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 61 – 70 as they come
Incredulity is a soft-paced wonder
& in the thick of days
Memory is a slippery thing
What do we remember from those one hundred days?
What happened on the tenth day or night
Might have well happened today, or yesterday
Incredulous is word from an innocent space
It is tepid, blubbery sometimes
because everything can happen and everything did
Unless you believe in the eye of the needle
This kind of poverty will never be about material
It won’t be about ragged clothing
or mud huts with broken walls
or river blindness
or murram roads
or bad humoured fields that hoard curses
and promise that there won’t be a harvest this year or next
This isn’t the poverty of sleep
or for that matter, dreams
This is my deep loss, my poverty:
He will never touch my hand again
He will never touch my hand
Walter says life is hard
He says that there is nothing we can do about it
Walter says I have to be happy to be alive
Walter says to be alive is better than being dead
Be happy, Walter says
Be happy to be alive
If being dead is not all that it’s cracked up to be
Then what was that all that rush about?
For my happiness?
There have been three so far
Three men who walk with your gait
Who turn, head first, the way you used to
Walk like you did, sauntering like a cat
Laugh with your laugh
Flick the wrist the way you used to
just before you pointed your finger to make a point
All three men wore your face for a moment
Lighted mine up
You mean to say?
And then you were gone again
and the men were just ordinary men
doing ordinary things
Three imposters
Three who acquiesced to your tricks of reminding me
that you used to be by me
Often times I want to become words
I want to inhabit forgetting as a state of being
Other times I think that if we wore a cloak of silence
Then our invisibility would not be seen as repair
or a sign that everything was good
The problem of becoming silence is that silence doesn’t exist
It wasn’t ever completely silent
Nothing stopped to pay attention
Nature chattered on, busy with life cycling
And subsumed us into the process
Day 66
Sometimes I want to melt into the earth
I want to imagine that some time in the future
Children will run over the soil that I’ve become
Some days
I want to stare at the sky
Perhaps I can learn something, anything
Some days I think about how important the sky has become
I think about it so much and in so doing, I make it exist
I make the sky an endless and expansive backdrop of blue
If there was a sky, how could it witness what it did
& maintain that calm hue?
There’s no denying that these haunted days
Are not necessarily days of grey
There are flowers everywhere
Beauty is always undeniable
These hundred days are haunted days not grey ones
These hundred days are filled with ghosted moments
just like every day
The world turns as it does
Spinning on its own axis and then around the sun.
Perhaps this galaxy is also spinning around something bigger
Perhaps all the worlds spin in order to avoid dealing with the numbers:
Fourteen
Three
All of them
Six from my in-laws
and all of my siblings, parents and their children
Twenty seven
Thirteen
Everyone
Everyone
All of them
Six
Nine
Twelve
My husband and all my children – seven in all
Two
Nineteen
I don’t know
I can’t count anymore
Nobody came back
I don’t know if they ran away to safety or
If they’re just all gone
Too close for comfort when everyone around looks like you.
Too close when they speak your language
Too close when you’re from the same house
Same meal at the table
Same sofa
Same containment of the heart
We became other people
We were them, those ones
And in being slaughtered and reported as slaughtered
We lost any claim to intimacy or self
Even animals don’t commit slaughter
Juliane Okot Bitek 