Three or four families had gathered together in a large vehicle to make the journey, and we took the road to Kirundo. It was toward the end of June. I myself was a survivor of Butare, but I had no hopes of getting as far as home, because the killings there were still going on.
In those days, it was too early to think about heading to any other district, so we crossed the Bugesera, which I’d never seen before. It was the first region to enjoy a little security, because the genocide had just been stopped there. The Bugesera looked like a huge desert. You couldn’t go out into the surrounding areas yet, and passengers who went any distance from the road, to forage for food in the fields, for example, could not do so on their own for fear of marauding interahamwe.
When we arrived in Nyamata, that was as far as we could go, so we got off at the town hall. We searched for lodgings, one or two families per room. Before the war, Nyamata was said to be a nice little town, but the moment I saw it I knew they’d had too much war, too many houses burned, too many people scarred and sickened. The town was beyond filthy. What it lacked most of all was people. On the road I’d learned about the massacres in the churches, and I knew that almost all the inhabitants had disappeared, as in Butare. My immediate impression was that our lot here would be a harsh one.
We also swiftly discovered in detail just how disrupted everyone’s existence was, as if they were all struggling to find their way completely on their own. You could tell that no one gave a hoot about anything, that they no longer saw any future ahead, all hope had gone, and people’s minds seemed crippled. Here’s an example. We happened to enter a dilapidated home to pay a goodwill visit and found a small family lying on the ground. We asked the man, “You, why are you sleeping like that, in all this dust and mess, without taking care of your family?” Without even getting up, he answered, “I don’t care anymore. I had a wife, she’s dead. I had a house, it’s smashed. I had children, some were killed. I’ve lost everything I loved.”
As for me, I’d made the journey with my husband, my two children, some little brothers and sisters, and an infant born during the genocide. I spent the first three months in Nyamata almost without leaving the house, coping with daily chores. Life was so hard because there was nothing. You could spend four or five hours without finding even a full bucket of drinking water—same thing for food, or wood.
It wasn’t a problem of not knowing anyone in the area, because we had arrived with a small group of people we knew in Butare, and no one here even seemed to recognize anyone, either. Later, in September, I learned that a Canadian organization was looking for a female social worker. I went for an interview, and landed the job. I began going out into the hills. And then I saw life laid bare.
At the time, few vehicles were still operating in town. One of them would drop us off at eight in the morning in the bush—where we would set out on foot—and return for us at the same place at five that afternoon. That’s how we began to track down the unaccompanied children, meaning those without any relatives or adults with them, kids who’d been scattered throughout the hills by the slaughter. We’re still at it today. We keep visiting homes, we enter the banana groves, we identify the children who’ve gathered together or who sometimes live alone in little shacks, without even a blanket or something to sit on.
Meeting those children touches me deeply, because no matter which way they turn, their plight is dreadful. They all escaped from different situations: some survived in sorghum fields, some in the marshes or at the bottom of a ditch, some traveled a great distance, outside the country, along roads thick with ambushes. These children are deeply shaken, but not all in the same way. There are those who want to talk but cannot organize their thoughts well enough; those who cannot express themselves, quite simply, through anything but tears; and those who say, “I cried already, but they killed my papa and mama anyway. I cried but I’ve got nothing to eat, no roof over my head. I cried but I haven’t anything for going to school. Now I no longer even want to cry—not for me, not for anybody.”
There are children who would talk with no trouble right after the genocide, but who have now fallen silent. They don’t see the point of talking anymore. At first, they spoke of the slaughter as if telling terrible and extraordinary stories, tales that were of vast importance, but that would end with their own telling, or that would end well if their audience listened to them closely. Later, the children’s hopes faded away with their words. Time has made them realize how their lives have changed, and how true these stories are. The children keep dwelling on what they lived through in the marshes, they understand that no one will ever replace those they’ve lost, and they shut themselves up inside a silent bad dream. Some are very frustrated, or confused, or rebellious. So, I gradually adjusted myself to them.
