I. Happy Hour at the Mille-Collines
Expat hour at the Hotel Rwanda. The pool, famously used as a water source, full of swimming children. When birds hang overhead, it is not because of an abundance of corpses nearby. The tall glasses of Mutzig lager are poured cold and frothy; bowls of warm potato chips topped with skin-on red peanuts. The Rwandese hosts are ex-pats too, raised mostly in the DRC. They are, I surmise by the date their families moved to the Congo, wealthy Tutsis whose parents made the decision to leave during one of the first bursts of violence, in 1957 or 1958.
Dinner follows, our first local meal at a place named Chez Jean - hardened manioc scooped with your hand into a vegetable sauce, enormous tilapia (NOT local), piri-piri, and conversation where words like "sustainable progress" are used unironically. Most streets in Kigali are still nameless, so giving directions is tricky. I have a hard time getting in touch with our earlier cab driver, and while not nerve-wracking, exactly, it’s still off-putting, though the hills sparkle. The legless streetperson from earlier in the day is nowhere to be seen.
II. Thought Hangover
Kigali is a gorgeous city, but at night I feel drunk on my own thoughts. I don't think I have ever been in a place where this much evil has been concentrated into a few months of hacking and domination.
You meet people and do a mental subtraction, current age minus twelve years: what were they doing between April and July of 1994? Were they running for their lives, were they elsewhere, were they one of the few silent Hutus given the luxury of not taking sides, or, worse, were they the fourth option?
The genocide museum yesterday was too much for words, especially being that I'm in the middle of Philip Gourevitch's We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families. His writing touches on imagination in the context of the genocide, and he can only offer the thought that while looking closely at what happened is nauseating, looking away makes you feel even worse.
Indeed, I have heard the word "genocide" so many times - and yet, with each repetition, with each closer examination, the subject is more painful. The senses are never dulled by it.
We are, each of us, functions of how we imagine ourselves and of how others imagine us, and, looking back, there are these discrete tracks of memory: the times when our lives are most sharply defined in relation to others' ideas of us, and the more private times when we are freer to imagine ourselves...
It was the same with nearly all the Tutsi survivors I met in Rwanda. When I pressed for stories of how they had lived during the long periods between bouts of violence - household stories, village stories, funny stories, or stories of annoyance, stories of school work, church, a wedding, a funeral, a trip, a party, or a feud - the answer was always opaque: in normal times, we lived normally.
So, remembering has its economy, like experience itself, and when Odette mentioned the hand of the professor of internal medicine on her bottom, and grinned, I saw that she had forgotten that economy and wandered in her memories, and I felt that we were both glad of it. A professor had imagined her susceptible and she had imagined that as a married man and her teacher he should know greater restraint. They had each other wrong. But people have the strangest notions as they navigate each other in this life - and in the 'good years,' the 'normal times,' that isn't the end of the world.
I think what Gourevitch is getting at is the importance of imagination, both in the positive and negative sense - because while the "lessons learned" section of the museum stresses that genocide is never spontaneous, never unplanned, it is always without a context. Genocide is always the result of a most brutal act of imagination that isolates the individuals who perpetrate it, cutting them off from their own long history of being doctors, teachers, nurses, neighbors, friends – anything other than being a genocidaire.
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