The Sanctity of Stars

"I can predict the movement of heavenly bodies but I cannot predict the madness of men."

Isaac Newton

In Musanze, when the power goes out on a clear night, the Milky Way become visible spreading itself out across the south western sky blanketing the whole of Rwanda underneath a veil of stars.

Here in East Africa along its Eastern edge I question why it is that physicists attempt to understand distant galaxies while I am still struggling to understand why things happen the way they do on this small, obscure piece of real estate called Earth.

Why it is that war, famine, and disease spread sometimes like tornadoes, sometimes like earthquakes, and sometimes like hurricanes destroying almost everything in their paths and how it could be that in these same places, on nights when no rains fall and you can stand infinitesly small underneath canopy of heaven, that you can experience profound moments of peace.

*****

After dinner some of the boys from the team linger outside in a world temporarily removed from the pressures of cycling and their everyday lives wondering how it is that these stars do not all fall from the sky.

In their innocence and in the darkness it is easy to forget that these boys, now men, were made to witness Rwanda's darkest hour and still their eyes are able to see the beauty and wonder of the world.

*****

The contrasts of this country are inescapable and I often get lost in the confusion of the night but then I remember that night, too, has its certainties. This planet is only a microcosm of the cosmos; expanding and contracting, exploding and imploding, shining brilliantly one moment only to fade into the next, all within the tumultuous rhythm of the universe. So who are physicists and astronomers but simply human beings using a little bit of fire and a little bit of light to find their way in the dark.

These thoughts comfort me as I make my way toward shelter and sleep. As I close my eyes I am lulled to slumber by the sounds of motorbike tires coasting down the hill with their engines off and the soft shuffle of feet finding their way home. A dog barking in the night temporarily disrupts the nocturnal symphony that began soon after the sun set.

If we are to believe that god sleeps in Rwanda then these sounds must be his lullabies.

Tonight, dreams come easy.

*****

In the waking hours of daylight, with only a single star to guide my way, I realize that these contrasts and contradictions are the ways in which the world presents itself to us; through struggle and survival, war and peace, pain and preserverance, joy and sorrow, toils and triumphs.

It may be that we live in a world full of contradictions, one that can sometimes seem unjust, imbalanced, nonsensical and asburd, but it is still the only world that we know that sustains life.

So bounded in this unbounded universe and left with left with no other choice...

Give me all or give me nothing

Just to Get By

I am a student of images. Paintings, sculptures, photographs, and even architecture help me find my place in this world and allow me to further revel in its beauty, share in its anguish, and find peace in the silence that is offered.

It was the artistic mediums of film and photography that drew me to Rwanda, first in 2005 and then eight years later when deciding on a thesis topic for graduate school.

Yet it was not image after image that horrifically displayed the senseless death of almost one million people over the course of the genocide, although I often found myself cast under the spell of death's destruction, it was the fact that no matter how many images of death I looked at, somewhere in the recesses of the frame life was still present, carrying on and picking up its shattered pieces along the way.

As Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Carol Guzy states, “With pictures you can weep for Rwanda and rage at the injustice everywhere but we can also celebrate the daily life around us- its mystery and magic- its poetry and wonder.”

Sometimes in Rwanda this is no easy feat for present in this country is a poverty of unfathomable depth and I have yet to come across a photograph that prepares you for the three dimensional reality of the life that you encounter in a world beyond your own and for the past few weeks I have found myself lost in the confusion of this life because after all this time we still do not know why we are born into the circumstances that we are. We cannot say with certainty why there are those who have and those who have not. We do not know who makes the decision between who wins and who loses or who flourishes and who falters for we all experience all of life's contradictions in one way or another over the course of our brief sojourn on this earth.

Rwanda is no exception although its story may be unique. As of 2013, Rwanda is ranked 164 on a list of 183, which is a step about Nepal and a step below Tanzania. 55% of its population, rougly 6.6 million people live below poverty line. With statistics such as these it is easy to only see poverty in Rwanda.

In a world where running water is a privilege and electricity is not always guaranteed distractions are few and people occupy themselves with life's simplicities: trips to the market, visits with friends, and the whispering of prayers that will hopefully be answered.

