The Rwanda Genocide, twenty years later: 100 Days of photographs + poems by Wangechi Mutu and Juliane Okot Bitek

Posted: May 1, 2014 | Author: Zócalo Poets | Filed under: 7 GUEST EDITORS, English, Juliane Okot Bitek | Tags: Wangechi Mutu: 100 days of photographs for The Rwanda Genocide |Comments Off on The Rwanda Genocide, twenty years later: 100 Days of photographs + poems by Wangechi Mutu and Juliane Okot Bitek

On April 6th, 2014, Wangechi Mutu posted a picture on social media via Facebook and Instagram. It was the photograph of a woman whose somber pose was that of an exhausted spirit. She titled the picture #100Days #Kwibuka20 – and immediately, I knew what I had to do. The photograph provided me an “in” to the conversation that I’ve wanted to be a part of for more than twenty years. I wanted to think about what it means to be a witness, however obliquely, and how to create solidarity with people who have some idea about the experiences of people I know and love. I decided to write and post “100 Days,” a poem for every day from April 6th forward, inspired by Wangechi Mutu’s work.

Twenty one years ago, I stood in front of the television with both hands on my pregnant belly and wondered what kind of world my child was going to be born into. The burning of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, was live on TV. I saw the images and listened to the commentaries that attempted to justify why the actions taken by the State were valid. It was a trick of time and distance. I understood in that moment that there wasn’t a loud enough scream from me that could stop the horror I was watching on the screen. My feet would not carry me fast enough to Waco from my living room in Vancouver. And even if I was there in Waco, I didn’t have the authority to stop the order, or the strength to stop the firing on the compound that seemed unending in that moment. It was a moment of utter anxiety. I was reminded about how the pain and suffering of others can unite us by our connections to our own pain.

My own homeland, Acholiland, had been burning, so to speak, in a horrific war that pitted the government of Uganda against the Lord’s Resistance Army. As in other landscapes of war, it was the People of the land that suffered the brunt of it as thousands were maimed, killed, and displaced over time. That engagement had been going on since 1987 when the LRA rose as the only guerrillas that the Ugandan army hadn’t been able to quell. By April 1993, I was well aware of a powerlessness that tinges every accomplishment because of that knowledge that people you know are hurting and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.

By April 6th, 1994, my son was a toddler. I was a young mother, used to carrying apprehension and holding on to hope. I wasn’t writing much in those days, caught up in motherhood as I was, but I knew that the downing of the plane that carried the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was the beginning of something awful. It might have been suggested from bits and pieces of news that trickled through to us in Canada. Time would bear it out that we were right. In those same one hundred days, South Africa had just conducted successful elections and Nelson Mandela became the first president of a free South Africa. The Bosnian War had been going on for exactly two years and wasn’t going to cease until the end of 1995. Kurt Cobain’s suicide on April 8th excavated a huge loss in the Grunge community and radio listeners who loved his music everywhere.

Not everyone was dying on the news. O.J. Simpson held the TV airwaves in a live chase in his white Bronco with the LAPD in pursuit – it was important that he was caught before he killed himself, the commentators told us. All this information was coming at me from the tube and there was nothing coming out of me. It was as if the knowledge congealed inside me and stayed put. Time went on as it does. The child grew, another came, and I got older but I never engaged with that knowledge.
Eventually, the news would become headlines and some media would write about or show horrific images of the death and destruction in Rwanda. Almost a million people would die in Rwanda in those one hundred days. Afterwards, the horror would spill into the Democratic Republic of Congo and over five million would die. The war in Darfur would be called genocide but the one in northern Uganda wouldn’t. Technicalities mattered as definitions do, but our pain wasn’t any less. Twenty years later and several declarations have come and gone, “Never Again” being the most common one. The Globe and Mail recently referred to April as “Never Again” Time, challenging the idea that it is enough merely to make the claim – yet the killings in CAR and South Sudan continue unabated.

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“Never Again” Time:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-debate/genocide-america-says-never-again-but-keeps-turning-a-blind-eye/article11541517/

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I wrote to Wangechi and suggested that I compose a poetic response to her photos, and she agreed. I have been posting a poem a day, thinking about what it means to engage with such knowledge today, twenty years after. What do commemorations and declarations do for people who are still deeply haunted and scarred by those events that we think of as History? What is it to be in a world that witnessed yet did nothing about your suffering? How do we hold just enough bitterness to keep us focused on what needs our attention? Above all, what does it mean for us to witness the suffering of others? It is so easy to stay hypnotized by the swirl of information that comes at us from the internet, in print and, of course, on television. How much out there does not reflect the reality of our day to day hauntedness?

If these should be a hundred days of thinking about what a genocide means in our time, I hope that we can make time to think about the impact of the intimate losses of so many of us, everyday that we forget. I’m humbled and happy to be invited to post these poems at Zócalo Poets. These poems are not meant to be a monument or even a voice for anyone who lost and was lost in the Rwanda Genocide. Rather, I hope to seek solidarity with those who continue to mourn the promise of the past and find strength to get through another day.

