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August 31, 2007
Betwixt the tealeaves and gorillas, Rwanda has a macabre industry: genocide tourism.
(July 26th) At Ntarama I found a pass card. It had holes in it, the photo was torn off, but the boxes next to Hutu and Twa were empty, and there was a small innocuous looking X next to Tutsi. This was amongst the relics left in a room that had been used to burn those that were alive, though injured, after the massacre. It was scattered on the outskirts with some other debris, that looked at first like sea refuse: a pipe, a card, and the gentle almost unrecognizable curve of an iliac crest… a half a human pelvis. My friend was literally standing on the card when I found it, and I hesitated to pick it up. In the holocaust memorial these relics are behind glass. At Ntarama they are haphazardly labeled with magic marker, or ignored all together. The shoes hit me hardest: the Sunday’s Best, stained in blood, still showing the “size 39” and inner pink tag. The sheer quantity of relics of the genocide is intimidating. The attitude seems to be, “Why bother cataloguing pains”? They are too numerous to quantify. They are too present. Cataloguing gives a degree of safety and disconnect. So many people in Rwanda do not want that, they want the gruesome and real reminders. Furthermore, these memorials have become a considerable tourist attraction.
Walking outside of the crypt at a nearby memorial, Nyamata, I treaded carefully through the small purple flowers strewn like a connect-the-dots image on the soil from a flowering tree above. Purple is the color of genocide remembrance. I looked at these constellations, compared with the constellations of shrapnel and shell holes in the tin roof of the ceiling of the church. They holes and the flowers seemed equal in number and in size. I couldn’t help but think that maybe they came in pairs, a flower for a life, a hole for its loss: maybe there is some accidental symbolism in Rwanda. The femurs in the crypt were stacked in the bookshelf-like spaces. Walking out I saw the stacks of firewood at the school next door, and their mottled bark resembled the mottled color of the unpreserved bones. I understood Delphine’s PTSD considerably better after seeing these memorials: the aesthetic reminders of terror are all too evident in the mundane.
There is a woman interred at Nyamata. She is not known by name. She is in a coffin to herself with a stick still in her vagina continuing to her abdomen and all the way to her chest. Her baby shares her coffin. She has an unusually small amount of company in her final resting place, compared with the usual 20-30 skeletons per coffin, expressly because of the gruesome mechanism of her death. And I think of that stick, still woven through her bones, and wish that her tombstone had a name. But names are worthless currency, and at a certain point it becomes both unreasonable and impossible to find a measure that can explain the vastness of loss of human life.
There are no answers in Rwanda. One could study the specifics endlessly, and find no ergot in the bread and no lead in the pipeworks. Even if these scientific answers did apply, they would be insufficient. Likewise, our explanations of the social and historical factors fall short of complete. One could look for explanations and find the only one available in the intelligent, structured, and capable Rwandan environment: depravity is only human, and otherwise good people are easy to frighten. The examples of genocide are numerous, and there is no equation that describes perfectly the precursors to them.
Leaving the memorials we ran into several prisoners being taken for a Gacaca trial. Gacaca is the local court system developed to deal with genocide perpetrators. The prisoners are dressed in pink jumpsuits, a change from the black jumpsuits they used to wear that were considered too macabre and frightening. They are treated casually, and they are only mildly guarded. Try as I might I could not connect one of these faces with the tombs and the bones. Despite seeing the relics, this place remains entirely unreal to me.
Posted by Caitlin Lee Cohen at August 31, 2007 03:56 PM
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