In Rwanda poverty is seen everywhere, all at once and where it is most apparent are in the clothes worn by men and women, young and old. There are clothes that have been passed down through more than one generation. There are coats and jackets that speak of seasons that do no exist in this climate. There are the t-shirts that were previously worn by other people in other countries that live other lives. Looking out across this human landscape of Rwanda is like gazing upon an entire army in search of salvation.

Oftentimes I marvel at the innovation of children whose toys will never find their way to the shelves of Toys 'R Us.

Some transform cracked containers that can no longer hold milk, oil or water into trucks, using the caps as wheels.

Others fly kites crafted from discarded plastic and shafts of young bamboo.

And still there are the children who play in the gutters along the road, sometimes without shoes and almost always without parental supervision.

And then there are the children who run down the rocky paths of their village chasing tires that no longer serve their purposes on bikes.

When all else fails these children draw lines in the dirt and dust on the ground outside of their homes and play hopscotch without any numbers, but then again who is counting?

The art historian in me wonders if this had been another time and another place and had a great artist happen by one of these many children playing in the dirt would he have recognized their potential for greatness or would he have walked by, as I have done, dismissing their creativity merely as games children play?

Confronted by this poverty it seems as if each moment contradicts the next and I cannot help but get caught between desperation and exaltation, contemptment and contentment, frustration and redemption. I fear that I have begun to suffer from the emotional bends due to this constant plunging and resurfacing of these contradictory emotions. One this is for certain...Rwanda will make you humble and it will bring to brilliant and devastating light all of the things that you are and all of the things that you are not.

This poverty is enough to make you question the things that you can do without. It is enough to force you to make promises with yourself to never again take for granted the vast freedoms afforded by time. And it is enough to make me wonder what it is that gives these people strength when mine has so obviously escaped me for it is a resiliency bordering on the miraculous and it is a resiliency that I witness bwimuzi, bwimuzi (everyday, everyday).

Despite the poverty apparent in Rwanda, the people of Rwanda smile. Not all the time, for good days are not always promised, but enough to soften even the most hardened of hearts and remind us that not all of life is suffering and richness can be found by means other than money. (Besides, who I am to judge the happiness of others when I am still in pursuit of my own)

This month I have discovered that these smiles, these fleeting moments of joy are often the most profound for they are formed from the same folds of life which also hold its sorrows and the memories created from these smiles are the things that you can take with you when it seems as if there is nothing else.

But alas, these moments and their memories are only fleeting and before long I am once again overcome by an impenetrable sadness.

It is a void that cannot be filled, or so it seems, until I come across one of the many churches along the road to Gashangiro where choirs gather both within and without their sacred walls. Here the faithful of Rwanda sing accompanied by an electronic keyboard brought out for this occasion, they sing to the beating of drums, and they sing without music reminding whosoever passes by that there is still joy, there is still peace, and there is still hope.

Running in Rwanda

“Twenty-five years and my life is still trying to get up that great big hill of hope for a destination.”

 4 Non Blondes

Here there is no need for an alarm. Before first light an aviary aria begins with the shrill cry of an Ibis that pierces through what remains of the night. It is closely followed by the low of cows let out to pasture in the fields on the other side of the creek. Before long the bleating of goats rises above the hushed voices of farmers whose days have already begun. Cacophanous, melodic, chaotic and serene, these are the diurnal noises of Rwanda that indicate that it is time to wake up. The athlete inside of me knows this so I climb out of bed, lace up my sneakers and make my way to the road.

Living on the middle of a hill I am faced with only two choices; to go up or to go down and whichever way I choose the opposite becomes true on the return. But no matter which direction I go I am always called geka, or slowby those already out on the road.* The city of Musanze, with a population density of roughly one thousand people per square mile, ensures that, even on these “quiet” morning runs, you are never alone.

On the way up I am passed by men, young and old, riding their single speed bicycles. Sometimes they are alone and sometimes they carry passengers, but always, the evenness of their pedalstrokes fails to reveal the burdens they bear. Those that transport foodstuffs from Musanze to their villages above smile as they push their way up the incline as if the job of ten men being accomplished by two was no Herculean feat.