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Juliane Okot Bitek

April 30th, 2014

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100 Days: a poetic response to Wangechi Mutu’s #Kwibuka20#100 Days

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Day 76
Another angle would have you believing that this is how it went down
This and specifically this.
And they will be right.
This is how it went down:

There were days upon days
Days upon days
Days upon days
Days upon days
Days that never seemed to end
Who’s to say when the first of a hundred days began?

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Day 77
We tried to sing but ended up croaking
We who used to be songbirds
In time, our throats had gotten dry
This is what happens when you start counting
Days in hundreds from a date that never was

Day 78
Insouciance must be blue
How else could we explain a sky that witnesses
And still insists on magical hues of its self?
Insouciance has to be blue
From royalty to madness
From the marked maleness of babies
To those that stayed death
From indigo at midnight
To the peasant hue of the mother of God
Another young woman to whom a hole in the pale sky announced
That she would bear a child
That she would bear
A boy dressed in madness
How else can we explain the resonances, echoes and exceptions?
The mother of God in us mothers of sons who had to be killed
& God in the mothers whose sons had to be killed

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Day 79
A piece of cloth in a breeze
A clump of mud
A memory of desire
A broken yellow pencil with black stripes
Staedler Noris HB2 Made in Germany
A small stone
A clump of grass
A day
A pinched nerve
A delicate smell
A hill
A faded sign above the shop
Reads oca Cola It’s the Real
A child runs across the way
A list of jumbled images

None of which takes me away long enough to forget
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Day 80
There is something inconsequential about all of this
One foot in front of another
One foot in front of another
To what end?

A nothing in front of a nothing
Round a round
Round a round

Never again and reconciliation
Like wayward birds about my head
Round a round a round a round a round

Blindfold me or not
Here’s another spot on the map
Where people are walking
One foot over another
One foot over another hundred days

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Day 81
Nine times
Nine times they called out
Nine times, just nine
We know this because each call caused a finger to fall
We know this because there was one finger left
The ringed one
Only the ringed one

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Day 82
This is to confirm that there is something to be said
For tying the waist really tight
Tight, tight, tight, tight
Tighter than when spoiling for a fight
Tighter that when getting ready to receive a heavy burden
Tight enough for days that rolled upon days

It was the tightness in our waists that kept us going
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Day 83
We failed to read the clouds
As we had been taught to do in high school
Cumulonimbus chasing cotton balls
Cumulonimbus alone
Cumulonimbus with or without rain

What did it all mean?
What did it mean that we failed to read the sky?
It wasn’t in the cowrie shell readings
It wasn’t in the tea
Perhaps Cumulonimbus was a script in the sky
A writing that was not familiar
Not then and definitely not now
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Day 84
Impressionistic moments follow each other
Like Monet come to life
It’s after two in the afternoon
Now it’s evening
Now suddenly night

Food, blanket
No food, no blanket
It’s all the same

There were no hundred days
Just a jumble of impressions
Moments that sometimes piled up
On top of each other
Sometimes moments lay side by side
Holding hands
Sleeping hungry
Or without blankets
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Day 85
And God said: Let there be light
And there was light from the beginning of the world
There was light on this day like all the other days
Every day there was light enough to see everything
We didn’t always need to see
We didn’t need to see everything everyday
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Day 86
My country belongs to God.
These are our scriptures:

Happy shall he be
that taketh and dasheth
thy little children unto the rock
Psalms 137:9

Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord
Romans 12:19

I will be there
where there are two or more gathered in my name
Christ proclaims in Matthew 18:20

Jesus must have a permanent presence in the church
Where the door has been propped ajar for eternity
Jesus Christ must live here
Where congregants were struck in supplication
Pleading for their lives, pleading, pleading for their lives

Where shall we find comfort?
Where can we go in this country of God?
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Day 87
Reconciliation is minding my business
Reconciliation is minding my life
Reconciliation is aimed at my head
Reconciliation leaves me no choice

Don’t get me wrong

Reconciliation is a grand thing
Reconciliation photographs very well
Reconciliation makes people smile
Reconciliation feels good, dresses well
Writes well, conjures good dreams

Reconciliation wants me to wipe my tears dry
To wipe the slate clean — well at least wipe it
It wants me to forget my first born daughter
The one I could not bury
The one whose body I walked away from

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Day 88
After all this, today
Another vigorous attempt to divvy up moments equally
Stillness, nothingness
A vacuous attempt to move, to sound, to connect to anyone, anyhow
Time flashes
Time drags
In another couple of months we will begin to grasp
The unending nature of these one hundred days
As nothing except what it was –
A nothingness that compounded nothing into being
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Day 89
What do crickets know about innocence?
Were they not there?
Did they not see more than we did
Staying closer to the ground than we ever were?

