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

Wangechi Mutu_Day 44_Rwanda Genocide 20th anniversary

The Rwanda Genocide (April to July, 1994) was one of the 20th century’s many horrific episodes in what has come to be known by the clinical phrase of “ethnic cleansing”. The Genocide was the culminating event in a civil war involving the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa peoples, and 800,000 people were killed in a mere three months. Both perpetrators and victims have had to re-build their traumatized nation, coming face to face with each other’s capability for depravity and also with that miraculous human need to acknowledge what happened – and to forgive.

When I tell you that the photographs of Wangechi Mutu are poems I honour her visual artistry in the highest way I know how: to give it the name of that uniquely human skill – poem-making – that I value above all else. At Day 100 she commenced with a moving image of a clay-caked woman whose eyes were – mercifully – closed. Other human figures followed. Why were they all women? Was it because it is mainly men who do these mass-killings worldwide? Then came photographs of limbs – hands, feet, bodies bagged – and these are piercingly close to “documentary” photography.
But she goes further still with images completely devoid of people or their “parts”. These may be the most powerful of all. Because of the hand-drawn number cards placed somewhere within each photograph, these person-empty pictures seem to indicate that something we cannot look upon has been left out. My mind wanders toward a hacked-up body dumped at a building site or an abandoned lot; by a rusty gate or in the loneliest corner of a concrete yard.
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Juliane Okot Bitek happened to see Wangechi’s first Instagram picture, Day 100, from April 6th, 2014 – that being the 20th anniversary of the beginning of those awful events of The Genocide. And she responded as only a poet might do: to commit to an epic poem-making journey for 100 numbered poems. If Wangechi’s pictures are raw or allusive, Juliane’s poems are everything that words are most suited for: questioning/wondering aloud; feeling all feelings, wherever they go / thinking all thoughts, though they be inconclusive. This is the very core of poetry, and there is no other kind of language that can handle such horror and humanly touch all the marks: to speak of the un-speakable. It is Poetry alone that best honours suffering, loss, shame, responsibility.

Wangechi Mutu and Juliane Okot Bitek are both African-born. Each has lived far away from the land of her birth for a long time now – Wangechi in Brooklyn, New York, and Juliane in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Is it possible that the geographical distance each has achieved – from Kenya and Uganda respectively – both countries having felt seismic social effects from the terror of Rwanda’s Civil War – has helped them to turn Pain into Art? For this is, surely, one of the greatest goods of artistic achievement: to do something beautiful with our pain. These two artists – one a collagist and sculptor who is experimenting with photography for the first time, the other a poet who is creating epic poetry in real time – merge empathy, an imaginative rendering of the facts, and the search for meaning to create unique works-in-progress: call them 100 Days.
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We invite our readers to scroll down through ZP May 2014 to read and reflect upon Juliane’s poems and to behold Wangechi’s photographs thus far. And to click on the links below and follow their journey through June and into July – until they have reached Day 1.

Alexander Best
Editor, Zócalo Poets
May 31st, 2014

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

http://www.julianeokotbitek.com

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

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Day 44
A hundred days of shallow breathing interspersed with deep sighs
A hundred days zooming into nothing
A hundred days of years and years that morphed into decades
of life as a gift, of life as worth living
A hundred days on a hundred days-ing, we weren’t counting

It wasn’t as if after all those days
a veil would lift and it would have taken just those days, nothing more
It wasn’t as if after all those days
there was a chance that normal would morph back
as if all the seeds that had sprouted in those one hundred days
would un-sprout themselves into nothingness
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Day 45
We watched as faith crumbled off the walls in dull clumps
We watched as prayers dissipated into clouds which then returned as drizzle to mock us
Although sometimes it rained
& sometimes it rained hard, as if the earth was sobbing
but it was never so – the earth remained dispassionate to our circumstances

Eventually our superstitions burst like bubbles
or floated away like motes in the light
There was nothing left to hold on to, not even time which stretched and then crunched itself wilfully
Cats and dogs roamed about, feral and hungry,
People crouched in the shadows, not all feral and all the time hungry.
At a half past all time, even decay stopped for a moment

Ours remains Eden, not even a spate of killing can change that.
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Day 46
If truth is to be known in order to be acknowledged, then this is the truth that we know:
we know the numbers
we know the number of days
we know the circumstances
where the machetes came from and who wielded them
where the dotted line was signed
we know who fled
who advanced while chanting our names out loud
the names they called us
and the papers and airwaves on which these names can still be found

we know who claim to be the winners & the victims
we know where the markers are for where we buried the children
we know the cyclical nature of these things

the impossibility of knowing everything that happened
we know that the true witnesses cannot speak
and that those who have words cannot articulate the inarticulable

we know that there are those who died without telling what they knew
we know that there are those who live without telling what they know

we know that some people choose to tell and some stories choose to remain untold
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Day 47
I remember how my sister used to look up when she remembered
Sometimes she would have a small laugh before she started to recall a story
Often she’d be laughing so hard at the reveries that we all started to laugh
Soon enough we were all laughing so hard because she was laughing
And then she laughed because we laughed
And the memory of that story dissolved into the laughter and became infused with it

My sister is not here anymore
I wonder if she remembers laughing
I wonder if she remembers anything

Wangechi Mutu_Day 48_Rwanda Genocide 20th anniversary

Wangechi Mutu_Day 49_Rwanda Genocide 20th anniversary

Wangechi Mutu_Day 50_Rwanda Genocide 20th anniversary

Day 48
So what is it to be alive today?

I no longer think about the hard beneath my feet
or the give of my body into sleep
or the way my skin used to dissolve so deliciously from touch

Is this what it is to become a haunt?
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Day 49
There we were, lining up like frauds
There we were, receiving medals and commendations
like frauds
There we were, listening to speeches and reading the adorations
about us as heroes – like frauds
There we were
holding in ourselves, like frauds

All we did was stay alive
While many, many others died.
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Day 50
This is the nature of our haunting:
silent witnesses & silence itself
neither revealing nor capable
of explication
of what any of that meant

What do we need nature for?
All it does is replicate its own beauty.
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