To throw a line out to someone who has been beaten down, you must first encourage that person to open up a little and dare to express a few thoughts, which will reveal the knots of inner anxiety. My strategy for that is simple. I approach that person, I observe a little moment of silence, I begin to talk, and I say, “I, too, am a survivor. I, too, was marked for death in every possible way. I, too, know that my parents are dead, and I saw interahamwe a few yards away from me sticking spears through people. I, too, lived through all that. And both of us will live from now on with these truths.” That way, the person begins to feel more comfortable with me, and able to grow in trust and self-confidence.
Genocide is unlike any other torment. That is a certainty I’ve gathered from hill to hill. Sharing the genocide in words with someone who lived it is quite different from sharing it with someone who only learned about it elsewhere. In the aftermath of a genocide, there remains, buried in the survivor’s mind, a wound that can never show itself in broad daylight, before the eyes of others. We survivors, we don’t know the precise nature of the hidden wound, but at least we know it exists. Those who haven’t experienced the genocide—they see nothing. If they make a real effort, they will one day accept the fact of this secret wound inside us. But that will take quite a while, even if those people are Rwandan or Burundian Tutsis, even if they lost families and close relatives in the killings. I cannot explain why, but I know this process will be slow indeed. I’m not familiar with the history of other genocides, but I suspect that this delay was present there as well: those who have not gone through genocide, even if they try sincerely, will take a long time to understand more than just a bit of it.
It is also vital, with a child coming out of genocide, to provide immediately for some desperate material needs. To find medicines if the child is sick, obtain a room in a house, give food, clothing, perhaps school supplies, and tools if the child will be farming. In this way, a child feels less abandoned, more respected, and more comfortable within society. The child must then be nudged toward other children. Children speak easily among themselves about their experiences, and that unlocks language. Then you must listen to everything everyone says, to help each child figure out his or her problem and find new words for even deeper insights.
I should clarify an important observation: the genocide has changed the meaning of certain words in the language of survivors, while other words have flatly lost their meaning, and anyone who listens must be wary of these changes.
In any case, I have noticed over time that the very youngest children are not the most vulnerable after a genocide because when they begin to taste life again, they recover themselves more spontaneously. Their pleasure is still lively. Except, of course, if they have been gravely traumatized and have stopped speaking.
The most difficult ages are adolescence and old age. The adolescents, they suffer more than others from not understanding. They cannot accept that the interahamwe tried to exterminate them without any previous provocation or quarrel. The teenagers were stepping jauntily up to the gates of life—only to be beaten back with machetes. Ever since, they have been mired in the why of this. They wonder, “Since I didn’t do anything to the Hutus, what is it about me that they can’t stand, what does my appearance show without my realizing it? Why did they have to massacre my parents who were just quietly farming? How am I going to live near people who think only of killing me without any explanation?” Adult life becomes too confusing for many teens—for all those girls, for example, who nowadays wind up pregnant any old way, casually, obliviously, without any thought or care for the baby’s tomorrows.
Still, when adolescents get together, when they speak about this among themselves, they do listen to one another, sharing their feelings, and that helps ease their anxieties. A few even start talking to young Hutus, and such conversations provide some faint hope.
As for their elders, they are inconsolable over their losses. They had raised children who gave them food, clothing, sweet comfort in their old age, and now they are left without a soul around them. Killing their children was like hacking their arms and legs off at the threshold of the last stage of their lives. The old folks keep saying, “I’d brought up healthy sons and daughters, I’d married them off properly, and they died in the marshes. Who will take my arm now to guide me through old age? Who will help me escape sickness and sorrow?” These people now see only loneliness and poverty ahead for company. It’s really so hard for them not to drown their thoughts in the abyss of memory.
There are also Hutu children who walked all the way to Congo and have come back home. The difference here is virtually invisible—except that the children of this long journey can never stay still: they tend to drop out of school or leave their families abruptly and head for the street, and they love to disappear into the woods. When you speak with them, when you ask them how they left for Congo, with whom they traveled, what their time in the camps forced upon them, how they’re living now, they’ll tell you several things, blurt out a few details, but they’ll run into some word or other and whoops!—you’ve lost them: they don’t want to continue the conversation.