Innocence in that ghastly cry –Why?  Why do we do this to ourselves?
Innocence in that other proclamation – Never, never, never again

Innocence is power without experience
Innocence is a knowing untempered
Crickets know that there is no innocence on hallowed ground
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Day 90
How these hundred days
Should be days to think
About reconciliation and forgiveness
To consider the irrationality of ethnic cleansing
To see the phoenix rise again
& grief overcome
To witness humanity & good
& the power of God
To make miracles

That ultimately
Commemoration is a crafted affair
A beautiful thing
A symbol of power and resonance
The everlasting flame

We don’t have to remember
The empty space in our arms
That our lost children will never fill

This is not our liberty
We’re not free to forget

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Day 91
We couldn’t have known, nine days in,
That it would ever be over
It was a time warp that had us
In flashes and then in woozy moments
That took forever

A machete hangs in a museum in Ottawa
A machete hangs perpetually in a museum in Ottawa
A machete hangs like a mockery of time
Like a semblance of that reality
In which another machete
Other machetes hang for what seemed a long time
But eventually they came down
Again and again and again and again and again
Even time marked by machete strokes
Can never be accurate
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Day 92
We wish for absolution, for a clearing,
for a forgetting, a filling of the heart
& a joyousness once more

We wish for children of innocence
we wish for an instantiation of things
a rationality that resonates with our emotions

We wish for the silence of the moon
the quieting of ghosts
& a peace to rest in
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Day 93
Suffice to say that there was nothing sufficient for some
Elsewhere:
Elections, and the winners won
A car chase
War ended
Another war continued
Jackal emerged
Earth rattled
Now headlines
Now pictures
Now memories
Now colour
Now movement
Now silence
Now drama
Nothing reflects the efficiency with which those days went by
We were betrayed by a month and a half that now we call commemoration
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Day 94
We walked when our legs could carry us
hinky pinky ponky
hinky pinky ponky
Childhood rhythms carried us along
hinky pinky ponky
hinky pinky ponky
Songs from days of innocence
Like holding hands, like soft embraces
hinky pinky ponky
hinky pinky ponky
Father had a donkey
We needed a rhythm to walk
To move, to drag ourselves along

Who could count past four?
Acel ariyo adek angwen
Who could count past four?
hinky pinky ponky
hinky pinky ponky
Father had a donkey
Donkey die
Father cry
hinky pinky ponky
It seemed as though there was a time before tears
It seemed a dream to think that there was a time when fathers could cry
.

Day 95
Time, they taught us
Was linear and exact
Time was a series of beats, a line extending from the beginning of things
Forget the idea that illumination is an indication of knowing
Forget that
We were trapped in a hundred days, a hundred days
Of light, each following the other, each following the other
Time bore witness to our erratic heartbeats but we
remain trapped in a hundred days that have morphed into years and years
How can we exist outside of betrayal by time and land?
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Day 96
What is the essence of beauty?
Why do mists swirl and rise but never completely disappear?
Why should iron gleam through soil?
Why should our dances be graceful, our cloths bright
Our memories long, our language rich and layered?
Why should beauty render us speechless?
What is it to come from a land that swallows its own people?
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Day 97
The poet told us of her brother
The poet told us of her drunken brother, speaking of his dreams
He was an alcoholic, he was always drunk
The poet told us about her drunken brother who spoke of his mad, mad dream
She told us how he spoke like a mad man, about this dream
Like a prophet, insisting on an unknown truth
Like the drunken man that he was, imposing faith that no one wanted to hear
Like Jesus
Like all the holy prophets, even the ones we forgot
The poet told us about her brother who spoke of a dream
In which everybody would die
They would kill everybody
Except me, she said
Except me
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Day 98
If this should be a list of betrayals where should we begin?
At last, we’re here
At last, we’re gone
What is this life beyond one hundred days?
What is this life beyond one hundred days, twenty times over?
What days are left?
We were already in medias res
We were always inside one hundred days
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Day 99
It was sunrise every morning
It was the same land
The same sky
The same rivers, hills, valleys
It was the same road that led away and back home
Same sweet air that amplified the voices through whispers, gossip, airwaves
Words leapt into our eyes and burned this new knowledge that was never new
But it was the earth that betrayed us first
In those one hundred days that would never end
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Day 100
It was the earth that betrayed us first.
It was the earth that held on to its beauty, compelling us to return.
It was the breezes that were there, and then they were not there.
It was the sun that rose and fell, rose and fell, as if there was nothing different: as if nothing changed.

.     .     .

Wangechi Mutu was born in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1972.  A collage artist and sculptor, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

https://www.facebook.com/hashtag/kwibuka20?source=feed_text&story_id=624576410970511

http://wangechimutu.com/

Juliane Okot Bitek is a poet and a scholar who lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Her ancestral homeland is Acholiland in northern Uganda.

To read a previous Guest Editor feature by Juliane click the following link:

https://zocalopoets.com/2013/11/11/remembrance-day-reflections-juliane-okot-bitek/

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