Often, still, my own life story feels fragmented, like beads unstrung. Each time I scoop up my memories, the assortment is slightly different. I worry, at times, that I’ll always be lost inside. I worry that I’ll be forever confused.
My life does not feel logical, sequential, or inevitable. There’s no sense of action, reaction; no consequence, repercussion; no plot. It’s just fragments, floating.
I thought if I stated my name enough times, my identity would fall back into place […] But a name is a cover, a placeholder, not the whole story. A name is a basin with a leak that you need to constantly fill up. If you don’t, it drains and it’s just there, a husk, dry and empty.
I lost myself anyway. Every little thing. I had always loved the fancy soaps at my aunts’ houses. I loved the ones that smelled like geranium and lilac best of all.
I needed to see the world in front of me clearly so I could perform my part well. I needed to crack the code. So many times, in my former life, I’d had to become someone else in order to stay out of a refugee camp or out of jail, to stay alive. I had played a mother. I had played a yes ma’am younger sister. I had made myself a nobody, invisible. Now I had to become this strange creature: an American teenager.
I work every day now to erase [the] language of ruin, to destroy it and replace it with language of my own. With konona (rape, ruin), you’re told, there is no antidote, no cleansing agent. […] You’re polluted, you’re worthless—that’s it.
My body is destroyed and my body is sacred. I will not live in that story of ruin and shame.
That’s life in a refugee camp: You’re not moving toward anything. You’re just in a horrible groove. You learn skills that you wish you did not know: how to make a fire, how to cook maize, how to do laundry in the river and burn the lice on rocks. You wait, […]
But nothing gets better. There is no path for improvement—no effort you can make, nothing you can do, and nothing anybody else can do either, short of the killers in your country laying down their arms and stopping their war so that you can move home.
I now felt I’d made a mistake in Uvira. I’d let my guard down. I’d allowed myself to feel I belonged. But there was no real belonging—not anymore. There was only coming and going and coming and going and dying. There was no point in letting anybody get close.
I resent and revile [the word genocide]. The word is tidy and efficient. It holds no true emotion. It is impersonal when it needs to be intimate, cool and sterile when it needs to be gruesome. The word is hollow, true but disingenuous, a performance, the worst kind of lie.
I wanted to piece [the] world back together, but the idea of one group of people killing another group of people—people they lived with, people they knew—that chunk of knowledge could never fit itself in my mind. It was categorically, dimensionally, fundamentally wrong. It was like trying to store a tornado in a chest of drawers. That was not how the universe worked.
To be a refugee was to be a victim—it was tautological. And not just a victim due to external forces like politics or war. You were a victim due to some inherent, irrevocable weakness in you. You were a victim because you were less worthy, less good, and less strong than all the non-victims of the world.
It felt surreal and awful. I’d lost track of who I was and who we were to each other. None of us were the same people who’d lived together in that house in Kigali. Those people had died. We had all died.
I understand that forgiveness is utilitarian, that it is likely even the missing piece in my life, the keystone that will allow me to balance and stabilize and keep the bricks of my life from tumbling down. But I can’t do it. To me it feels false.
Boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion—anything, really—comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination. The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves.
Survival, true survival of the body and soul, requires creativity, freedom of thought, collaboration. You might have time and I might have land. You might have ideas and I might have strength. You might have a tomato and I might have a knife. We need each other.
My hustle was getting through the day. How to claim dignity. How to keep the kids clean […] How to “shine” the house, which was really just dousing the floor with petrol to keep out the bugs. How to wash my loud, floral, short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, which I loved and which I wore with my jean skirt, tied at the waist. How to make the kids cute, and thus make them lovable and seen.
For that one hour, I felt proud. Not just dignified but certain, impermeable, a rock. The sun that turned the window glass into a mirror had confirmed my existence. But I needed to see my body—I needed to own it.
Almost every other minute of my existence, I felt the pain of being nobody’s child, the sting of the assumptions people make when you don’t have a mother and you don’t have a father. People assume you’re adrift, at play. They assume that you are vulnerable. They assume your needs are lesser, that your will is broken, that your body can be bent to theirs.
The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war, and rape. I would not—could not—live in that tale.
Instead, I would be the girl who smiled beads, my version of the girl who smiled beads, one who had power and agency over her life, one who did not get caught.
I need more than the artifacts stuffed into a suitcase. I need to comprehend my history, a deep history. I know the facts about the genocide […] But that is not enough. The past, that story, cannot fill me. I need a longer, broader, more fully human backstory, a history not all soaked in blood. I need clarity, perspective, joy, beauty, originality, intelligence, a wide-angle view.
[Rwandans] needed to find a way to tolerate an intolerable truth. We needed to acknowledge facts that are incompatible with a stable faith in humanity, incompatible even with any sane definition of God.
The transaction that resulted from sharing my story often bothered me. Some wanted to help me and could not stand the idea that I was not defeated. Panic flashed across their faces when I suggested to those who considered themselves more powerful than me that the transaction could go both ways. That I could help them too.
My body itself remained alien, a burden. I’d had to carry this thing around with me—this body with its dark skin […] this body, with its liabilities, this body that had been vandalized, stolen. This was the hardest thing in the world: to remember the ravagement and still believe my body was magic, to remember the shattering and still believe my body was spectacular, holy, and capable of creation.
Rape is the story of women and war, girls and war, hundreds of thousands of mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, cousins, and aunts in my country alone, hundreds of millions across the world. So many men were murdered in the massacre. So many women later died of HIV. Rape, ruin—corporeal, psychological, social—lingered in even the most polished, sophisticated, private spaces decades after the war.
The sun felt rejuvenating. Some ants worked on a ledge in the shade, dismantling a fallen mango. […] I felt, at last […] like I’d finally exhaled. I was wearing a floral top, black with huge yellow and green flowers, and a bright yellow skirt. I stood out and I fit in, and I felt taken care of in a way that I felt taken care of nowhere else in the world. It had been so long since I felt like that—like a child, like someone else’s ward.
Every time I need to summon my toughest, most self-actualized persona, I channel [Claire]. […] But […] my most generous feelings [towards Claire] are clouded by my own need to be recognized.
[…]
These days, when I’m with Claire, we have so much love and so much fear, and we want to kill each other.
Insist on knowing the backstory to your gifts and your pain. Ask yourself how you came to have all the things you carry; your privilege, your philosophy, your nightmares, your faith, your sense of order and peace in the world.
I had only a character, a rubric. The girl who smiled beads gave me a way to go through the world […] but I was still looking for a narrative that felt coherent and complete. […] I still, still, after everything […] longed for Mukamana. I wanted her to sit on the side of my bed, talk to me, and make my world feel not just magnificent but logical and whole.