The children who survived in the Nyamwiza Marsh have gazed into the black heart of evil, but for a limited time. If you can get a grip on them, and pull gently, they will come to you more easily.
The ones who went to Congo lived in confusion and danger for a very long time. In the camps in Goma, they were on their own for everything: not a soul took care of them anymore, they felt rejected by everyone, and returned like the lowest of the low. They are no longer at home in their own skins.
Those who survived the genocide will never get rid of what they went through, but they can make their way back to real life because they can tell the truth, and they are surrounded by people who tell the truth. They fear many dangers, but they are not threatened by lies.
The children who come back from Congo, well, they live inside silence, and they don’t look people in the eye when they talk to them. Some have parents who died or vanished during their flight. These children say they know nothing. Some of them have parents in prison; when you ask them if they know why, they wriggle out of the questions, replying that they were sick, they weren’t there, they didn’t see or hear anything while the genocide was going on. They are perpetually terrified that a word will slip out—and then someone will come for them, too. And even if they dare say something, even if they want some relief from their burden, if they try to reveal what they know, they don’t tell the truth. They concoct alibis to prove that they never saw a thing. They’re afraid of being mistreated. And I’m not mistaken when I say that as the years go by, they feel more and more guilty for their parents’ evil deeds.
The problems of Tutsi children who survived the slaughter evolve over time. Their memories, too heavy to bear, grow lighter nevertheless, because they change as the children grow up.
For Hutu youngsters who went to Congo, the oppression remains, because they are not facing the past. This silence is paralyzing them with fright. Time is rejecting them. From visit to visit, I find no change. One can see that anxiety is forever stifling their thoughts. It is such hard work, encouraging them to speak, but they can never set foot back in life if they do not talk about what they must confront within themselves. So you must be very patient and gentle with them, and visit them regularly, entrusting time with the birth of friendship. In a few families I have been visiting since the beginning, the children have recounted what happened during the genocide, what they saw with their own eyes around the house in those days, and the harm their parents did. Now they seem more at ease with the children of survivors, whom they are starting to get to know.
Often, children stumble into a hole of grief or panic, especially during sleep. They reproduce in dreams what they lived through; they cry out, weep, sometimes they begin to run through the shadows or beg to be forgiven. That disturbs the other children in the house and everyone spends a sleepless night waiting for morning. When little ones or adolescents lose control in a crisis, someone must sit by their side and ask if they want to talk about it. If I’m there, I begin talking; so do they. I tell about everything that happened to me, they recount their own experiences, as I already explained to you, and meanwhile the child calms down. I pass over some parts of my ordeal, but I remain ready for questions. Too bad if I can’t explain why it happened—the main thing is always that the child should feel less alone for having survived.
Myself, I like talking about it all with the children, with friends and colleagues. In any case, not a day goes by that I don’t remember those things, so it’s useful to discuss them. A genocide is a film projected every day before the eyes of the survivors, and there’s no point in interrupting it before the end. I love my work, it doesn’t exhaust me; on the contrary. I go all out on the job. Talking with the children helps me deepen my understanding of the genocide.
My tiniest children, I treat them differently, because the moment for talking hasn’t arrived yet. If I were to tell them about the dangers I escaped, my words might infect them with a sorrow, a hatred, a frustration that little children cannot handle. I would risk the irruption of feelings that would be alienating. It’s important to accept this, because if children have not lived through the killings, they should not suffer the same damage as their parents. Even if life has come to a halt for someone, it continues for that person’s children. When my children are more grown-up, I will answer the questions they’ll bring home from school. I won’t hide anything from them, because the genocide is written in the history of Rwanda. But I want life to stretch out in front of them for a long time before that blood appears.
