Blood Papa Page 2
In my workshop, there are nine of us young tailors who work as a cooperative: five survivor children and four Hutus. We get along well. We lend each other a hand on the sewing machines; we share the chores in the living quarters. Everyone pitches in for food and takes turns preparing the meals. We watch movies on tape. Whoever is the most expert with internet introduces it to the others, if we have the time, and the ones who know the ins and outs of computers teach the group. We never speak of the genocide. Sometimes a dissatisfied customer blows his top: he hurls hateful words and brings up the genocide in a threatening tone of voice. We don’t respond.
Anyway, I never mention the killings with coworkers from the other ethnicity. We don’t talk about our parents. Sitting down with a survivor’s son to talk to him about the dark times or ask him about his problems—that, I still haven’t done. As for us, we were brought low by poverty and mistreated with nasty words. And yet our parents always watched over us. The humiliation will slip away in time; we won’t be so old before we seem just like normal people. The survivors, though, have no family to stand by them as they grow up. They have no guidance to protect them. As children, they struggle to make their way through adult dangers. They suffer from abandonment as well as trauma. It really is a big thing.
* * *
I FEEL HUTU. In Kabukuba, where I’m something like a foreigner, I can’t always tell the difference between Hutu and Tutsi faces. I would be happy to marry a Tutsi, even though I don’t know if there is one in the dry Bugesera who will have me. I know Tutsi girls who are very fancy but no less cheerful. They aren’t proud like the ones from times past. I don’t worry about ethnicity. In many countries in Africa, ethnicity doesn’t concern anyone; people don’t have any hang-up living with the ethnicity they were given at birth. In Rwanda, it attracts misfortune and hinders understanding. People steer clear of it now. But can you feel ashamed of being Hutu if that is your fate? Many people claim that ethnicity has no place in Rwanda anymore, that in the future it will simply disappear. I think that if we ignore such a natural truth, we distill venom that is bound to poison children from a very young age. If we bury ethnicity, confusion constantly inflames the frustration of victims. I understand them. It’s important for the ones who suffered to be clear about who suffered and who committed crimes.
No, I’m not tired of it all—I don’t want to sweep it all away. Because I pray. Being a Christian gives me the strength to accept the disappointments I encounter in life. If, in that fateful month of April, neighbors had sincerely believed that man was made in God’s image, they wouldn’t have raised their machetes. Today we aren’t looking to forget, but I don’t know what we are looking for. The influence of the past isn’t going to fade. Cutting down neighbors like animals is a big thing. People are going to keep talking about and examining the genocide for generations to come, because it is an unnatural history.
AT THE MARKET
What lovelier advertisement for fabrics than a beautiful woman dozing atop piles of multicolored cut cloth, dressed head to toe in matching hues. In the suffocating heat of the Nyamata market, Angélique slumbers in her boutique at the entry to the fabric aisle. She awakes, makes a contrite wave of the hand, then smiles. The smile is a pleasure to behold because the last time I saw her she was wandering the street, her face slightly swollen, her mood dark, and her head aching with nasty migraines.
Angélique Mukamanzi, still just a teenager at the time, told me shortly after the killings: “In Ntarama, survivors turn bad or desperate … There are plenty of men and women who no longer bother. As soon as they scrape together a little money, they drink Primus and let everything drop. They get drunk on alcohol and bad memories. There are some who get a kick out of retelling the same fateful moments … Nowadays, I see this wretched time that stretches out before me as an enemy. I suffer from being bound to the past and from a life that wasn’t meant for me.” She gazed bitterly at her palms hardened by the hoe.
In this new covered market, one is plunged into a crowd more hurried now than in the past, between concrete stalls and protective fences. Walking the long hall, one might lament the loss of the old soccer field, the sunlit strolls in the company of cows, the exotic parasols, or the crowd’s giddy dashes to escape sudden downpours. Yet one still finds the familiar aisle of tomatoes raised into small pre-weighed piles, the tall pyramids of flour, the scent of saffron, the buzzing aisle of fish protected from the dust by a blanket of flies, and the fine jokes of the women vendors.
