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June 19, 2007
Mail me the carbon...
When I wake I comb my hair before the mirror above my dresser. Every morning for the past two years I have seen in that mirror, beside my sleep-softened face, the blackened face of a burnt man. It is a wire service photograph clipped from a newspaper and taped to my mirror. The caption reads: "Alan McDonald in Miami hospital bed." All you can see in the photograph is a smudged triangle of face from his eyelids to his lower lip; the rest is bandages. You cannot see the expression in his eyes; the bandages shade them…He had been burned before, thirteen years previously, by flaming gasoline. For years he had been having his body restored and his face remade in dozens of operations. He had been a boy, and then a burnt boy. He had already been stunned by what could happen, by how life could veer.
Once I read that people who survive bad burns tend to go crazy; they have a very high suicide rate. Medicine cannot ease their pain; drugs just leak away, soaking the sheets, because there is no skin to hold them in. The people just lie there and weep. Later they kill themselves. They had not known, before they were burned, that the world included such suffering, that life could permit them personally such pain…
I read the whole clipping again every morning. This is the Big Time here, every minute of it. Will someone please explain to Alan McDonald in his dignity… what is going on? And mail me the carbon.
- Annie Dillard, from Teaching a Stone to Talk.
The road by my house is undergoing construction. This morning, when digging the sewer, three men uncovered several bones from a human’s remains. There was little ceremony. They dusted them off with a rag, purchased a plastic hallmark-style gift bag covered in hearts, and placed the bones inside delicately, though they had been driven on top of for years. I didn’t see what they did with the bag, but I imagined them leaving the cheesy valentines present on the doorstep of some neighbor. I imagined little kids ringing the doorbell and running away, and the horror on the face of the recipient. Is there any good way to receive half a dead body? Can the kitchy hearts, an expensive gesture in such a poor country, cushion the blow?
I saw the film “Hotel Rwanda” when it first came out, in the safe confines of the Avon Theater in Providence. I am generally not wildly susceptible to heartstring-pulling. However, this particular movie destroyed me. I felt foolish walking up the frozen Providence streets, crying profusely in the hard grey context of “ViaVia 4” pizzeria and the construction on Olive Street. I spent an entire day imagining my death, and I somehow could imagine only the preceding events, not the event itself. There is little glamour in death, for all its mystique. Friends of mine were much more critical of the film than I… they felt that the movie toyed with emotion to give you a sense of relief when the main characters cross the line into the RPF territory, from a world of disorderly killing to one of “protective” killing. They said that the movie cultivated a false sense of security, and that it was an improbable survival story. I agree, Hotel Rwanda is both true and improbable. The Rwandan genocide is both true and impossible to believe. Even as an outsider, I want someone to explain to the Rwandaise how life can permit them so much pain. And, as Dillard says, please mail me the carbon.
I have been listening to stories. There is a clear and completely unavoidable problem with the stories we hear from Rwanda: they are only survivors’ stories. In telling the stories of those who survived it is almost as though we pass judgment on those who died. It is appropriate that we extol the determination, genius, and wherewithal of survivors, but can we do this without accidentally claiming that victims didn’t have these same characteristics? In horror films, it is always the weak at heart or the unresourceful who die in the first hour of the movie. When we hear that survival is possible, we cannot help but have this faint idea in the back of our minds: “I would have lived. I would have found my way out and survived.”
My idea of survival was that: a flood of relief, akin to watching Don Cheadle pass through the Hollywood re-created RPF front line.
There is not a single survivor of the Rwandan genocide. I do not believe that anyone who was alive and in Rwanda in 1994 is not deeply (and probably irreparably) traumatized. Everyone, perpetrator or survivor, has witnessed an inescapable and brutal killing, where no tricks or negotiations would have purchased life. Perpetrators have discovered how possible, even facile, it is to take a human life. Whether they were forced into it or elected to do it, whether they are regretful or not, this is an elementally disturbing discovery. Survivors have clearer traumas.
My friend Delphine had never seen a human corpse in her life until 1994. I asked her what it meant to be a survivor. She laughed, a dry, hacking laugh, more of a cough really. She said that surviving only meant having empty tables at weddings. If you imagine the closest people to you, and think of four out of five of them dead (probably killed in front of you) you begin to realize what an echoingly hollow word “survivor” is.
One day I was trying to break Delphine out of the stare that I have learned she does when she re-sees, as though watching a movie, all the bad things that have happened to her. I asked Delphine where she finds pleasure in life. She said that she loves Tracy Chapman, and I set up my computer to play her the tranquil and self-possessed tones of her first album. With small tears, Delphine said that even kindness, when contrasted with the opposite end of the human experience spectrum, makes her sad.
I asked her what brings her joy. She chuckled, a real laugh this time. Her five children love to dance, but are embarrassed to do it in front of her. Delphine’s greatest joy is spying through a crack in the doorway to watch her children bust a move to Jay-Z. But can these pleasures atone for the traumas? Can she somehow hope that joy will counteract the pain rather than remind her of it? Can I hope that Delphine will die an old lady, of a comparatively kind opportunistic infection, feeling as though her life had some ultimate justice, some ultimate balance between the pleasure and the pain?
The movie “Hotel Rwanda” ends with the following sentence: “The genocide ended in July 1994, when Tutsi rebels drove the Hutu army and the Interahamwe militia across the border into the Congo.” I wish that it were over. The Interahamwe continued to kill in Congo for years, reprisal killings and killings of witnesses still happen, and people continue to relive this history, throughout the survivors’ diaspora.
Can we believe the purple signs with hand-written white paint in Kinyarwanda, claiming “Never Again.”? Can we believe the slew of US presidents who have uttered this phrase, what Samantha Powers calls “The Worlds Most Unfulfilled Promise”? Can we hope that there is any truth to Bush’s capitalized scrawl in the margin of Powers’ 2001 article on the Rwandan genocide, “NOT ON MY WATCH”? We have developed a selective vision, which procrastinators around the world know as exclusive hindsight. Not that we haven't had time to do our homework... A new group has been living this hell for four brutally long years, in Darfur.
Posted by Caitlin Lee Cohen at June 19, 2007 04:53 AM
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