I was born in the prefecture of Butare. My father was a librarian at the National University of Rwanda, and my mother was a grammar school teacher. There were nine of us children; I was the second oldest. Our extended family included more than two hundred people living in a dozen houses lined up on a street in Runyinya, a neighborhood lying eleven miles from the city center. I grew up in a lovely family. I was surrounded by grandparents and the relatives you call aunts and uncles. I never heard my parents have a single argument. They earned a little money, and we didn’t have to buy much because we had our own bit of farmland. My life was carefree, so I was quite happy. I completed my humanities courses and began studying the social sciences, intending to go to college. I married an up-and-coming teacher, lived in an average house, tended my little flower garden. Really, life was good.
In Butare, Tutsis and Hutus lived side by side without a hitch, especially in the neighborhoods favored by teachers. There was a small cabaret near our house where we had always talked together and shared brochettes of roast meat in friendship. This changed at the very last minute, at the news of the president’s death. The day Habyarimana died, suddenly the colleagues with whom we’d shared gossip and a beer the day before no longer wanted to meet our eyes. On that day I realized how oblivious we’d been to the contempt those friends had felt for us.
In Tutsi families, we’d avoided any mention of the war between the soldiers from Uganda and Habyarimana’s army. Maybe the Hutus talked about it a lot among themselves, feeding a hatred for us they had carefully kept secret. Really, I was so surprised I couldn’t understand it at all.
So, after the plane crash, we were ordered to remain in our homes, unable even to go to market. We were guarded by soldiers and had no idea what would happen next, but we weren’t being killed yet. On around April 9 or 10, the situation in the country deteriorated. We heard, on the radio or through rumors, that things were falling apart in Kigali, and there was dreadful news of bodies lying all along the roads in other regions. It was still calm where we were, however, although many people were beginning to starve in their homes. Meanwhile, we discussed the crisis, wondering about perplexing questions, such as: Since no one knew whether the plane crash was an accident or not, why did the Hutu peasants immediately march out in organized columns to kill Tutsi farmers?
One morning, the soldiers opened our doors to let us spend one day getting food. That was April 19. So my husband went to the market. When he returned, he told me, “It’s truly serious in town—the interahamwe have started killing. We have to leave now.” I was quite sick, weakened by my pregnancy, but I didn’t protest. I told him, “Fine, I’ll pack a suitcase.” He said, “No, we haven’t time anymore, we’re getting out this minute.” I put our diplomas into a small case with some things for the children and we left, in the clothes on our backs, our two children in our arms. We just happened to find seats in a van, splitting the cost with another family, and we went off toward Burundi, because Butare is close to the border.
And then, along the way, I discovered the ferocity of the war. I mean corpses just everywhere, people dying with their bodies split wide open, still writhing and moaning, and Hutus rejoicing in their viciousness. Near the customs office, we were held up at a last barrier. A vast throng of fugitives gradually piled up behind us, pouring out of the fields, emerging from the river, running down the road, all screaming. Soldiers and interahamwe were cutting them down absolutely nonstop. The criminals looked like savage hordes, really, leaving only the dead and dying in their wake.
So we sat down on the ground and waited for death. I had thrown off my fear. I was growing numb to the uproar of shrieking; I was waiting for the blade. Sometimes you are afraid when a situation arises, but as it develops you proceed under a kind of anesthesia. I had become patient. Suddenly, we heard a panicky little volley of gunfire. Some sort of dispute among the soldiers, I believe. I felt the baby in my womb, and thought of the mothers-to-be that had been sliced open with machetes; I grabbed one child by the hand, my husband hoisted the other one onto his back, and I ran without another thought through the mad carnage, straight into the arms of a Burundian customs official, who said something like this: “Well, madame, it’s a happy ending for you, and now you must rest.” A moment later, looking back, I saw bodies lying in a great sea stretching far behind the barrier.
I loved Butare very much. First because it was my birthplace, and then because I was used to it. It was an average city where I knew all sorts of people. Afterward, I returned to the house where my parents had been killed, to give them a Christian burial. I stayed there only long enough for that.
