel before you because I cannot stand
I kneel before you because I cannot speak right now
My gestures are wordless articulations
& the dark in my eyes is not an indication of anything you could imagine
& there is nothing, nothing that you could ever give me
Day 43
After all the madness
& it had to have been a madness
You hear the arguments and explanations
That it was inevitable
That it was coming
That it had to happen after all those years
Knowing what we know now
What else should we have expected?
I hear that my loss was inevitable
I hear that my loss was coming
I hear that my heart break was written in the stars
& in historical documents & even in the oral stories
We had to have been blind & deaf & dumb to not have known
We had to have been oblivious, thinking that we could live
to a full life of family and community like others
After all, who misses the inevitability of a mass event like a genocide?
Day 44
Days and days of shallow breathing interspersed with deep sighs
days zooming into nothing
days of years and years that morphed into decades
of life as a gift, of life as worth living
days on days-ing, we weren’t even counting
It wasn’t as if after all those days
a veil would lift and it would have taken just those days, nothing more
It wasn’t as if after all those days
there was a chance that normal would morph back
as if all the seeds that had sprouted in those one hundred days
would un-sprout themselves into nothingness
Day 45
We watched as faith crumbled off the walls in dull clumps
We watched as prayers dissipated into clouds which then returned as drizzle to mock us
Although sometimes it rained
& sometimes it rained hard, as if the earth was sobbing
but it was never so — the earth remained dispassionate to our circumstance
Eventually our superstitions burst like bubbles
or floated away like motes in the light
There was nothing left to hold on to, not even time which stretched and then crunched itself wilfully
Cats and dogs roamed about, feral and hungry
People crouched in the shadows, not all feral and all the time hungry
At a half past all time, even decay stopped for a moment
Ours remains Eden, not even a spate of killing can change that.
Day 46
If truth is to be known in order to be acknowledged, then this is the truth that we know:
we know the numbers
we know the number of days
we know the circumstances
where the machetes came from and who wielded them
where the dotted line was signed
we know who fled
who advanced while chanting our names out loud
the names they called us
and the papers and airwaves on which these names can still be found
we know who claim to be the winners & the victims
we know where the markers are for where we buried the children
we know the cyclical nature of these things
the impossibility of knowing everything that happened
we know that true witnesses cannot speak
and that those who have words cannot articulate the inarticulable
we know that there are those who died without telling what they knew
we know that there are those who live without telling what they know
we also know that some people choose to tell and some stories choose to remain untold
Day 47
My sister used to look up when she remembered
Sometimes she would have a small laugh before she started to recall a story
Often she’d be laughing so hard at the reveries that we all started to laugh
Soon enough we were all laughing so hard because she was laughing
And then she laughed because we laughed
And the memory of that story dissolved into the laughter and became infused with it.
My sister is not here anymore
I wonder if she remembers laughing
I wonder if she remembers anything
Day 48
So what is it to be alive today?
I no longer think about the hard beneath my feet
or the give of my body into sleep
or the way my skin used to dissolve deliciously from touch
Is this what it is to become a haunt?
Day 49
There we were, lining up like frauds
There we were, receiving medals and commendations
like frauds
There we were, listening to speeches and reading the adorations
about us as heroes – like frauds
There we were
holding in ourselves, like frauds
All we did was stay alive
While many, many others died.
Day 50
This is the nature of our haunting:
silent witnesses & silence itself
neither revealing nor capable
of explication
of what any of that meant
What do we need nature for?
All it does is replicate its own beauty
Juliane Okot Bitek 