It was the year of literature for me but you, Rwanda no longer have any kind of album.
You who have survived genocide and migration. It was the year of picking out books that would make me feel glorious and unique for being a female writing in an age of iron still dominated by males. It was the year of missing people from childhood, from high school, an aunt who was so far away from me who died from cancer, another family member who I regarded as my second mother who passed on after a short illness. It was the year I first spoke those words. She did not have to go, I said. Her death was untimely, I said.
These days I am catching up on my reading. Reading all those books, I should have read in high school and university. I am reading The Waves by Virginia Woolf. Have yet to finish Mrs Dalloway. I can write about genocide from looking inside the glass walls that separates us but I have never experienced it. It is hideous to think that we are the cause of our own oblivion. Humanity is the cause of killing humanity. We know how to manifest, manifest, and to manifest the ‘glories of war’. We know how to kill but half the time we do not know how to live.
Welcome to Darfur. Genocide is a cancerous growth. When you confront that evil, death of the muscle of the ancients, that bloodbath you not only confront conflict, war, hatred, loathing of the worst kind and prejudice. You also happen to confront child soldiers, rape and sexual violence of the worst kind. At the end of the day, the women and the girls of Darfur are like falling rain. There is beauty in that picture if you make contact with them but if you look closely enough you will see that there is something destroyed. They are no longer among the living.
Their survival means that they have to create a new identity, psyche, intellect, mental faculties for themselves if they wish to exist. From the beginning of time, there has been genocide. I cannot say you who are damaged and scarred let it feed you, let it nourish you if you are a refugee. It is not my place to tell you anything. The psychologically depressed. Let us call the victims and the survivors of genocide the psychologically depressed. The suicide of history is there. All I can see is a hopelessness and a terror. Falling and falling down. Dumbed down.
I mean is that not the best way to describe them. Genocide teaches you to talk to the dead. Most importantly, your dead. It is a disease. This longing. This is how we live now. Girls, young boys and women living alongside men with guns, war, a slaughterhouse and no girl, woman and young boy. There was blood in the mud. Journalists stood on bones and their words became the words of prophets in a wilderness history. This is what pain (the bleeding lion) and insanity (the handsome tigers parading at the zoo) is at the same time. They have to meet somewhere.
Genocide meets many more witnesses than celebrities will ever meet. Genocide will meet watchers, dancers in the dark, sabotage, destruction and in the end destroys that word ‘stigma’. In the end, it builds the word ‘community’. You remember pain in childhood but there is a long-suffering ahead for someone who has experienced and lived through genocide that I cannot even begin to fathom. I write in long intervals of mourning. That is the name of the game.
Here in my hot bedroom that in post-apartheid South Africa I have yet to start on The Voyage Out and Virginia Woolf, her essays and lectures. Am feeling gloriously in tune with stream of
consciousness writing. Am positively glowing with it. I write best in that niche but was told to explore other avenues as well. The year is ending but a writer and a poet’s work is never done. I am more tired in the evenings now. The more I think of the ‘ballad of Sylvia and Ted’, the more I think of the ballad of my own parents, of my own failing health problems.
How they do not fit anymore into that otherworldly wheel of perfectly matched individuals who get married fit into it. How my father is not a repair type of person or a repairperson. I think of waves. Their ghost stories haunt me. I do not know what happens to families when they lose their families to the horror of genocide. I only know that I am one of the privileged few. Educated and so forth. The ancestors are not responsible for the genocide in Africa. I think of waves. Woolf’s waves.
From childhood to growing, becoming more set in your ways, becoming elderly. I think of the waves breaking against Sylvia Plath’s adolescent shoreline and her years at Smith. My Hiroshima. The Hiroshima of my parents own making. When you write you have to get used to the solitude. It almost pains me to say this. You take all your wounds, all your walking woundedness, all your scar tissue, all your shouty emotions, you spread it all out in front of you, and then you begin to put everything in mental boxes.
Make arrangements out of them and label them all with ‘Pandora’. Only if you feel like it. Treasure your thoughts because they are precious. As precious as Rwandan ephemera, the miracles of glaciers on the opposite side of the world and Eastern Cape butterflies. There it was. The Rwandan genocide, hell on earth and the international community turned their heads and looked away. Remember, I tell myself there are also treasures, so treasure them. You believe in a God. For centuries men, women and children have believed in a God.
When genocide strikes a country or humanity, there is no God. Somebody should have said that already in every war that was ever fought that there is a genocide. On both sides. On all sides. Every human life that comes back in a body bag is not a conquest for the other side but it is a measure of loss on how that person could have shaped history either themselves or by their progeny. They say that the winner takes it all but instead it is the legacy of the history that remains of that fate of that person who was the victim of the genocide.
Instead of talking about genocide let us do this instead and talk about the milk of kindness of humanity. It seems as if only women think that way. A grandmother’s love will ravish you. For you as a child there are terrors. The terror of losing the mother figures in your life. Your mother, your grandmothers and other female mentors. You will know nothing of German revenge and Nazism, Auschwitz and SS soldiers. You will know nothing of Hitler and Mussolini. When you grow up you will see genocide everywhere you look. You will not be able to escape it.
I know you ethnic cleansing, Bosnia. You will say.