Before the war, a Rwandan couldn’t live just anywhere, as in your country. He would insist, “I can’t live in a place without my family, my house, my neighbors, my cows.” If he went on a trip, he always returned to where his family had its roots. When I visit Butare now, it hurts me, because no life is left for me there. If you find no one you used to chat with where you once lived, you feel sad. No one lives in the outskirts of the city anymore. Downtown, I saw many new faces without spotting anyone I used to know. To their credit, many colleges, university departments, and graduate schools have reopened since the war, yet I still feel that intellectual life there has been shattered. I found only four people who’d been students with me; the others are dead. In our old neighborhood of Runyinya, the bush has moved into the ruins of our houses. Our big family had been about two hundred strong; now there aren’t even twenty of us left.
In Butare, when I run into Hutus I used to know well, they avoid me, sidestepping me after our greeting and a few polite remarks, unwilling to begin a real conversation. Shame will immediately come between us, even if I don’t show any bitterness, and even if that Hutu is a good person. I’ll hear, “Excuse me, Sylvie, I’m really very busy,” and things like that to cut our talk short.
In the customs of Rwanda, a neighbor is a most important person. Only your neighbor knows how you awakened, what you need, how to advise you, how we can help one another. If you no longer know your neighbors, or if they slip away when you talk to them, you feel a great loss, and you must leave. I cannot imagine any future for me in Butare now, because the things and people I once longed for there are gone.
After the genocide, it was therefore all the same to live anywhere, so you settled in where life had put you. As for me, I’m now capable of fitting into any society at all, if I find a job and a roof. In Nyamata, no one is where he or she belongs anymore. There are survivors from the area who can’t return to their former lives, Tutsis back from exile in Burundi or Uganda, Hutu refugees from Congo who can’t manage to feel at home. There is also great poverty, and poverty of mind as well. But as I often tell people who complain, anyone lucky enough to be alive somewhere after a genocide should dig in there and be grateful.
I personally feel that if anything good ever comes to me, it will be in Nyamata, because this is where I found myself again. In Nyamata, I roam the hills, talking with many people about their innermost feelings. I like these visits, these discussions. And I like to be with my children, fixing their meals, mending their clothing, that’s all.
If I don’t travel abroad, or buy the pretty dress I noticed in a shop window in Kigali, or get invited to a wedding, that doesn’t bother me anymore the way it once did. I no longer covet what I don’t have. I don’t feel any desire or need to rush into things on the pretext that I almost died, that I might no longer have been here to do them. I still haven’t even made myself a little flower garden like the one in Butare.
No, the war hasn’t destroyed my peace of mind. I consider myself extraordinarily fortunate, because others moved heaven and earth to escape the machetes and yet they were killed, while I’m still alive. If I’ve been that lucky, then my enjoyment must carry me along at a calm pace that suits me, not too fast or slow. I watch time go by, without running after it—or letting it sneak away unnoticed.
Many people spend their days doing nothing, won’t look for work anymore, won’t build themselves a new home. They are overcome, crushed by mourning and the onslaught of misfortunes, no longer even looking for a way out.
Some people want life after the genocide to stand still so they won’t need to question themselves anymore. They keep saying, “Why wasn’t I able to save my mama? Why couldn’t I save my child?” They’re sick at heart for still being here, alive, alone. “The family was all together,” they say, “and we heard the killers, we ran away, and when we came back, Mama and the children were lying cut up in their own blood.” Many people feel guilty for being alive, or think they accidentally took a better person’s place, or they simply feel worthless.
I, too, left many dear friends behind. I’m sometimes stricken with sorrow, but never with remorse. My parents died on April 8 and I didn’t even know it at the time, because I couldn’t open my door. On the day we fled, I saw many people dying behind us. And I’m alive, with nothing to reproach myself for.
It happened, it shouldn’t have, but it happened. I grieve for my vanished friends. But even if they were chopped up with axes, even if they died gruesomely, that was their day to die, without me. What was I supposed to do? Panic? Stay and die with them? No. I tell myself, life is over for them, but not for me. I will simply think of them, of us, with sadness, my whole life long.
I have many dead around me, but I don’t want to lose faith in life, because there are also the living. I don’t like shelters where people give up and wail. It’s the same weakness, whether one leaves Rwanda for fear of massacres or spends all day sitting and repeating, “If I make bricks for a house, they’ll destroy it; if I sew some nice clothes, they’ll tear them up,” expecting nothing good, from oneself or others, huddling beneath a black cloud.