I meet Pio and Josiane, hand in hand. They laugh because they immediately sense my urge to pose still more questions about their marriage, to finally penetrate the mystery of the mutual promise they made each other in the marshes, a promise between a tall Tutsi cutter and a Hutu high school girl huddled beneath the papyrus, both of them pupils from the same class. Instead, we exchange the latest news. They tell me that the war Pio’s mother has been waging against them—for she can’t stand the idea of seeing her descendants contaminated by Tutsi blood—is now heading to court. At the end of their rope, they are leaving to the Mutara region, in the north of the country, to try their luck there.
The Mutara, an El Dorado of virgin prairies much discussed up on the hills, is the same region from which Jeannette returned at once utterly disillusioned and ruined. We find her farther on, in the tailors’ row, hunched over her Singer. She recounts the dream she and her young husband shared of a sprawling parcel surmounted by wild pastures, the euphoria they felt as they embarked on their new adventure, taking their three children and the bundles in which they had wrapped the bounty from the sale of their land. Then the three hellish years in a windowless house, on arid land, the closest water supply at least two kilometers away, near a hamlet lacking both a school and a clinic.
And yet Jeannette had seen worse. In Life Laid Bare, she spoke of her mother’s death as we talked in her small house in Kanazi. Then she added this: “I know for myself that when you’ve seen your mama cut so savagely and suffer so slowly, you forever lose a certain amount of trust in others, and not only in the interahamwe.1 I mean, a person who has peered for so long into such terrible pain can never live among others like before. You are always wary. You distrust others even when they haven’t done a thing. What I’m getting at is that Mama’s death grieved me the most, but that her drawn-out suffering did me the most damage—and that can never be undone.”
She was seventeen years old at the time, working the land to feed a family of orphaned children who had been brought together around her and her sister. Years later, during the drought of 2000, she gave up agriculture on a whim, tried her hand at business within a cooperative, took flight from her empty cashbox, and joined the local police force, from which she was expelled because of her slight build. Then she was given the gift of a sewing machine and married the father of her children, a pleasant young man, about whom she says: “His name is Sylvestre Bizimana. He’s a bike-taxi driver. He brought me home in the evening several times after my sewing work at the market. We came to an understanding. Pregnancy followed. He showed affection … Now, debts come rolling in and money troubles pile up, but we have sorghum porridge aplenty … Heaven chose me to be a mother, and I gave birth—it’s a big thing.” The Bugesera air and her return to the tailors’ shop have fortified her enthusiasm for her work, which isn’t in short supply.
A market day begins before the pink streaks of daybreak, when columns of people walk down from the dark hills surrounding Nyamata. The route sometimes takes more than four hours. Women carry sacks, baskets of beans, bound hens, bins filled with fruit, and sorghum—indeed everything the land has to offer. The lucky ones transport baskets of charcoal, the unlucky heavy sacks of flour. Rucksacks top off the load if no toddler is wrapped to the women’s backs. Men push bicycles weighed down with more cumbersome sacks and sometimes with a goat, if it isn’t trailing behind on a leash. They often tote bookbags containing the papers they plan to present at the clinic, the insurance office, or the district office. Bec
ause it is a market day, it is also the day for medical visits and administrative appointments.
Théophile carries nothing on his bike except, on the back-wheel rack, his beautiful wife, Francine, whose white shawl shields her from the dust, and atop the front bar, their daughter Aimée. He wears a herder’s hat and carries a Tutsi staff. He drops the ladies at the market entrance, then pedals off contentedly to the first of several small cabarets, where he and other former breeders will swap stories about their herds. On the return trip, the men will bring the women home on their bicycles if their rounds of drinks haven’t made them too wobbly to steer.