On the way down I am joined by schoolchildren in uniforms of green and white. The girls laughing and the sound of their slippers flipping and flopping against the pavement matches the thumping of my heart and lungs. When the boys join in it becomes an unofficial race; me unwilling to admit that I am more than twice their age, them unwilling to concede victory to a Muchechu.**

For the first few days I tried to differentiate between those who are Hutu and those that are Tutsi.*** But you can only do this for so long because it is enough to drive you mad with fear, sadness and grief. Somewhere along the road I stopped trying to guess who was a Tutsi and who was a Hutu because they are all Rwandan and they are all, in one way or another, survivors. This is not to detract from the violence that claimed the lives of almost one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus in 1994 and the years that followed, it is merely an observation that after the genocide everyone in Rwanda, whether guilty or innocent, was tasked with rebuilding a nation whose very foundations no longer existed.

Twenty years on Rwandans must continue to live together side by side regardless of the past. In order to do so they must forgive the unforgivable. Running along these roads I question my own capacity to forgive and I fear that I hold on more often than I let go...

This is only my brief encounter with a reality that Rwandans face day in and day out. For this is where they live. This is where they work. This is where they pray. And these hills are are where they bring forth new life everyday in the hope that history will never, ever repeat itself.

Along these roads there are lessons to be learned: There is no going back. There is only going forward.

And like me, these Rwandans are just trying to get up the hill.

*I want to make excuses, to tell the ones that called me slow that the elevation that I now found myself at was a mile higher than the sea level that my body had grown accustomed to on the east coast of the United States but excuses serve no purpose on these hills.

** Muchechu is a Rwandan term of endearment designated to old women. Let it be known that at the time of this writing that the author is thirty-three years of age and while no means old, has perhaps past her prime as an athlete. Also, the spelling for these Kinyarwanda terms my not be accurate as I do not have an English-Kinyarwanda dictionary.

*** As an outsider it is nearly impossible to tell the difference and it makes you wonder how and why there were ever “officially” separated in the first place.In this region of Africa the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi has always been in place but it was exacerbated over the course of Belgian colonial rule when measuring systems were implemented in the name of science, which only further separated these two groups. Author's note: It has always been both shocking and fascinating to me how haphazard lines drawn after wars won and lost in distant countries forever altered the fate of the African continent.

Observations

It is a strange sensation when a dream over one year in the making, is finally transformed into a reality.

I arrived in Rwanda a day later than I was supposed to but still I arrived nevertheless.

In this land of one thousand hills the road rises and falls as we climb out of Kigali toward Musanze. Escaping the city, I am struck by the notion that to be aware of beauty and to be presented with beauty are not one and the same for Rwanda is not a country that takes your breath away, rather it is a place that makes you questions whether or not you ever truly breathed before arriving in this land of undulations.

Two hours after touching down in Kigali we came to the place that I will call "home" for the next two months. It is embarrassing to admit that, even without a refrigerator or furniture more than a single bed, my temporary quarters in Rwanda are a far cry better than the apartment that I willingly gave up in Savannah more than two months ago. I unpacked my bags, a la Carrie Bradshaw, stowing my clothes in places usually designated for cereals and spices, sugars and saucepans.

After I finished, I sat on my porch with a book and a journal to breath in Rwanda. To the north there is a chain of volcanoes that is visible from my window. Separately, their names are Bisoke, Sabyinyo, Gahinga, and Murabura. Together, they are the Virungas. Bordering both Uganda and the RDC, this is where gorillas play in the mist and this is where it is difficult to tell where Rwanda ends and heaven begins.

When the day was about to relinquish its hours to the night and the cool evening mountain air sweeps its way across the hillside of Gashangiro a noise rose up from outside of the gates. It was the sound of men and women chanting and singing and beating on makeshift drums as they made their way down the hill. Towards what? I do not know. Their voices, fading into the distance, were replaced by a chorus of nocturnal insects and the soft purr of motorbikes traveling in the opposite direction.

I wanted to follow them, to see where they were going, to know what they were doing but this was only my first night in Rwanda and those answers, as well as the answers to all of the questions that will no doubt arise, will come in time.