Of course I, too, often felt humiliated. I was part of an accomplished family that was almost completely destroyed. A fine future chose me, only to drop me flat. I’d intended to go to college but never did. I was a fugitive, a refugee, almost a beggar. I waited for someone to give me a pittance to eat, I lived in dirt and pity. But now I have set all that aside. If life goes on, it must go on absolutely! When my health isn’t good, when my work seems too much for me, when disappointments await me all around the house, I don’t care: every morning, I find my good humor where I can.
Deep inside me, nothing important has changed. My life has taken a new course, my neighbors are different now, my job isn’t the one I studied for, but I want to be the same person. I’m not looking in the genocide for pretexts to give up or excuse myself. I don’t know if you can understand me.
In Butare, I remember French soldiers who would jog by early in the morning, sweating in their new track suits. During the first days of the genocide, they took off, herding all the Whites in front of them. Why were they there, if they couldn’t use their guns? Why did they take French leave, if they didn’t know anything? I have no idea, but I do know that the Whites never wanted to face the genocide squarely.
As for the television cameramen and journalists, they came and traveled around. They took a look, but they saw only remarkable events, so to speak. They saw the columns of Hutus heading for Congo and observed, “Look, there are some victims of the war, fleeing certain death.” They saw the army of the RPF entering the country and explained, “There are the Tutsi soldiers winning the ethnic war and driving out the Hutus.” But the people who had hidden in the muck of the marshes, in the crawl spaces of houses, at the bottom of wells, unable to escape for weeks on end—there was no one to come worry about them. On television screens, reporters said, “Those who weren’t killed are now trying not to die on their long journeys to the camps,” and in the end they completely forgot about the survivors of the massacres.
So, these survivors, to whom could they speak? No one. They were caught between those coming in and those going out, and that shoved them even further aside. We found that barbaric. That callousness seemed cruel to us. We had survived the machetes for weeks, we had come through the worst without a single helping hand, and already we had ceased to matter at all. Even now, years later, that hasn’t changed much. There are always hidden or poorly presented truths about the survivors that prevent foreigners from accepting the genocide without suspicion—in other words, from being alarmed by it.
I offer a little explanation: the Whites who calmly watched the genocide, they feel embarrassed by their lethargy, their deceit, so they now prefer to confuse the slaughters, to lump the wars and countries together, to avoid the simple truth and not have to deal with too many survivors. Then the survivors as well lose their respect for truth and think, Well, since those others arrange the truth to suit themselves, why pay any attention to them?
Another important observation is that it’s difficult for a White to comprehend certain African attitudes. Here’s a situation that can often arise here: I have a good neighbor, we seem fine, we’re on good terms. One day, he becomes brusque with me, reproaching me for something but without saying what. He broods over this and his eyes turn cold. If I notice his evil eye in time, I go find a friend and tell him that something has come between the neighbor and myself. The friend visits the neighbor to talk to him. Perhaps he’ll return to me and say, “Your neighbor, he’s angry with you over this or that, be careful.” Me, I’m either going to get right up and go give my neighbor an explanation, or I will keep out of his way. Otherwise a serious dispute might break out. If he bottles up anger, an African may suddenly explode in uncontrollable violence. This African character is what leads to unforeseen massacres. When they occur, Whites look at us and say, “Well, they’re at it again: the Congolese—or Sierra-Leoneans, or Angolans—are killing one another, but it won’t go on forever.”
Still, in Rwanda, the Whites could not have failed to understand after a few days that this was no ordinary massacre, but a genocide, and they did nothing. That’s why, in the future, they will leave a stain on the survivors to conceal their mistake.
When I discuss the cause of the genocide with friends, we come up with three ideas. The first has to do with poverty and the necessities of life. The second idea concerns ignorance. The third focuses on influential people—and all those who are easily influenced. Four out of five Rwandans cannot read, so it was no trouble to feed them evil thoughts that were to their material advantage. Before the war, I never noticed any appreciable difference between Tutsis and Hutus, since we socialized together, helped one another, shared a friendly glass. And one day, they brought out gleaming new machetes. They had certainly harbored a secret hatred they could no longer handle. But that explanation cannot justify extermination.