For some market-goers, the departure starts the night before instead of in the morning; cyclists transport their cargo of pineapples bound in nets from as far as Uganda, more than 150 kilometers away. From Kigali come moto-taxis loaded with secondhand clothes: jeans, shirts, and European-style dresses at cut-rate prices. The latter arouse less excitement than the mountain of ladies’ shoes toward which the women gravitate, delighted. Eugénie loves sliding her feet into all kinds of pumps. She laughs as she takes a few steps in high heels. She says she was “a bit plump with plenty” after the birth of her seventh child. Francine picks out sandals for Aimée, who is taking school exams at the end of the week and could see herself in a pair of ballet flats. A shopkeeper sporting a broad-brimmed hat spreads out his tobacco leaves. Englebert comes here to smoke his pipe after bawdy chats with the merchant women.
Leaving at the other end of the covered market, we come upon bicycle mechanics and a scrapyard of machine parts and radio equipment. Deliverymen race past, their torsos shiny with sweat behind their wheelbarrows or their backs bent at right angles under sacks. The animal market resounds with restive groans, bleats, and cackles. Rabbits, newcomers to the Bugesera, are stupefied to find themselves rolled up like crepes at the bottom of baskets.
In the poultry section, we meet up with Immaculée as she selects a chicken for Sunday lunch. She likes to inspect their feet, to grope their hackles, then to play the crafty haggler as she wiggles in place. Immaculée is a teenager in perpetual motion. She bounds more than she walks; she jumps up and down as she talks. Everyone calls her Feza, her Rwandan name, except for me, who can’t resist her Christian name, Immaculée. She delights in everything. Her curiosity is active from morning to night. She looks with smiling eyes on the world around her, giving the impression that her laughter and her gazelle-like skipping about stave off her timid nature.
IMMACULÉE FEZA
SIXTEEN YEARS OLD
Daughter of Innocent Rwililiza, Tutsi survivor
My name is Immaculée Feza and I’m in my sixteenth year. There are four of us children in the family, two girls and two boys. I was born in a small house we call a terre-tôle, made of earth and sheet metal, in the run-down part of Gasenga. Then I grew up in the Kayumba neighborhood. Papa teaches at the high school. Mama works at the preschool and farms on our plot. Childhood has left me with happy memories. My family took great care of me. They gave me all they could, and they looked after my well-being in a way that spared me every cause of suffering. My mama took my hand on the walk to the little school; she saw me to church on Sundays. My papa showed me the straight and narrow. I was raised without any memorable hardship. We had endless fun between us sisters and brothers, and we enjoyed ourselves with the neighborhood kids, too. I hopped on one leg in hopscotch, I joined in ball games, and I danced. We were brought on trips to the Mutara to visit a maternal aunt, and a paternal aunt in Ntarama, and other family scattered across the district.
But I never spent my vacations with my parents’ parents. They were cut by the machetes, all of them. I miss them very much. I often mourn their passing because they aren’t here to encourage me. I know my childhood was a bit ruined by their absence. Yes, it really upsets me that I didn’t get to meet them. Children who visit their grandparents come back in awe. They are sung incredible legends that their parents don’t know. They discover illustrious characters known only to the elders.
In Africa, time refines our stories with the polish of magical words. The older the stories, the more they shine. Rwandan tales were missing from my childhood. It’s frustrating. The killings harmed our sense of family. Without elders, wisdom slips away and family ceremonies come to be neglected. There is no one left to lecture us about how to behave at gatherings, to instill in us the kindness we owe the aged, or to scold us for shabby clothes. In Africa, families continually extend with each new brood of kids. Children make the rounds of their grandparents and granduncles and -aunts to be doted on from lap to lap. Grandparents rely on their grandchildren’s young legs for the chores. They talk to each other without holding back. Sometimes children are scared to ask their parents questions; with the old folks, one feels freer to speak of personal things. It’s something they enjoy. They know how to joke about how one’s parents behave. But me, I have never had anyone to tell me how mine weaved their way through childhood. The elders might have told me about the killings differently. Like what? I don’t know, maybe about a time when Tutsis and Hutus didn’t interact like today, about their memories—that’s what I have really missed out on.
I was eight years old when I learned the true story of the killings. Before that, I had only heard things mentioned on the radio or by my parents in the hush-hush of evening gatherings. They named the dead; it made them sad, as you’d expect. I heard them evoke lost family, people I didn’t know. The killings hummed in our ears, but I didn’t think much of it. They were words without a story, which pass children by. I didn’t doubt what I heard, but deep down the words weren’t meant for me. My childhood continued carefree, because that’s what life offered me.