******

On Monday I began to teach English at a sewing cooperative in town. This school is about four kilometers from where I stay so partly out of stubbornness and mostly out of curiosity I have decided to walk the hour down the hill in the morning and up the hill in the afternoon because it has always been my belief that the feet see just as well as the eyes.

Although it is my first day teaching the warmth of these women’s affections can only be compared to the Italian family that I left in New York, except here they embrace you three times, cheek to cheek, before giving you a half high-five/half handshake. So much of me wanted this greeting to be OUR secret handshake but this greeting is no secret because this is the way friends in Rwanda say hello.*

*Out of respect for these women I have decided not to write more about my experiences teaching at this school until I get to know each of them better for fear that I will do them a tremendous disservice by pretending to know anything about their lives just because I have read some books on Rwanda.

*****

By the end of the week the sights along the road have begun to become familiar. And it is here, along this ascension and descension, that the reality of poverty in Rwanda begins to sink in. It is a poverty that I cannot even begin to describe.*

*So as to not sound brash and dismissive here, I will be dedicating a future blog to perceptions of poverty in Rwanda.

In town, tomatoes, charcoal, and shoes that are worn well past their welcome are sold side by side outside of shops peddling household wares and other necessities.

Further up, there are women who carry freshly cut stacks of wood or bundles of cassava leaves upon their heads. Even under their load the regality of their stature would make even the most primest and properest of ladies look as if they were slouching underneath the weight of a book bound in hardcover.

There are the mamas who swaddle their children on their backs as they work in the fields, hoe in hand.

There are the men who stand on the side of the road. Waiting for what? It is hard to tell.

And then there are the children, the ones on their way to or from school and the ones for whom school is no more than a dream that may or may not come true.

Shrieks of Muzungu! Muzungu! emanate from the dirt paths that branch away from the road.* Whether it is said with terror or delight remains uncertain until they wave and continue to wave long after I am gone.

*in Kinyarwanda, Muzungu generally means any white person but it can also be translated as usurper or he who comes back.

*****

Without any foreknowledge of Rwandan history it would be difficult to tell that a genocide occurred here twenty years ago for how can a country so beautiful descend into such madness?

But you cannot deny the past for a genocide did occur and it has forever changed the landscape of Rwanda.

And still, even with this knowledge of violence I cannot help but seek the beauty of this landscape. It is a beauty that can be discovered in the hills that are in constant competition with the sky. It is found in the sky itself that shifts from steel to cobalt to periwinkle and back as the sun comes and goes from behind the clouds. But where beauty is truly triumphant is in the flowers. Whether they grow wild or are tame, the presence of their crimsons, their yellows, their pinks and their purples, especially their purples, brings a sense of serenity to these often chaotic hills.

I am reminded of a conversation that I had with an artist who had traveled to Rwanda in the wake of the genocide to document the violence. He revealed that he has also taken thousands of photographs of flowers throughout the country that he never displayed for fear of making light of an event so heavy. I think of him as I walk past these fields of flowers.

Alice Walker also comes to mind:

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.” 

These fields, the color of purple, are at once a distraction from and an invitation to what lingers below the surface…

Rwanderings...

“We hope. We despair. We hope. We despair. That is what governs us. We have a bipolar system.”

Maira Kalman

In 1994, I was fourteen years old. That age of both innocence and arrogance where I thought I knew everything but I was too insecure to admit that I knew nothing at all.

In eighth grade, even though the narrow scope through which I viewed the world was widening, it was still limited to what I was taught in school and although there was gravity in words like Holocaust and genocide, I had yet to feel their weight.

 As an American teenager I was content to be distracted by sports, school plays, and friendships both old and new and content in knowing that whatever I was to learn about the world still had yet to come.

 How little I knew or even thought that about Africa became apparent in the spring of 1994. In the middle of lacrosse season another season began on another continent. Before 1994, Rwandans refer to this time of year as Gicurasi, a time of illness and sadness.[1] After 1994, French author Jean Hatzfield referred to it as machete season.

 In this tiny heart of Africa, over the course of one hundred days, almost one million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were slaughtered at a rate of three times faster than that of the Holocaust. This was a genocide that was carefully planned and recklessly carried out in less than four months. And yet, seven thousand miles away, I remained unaware of the their fate.