Ever since, I have been looking for some clue that I cannot find. I know Hutus did not feel at ease with Tutsis. They decided to erase them everywhere and forever, to feel more comfortable among themselves. But why? I have no answer. I do not know if I bear on my face or body some special marks they cannot stand. Sometimes I say no, that cannot be it—being tall and slender, with delicate, gentle features, all that silliness. Sometimes I say yes, that really is what began to grow deep inside them. It is an utter madness that even those who killed can no longer manage to contemplate. Still less those who were supposed to die.
On the hills, I sometimes speak with families who participated in the killings. They say that they regret what they did, what their men did. Their explanation? “We were told, ‘Kill Tutsis, you’ll have houses, you’ll have farmland.’ But no one knows how it could have happened.” I don’t understand them when they talk like that, but I can listen to them. I am deeply convinced that it isn’t a question of forgiving or forgetting, but of reconciling. The White who let the killers work, there is nothing he can be forgiven for. The Hutu who massacred, there is nothing he can be forgiven for. Someone who watched a neighbor slit girls’ bellies open to kill babies before their mamas’ eyes, there is nothing he can be forgiven for. There is no point in wasting words talking to him about it. Only justice can pardon. First we must think about a justice for the survivors. A justice that makes room for truth, so that fear will drain away. A justice to reconcile us.
I have hope for the future, because things are on the move in the hills, people are timidly drawing closer to one another. One day, perhaps, the families of those who killed and those who were killed will live together again and help one another out as before. But for us, it is too late, because from now on there will always be a sense of loss. We had stepped forward into life, we were cut, and we retreated. It is too heartbreaking, for human beings, to find themselves fallen behind where they once were in life.
So far, I haven’t met anyone who claims to be proud of having survived. No one who tells me, “Life is beautiful, and I never knew it was that beautiful until I was so scared of dying during the massacres”—like someone who has recovered from a dreadful illness, for example. Even if they have found a good life, have a job, lovely children, beer, survivors have been cut down in their very lives.
I do not know a single survivor who feels completely safe, forever free from terror. There are those who fear even the very hills where they should be working their lands. There are those afraid of meeting Hutus on the road. There are Hutus who saved Tutsis, but who no longer dare go home to their villages, for fear that no one will believe them. There are people scared of visitors, or the night. There are innocent people whose faces inspire fear and who dread inspiring fear, as if they had the faces of criminals. There is the fear of threats, the panic of memories.
I’ll give you an example. Last week, we took the van into the bush to identify some children in a new sector. We lost track of the path in the foliage. I told the driver, “Well, we’re lost, but we can press on anyway to finish things up.” At the edge of a banana grove, we encountered a group of Hutu peasants at work. They stopped trimming branches, their arms motionless, and stared at us in silence. I heard myself shouting, “This is it, we’re done for this time, we’re all going to die!” I was beyond frightened—I no longer knew where I was, my vision had gone blurry, I thought we’d wandered into a nightmare. I was sobbing, repeating to the driver, “Don’t you see them, all those men with their machetes?” Placing his hand on my arm, he said to me, “No, Sylvie, everything’s okay. They’re farmers pruning their grove.” He did his best to calm me down. That was the first time since I’ve gone back into the bush that it caught up with me. I was in such anguish that day!
Often, I regret the time wasted thinking about this evil. I feel that fear is eating away at the time luck has saved for us. I tease myself by thinking, Fine, if someone still wants to cut me, let him go grab his machete. After all, I’m only a survivor: he’ll be killing a person marked for death, and I amuse myself with that fantasy.
Because if you linger too long with the fear of genocide, you lose hope. You lose what you have managed to salvage from life. You risk contamination from a different madness. When I think about the genocide, in a moment of calm, I mull over where to put it properly away in life, but I find no place. I simply mean that it is no longer anything human.
Written in Nyamata in April 2000