Later, I was surprised by the extraordinary way people behaved during the Week of Mourning.1 People screamed, they sprinted aimlessly, they fell to their knees overflowing with tears. Their gestures were frightening. I saw my mama crying one morning in the courtyard. Her silent sobs came pouring out, but as far as we knew she wasn’t hurt and hadn’t had sad news. I got up the courage to ask her. She spoke of her life in Kigali during the genocide with my sister, Ange. She told me about relatives who had been cut. I visited the Nyamata memorial, the first time in her footsteps with my brothers and sister, a second time alone, trailing Ange. I tuned in to the television shows and paid attention to the civics lessons. Afterward, when I felt comfortable enough, I dug up hidden information on the internet.
The genocide is familiar to me now. I know a lot about how my parents lived, and there is always more I want to know. Papa ran through the Kayumba forest. He bolted down the slopes like so many others. They lay flat in the ditches, thorns stuck in their bare feet. They threw themselves in the thickets to stay alive. Each morning, the ones who woke without illness did their best to hold out until dark. During the night, they ate bananas and raw cassava; they drank water from the rainy season. I’ve pieced together the details. Fugitives by the thousands went up to the forest, and twenty were chosen to come back down with their lives. The good Lord saved Papa. It wasn’t the extraordinary strength of his legs or his brave heart. I know it was his fate to be guided by the dear Lord through all the zigzags of his escape.
Papa is good at telling the story, like a sad fairy tale—Mama, too, though she doesn’t play the teacher as much. She speaks softly. When they recount their experiences, they use a calm voice and hide their feelings from their children’s eyes. It upsets me to know how they lived—lower than animals. It doesn’t make me ashamed. I imagine my mama hidden in a ceiling the whole day, and my papa almost naked, exhausting himself in his breathless sprints. These thoughts pierce me with dread. Have I visited my mama’s hiding place in Kigali? No, there’s been no opportunity to. I went up to the Kayumba forest with schoolmates. We had heard the accounts of survivors running for their lives. We were anxious to see the huge forest for ourselves. We walked through the thorny undergrowth and the little gullies on the trail of their memories. Fate hounded my parents—it wanted them dead be
neath the machete blades. They survived hostile forces, they escaped evil. I’m proud of such beautiful parents.
* * *
THIS IS MY second year at Nyamata Catholic, the secondary school next to the church. It’s a coed school, which my parents chose. We study in peace. The subjects I like best: biology and geography. I am neither the smartest in class nor lagging behind. It’s good. For sports: volleyball.
I get up at 5:30. After heartfelt prayers, I do the dishes, I wash up, then I’m off to school. At seven o’clock, we have assembly, and classes begin at 7:30. Lessons last fifty minutes, recesses fifteen. At 2:30, I come home. I eat, then I clean the family clothes, and at six o’clock begin the evening’s schoolwork. At suppertime, the family gathers for the meal. We used to eat mostly beans, but now there are different vegetables because of my papa’s health. After the meal, we share news and swap jokes between us brothers and sisters. Our parents sometimes encourage us to stop and think about things. Sleep overtakes me very quickly.
I’m up at six on the weekends. I get the porridge ready, I scrub the wash, I give Mama a hand with the cooking. I like to think I’m good at preparing food—I brown the plantains in oil or the sweet potatoes. Papa’s illness means no beans. Housework I like. Everything except for cleaning the kitchen utensils, fetching water, and, of course, farming. In the afternoons, I leave to meet my girlfriends. We don’t have any particular places. Most of the time we sit by the hedgerows, we talk without forethought or study schoolwork in the yard. We sometimes stroll down to Nyamata’s main street, but we don’t go to the cabaret or to the cinema, either, because there isn’t one. We lack the money for outside entertainment, and getting our parents’ permission is a problem. We haven’t yet learned to disobey. We’re happy enough hanging out on the street. We say hello to friends we happen to meet, and we share whatever comes to mind.