 In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag states, “No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.”[2] At fourteen, I suppose that I had not yet reached that age.

 Whatever imaginings I had of Africa in 1994 derived from watching the The Lion King, which was released in June of that year. So, as a child, it was easy for me to believe that the whole of Africa lived by the motto of Hakuna Matata. 

 It was not until over a decade later, in 2005, that I learned about the details of the Rwandan Genocide from watching Sometimes in April. By then I had surpassed the age of innocence that might have previously excused my ignorance of the Rwandan Genocide and yet, after everything that I learned about the humanity and inhumanity of the world, it was not the phrase “Never Again” that haunted me; it was that no matter how many lives were lost, it never seemed to be enough.  

 Afterwards, I wept. I wept for Tutsis. I wept for Hutus. I wept for Rwanda. I did not weep because I was unaware of the genocides that occurred over the course of the twentieth century, I wept in the sweeping realization that the mass extermination of people based on their ethnicity, race, or religion continued to take place during my lifetime.

I do not know what it is that draws me toward the macabre. Perhaps it is the historian in me that hopes there are lessons to be learned from the past and perhaps it is the artist in me that seeks an explanation for why these acts of violence continue to occur long past our ability to deny that we do not know any better. At thirty-three, it is still difficult for me to make sense of the madness that descends upon men.

******

 For the past few months many of my friends and family have been “Rwondering” why I was going to Rwanda and sometimes I question my own motives for such a journey.[3]

 Maybe it is the childish innocence with which I listened to Paul Simon’s Graceland, as I made the sign of the wave out the window of my parent’s station wagon under not so African skies. Maybe I have read too many books by Kuki Gallman, Isik Denisen, Bryce Courtney, and Chinua Achebe. For I too dream of Africa.

 My dreams of Africa were accelerated in the autumn of 2012. That fall, I fell in love with photography. I did not mean to. It was an accident. When I applied for graduate school I did not want anything to do with modernity and yet, in my last two quarters at the Savannah College of Art and Design, I found myself escaping from the Old Masters and embracing photography, especially the photography of war. But it was not the tornado-like path of war that fascinates me, although there is poetry in its ruins, what captivates me is our ability to continue to survive in a world intent on our own destruction because somehow we find a way to go on.

 In March of last year I was struck by the images taken in the aftermath of the Rwandan Genocide and decided to write my graduate thesis about the necessity of visual and textual poetry in the Rwanda Project (1994-2000) of Alfredo Jaar. It was a transformative journey that changed my life forever.

 As I grappled with the emotions that accompany tackling the topic of genocide, I realized that I could not write or research something with such compassion and conviction without traveling to Rwanda myself.  

 I am in agreement with Pulitzer Prize winning photographer Carol Guzy, who admits, "With pictures we can weep for Rwanda and rage at the injustice everywhere, but we can also celebrate the daily life around us — it's mystery and magic — it's poetry and wonder.”[4] I know, without a doubt, that this journey will bring tears, anger and frustration, but hopefully it will also bring joy that I cannot even begin to imagine, so here is to the wonder.

 Maybe these words come across as naïve but it is with the same naiveté that the Rwandan government has implemented the program of reconciliation in which survivors of the genocide are asked to forgive the friends, neighbors, priests, and schoolteachers turned enemies that April. A naivete that has allowed Rwandans, despite their inability to forget their past, to perhaps look forward to their future.

I count myself among the Afro-Optimists, those who acknowledge that although Africa has long been the stage of famine, disease, and war, but also celebrate the small victories that take place across this continent full of hope, wonder and often unfathomable resiliency.

Maybe in 1994, what the world needed was a little less of Walt Disney and a little more Stephen King, or a least a little more people who believe as he does that, “Hope is a good thing. Maybe the best of things and no good thing ever dies”[5] For a world free of worries is elusive and ephemeral at best, but a world empty of hope is simply hopeless. And the world can use all the hope it can get.

At the moment I fear that I can do no justice in my attempts to articulate all of my hopes for this journey to Rwanda. And still…

I hope. I hope. I hope.