Memorial Day

People smile. They walk to the grocery store. They stop and talk on the street. University students study for exams. They meet with friends. They make their meals. They continue their lives.
Only these days, some of these daily activities are visibly interrupted to remember events that shook this country to its roots. The cotidial chores stop, and people take the time to remember.
This is Genocide Memorial Week in Rwanda, a time to honor and remember the four months twelve years ago that left more than a million people in mass graves, murdered in their homes, in schools, churches, on the street. It is traumatic. It is difficult. It is unbelievable. I don’t know how to write about it, and I have only been here two weeks. I have no notion of the actual experience. The sinking pit of knots in my stomach can be nothing compared to the anguish experienced both individually and collectively by the people with whom I am sharing these streets day to day.
The university students with whom I have spent the last days are members of the genocide survivor’s organization. Of the university’s 6,000 students, more than 800 belong to the organization. This week they are holding testimonials, movies about the genocide here and in other nations, making vigils in cemeteries, and aiming to support each other. For many, this is their family. They are orphans, siblingless, having lost in many cases their entire families twelve years ago.
Thursday night I attended a ceremony at the university, where a theatrical interpretation of the genocide was made. It followed a family from five years prior to the genocide, when boys in school were split up according to their ethnicity. It follows the family to the church five years later, where seeking refuge, they found death. It followed the son, who had fled the country, to the church, where he arrives as a rebel fighter, and finds his two parents dead.
Yesterday, we went to the national memorial service and heard the president speak. He stressed, as did others, the importance of memory. Of never forgetting. Rwanda has an entire genre of music dedicated to the genocide. All stress remembrance, which is what this week is about. But what does it mean? I walked through a memorial, a long hallway with a walkway on either side. In the center was a slightly raised block, twenty feet wide and four hundred feet long. Underneath reside the bodies of some 5,000 people, less than a one tenth of the people who were killed only in that region. Halfway through was a chest. Underneath the glass were the first human bones I have seen in person, 12 skulls and a pile of neatly laid femur bones. As the woman ahead of us passed it, she cried out and fell hysterically to the floor. She was half carried, half dragged out as she wailed out her grief and memory. Another woman behind us, mute, kept signaling to her back, where Rwandan women carry their babies. She then pointed to the grave, explaining through gestures that two of her children were buried there.
I don’t know how to deal with this event. It is so large as to be unimaginable. I can imagine the twelve skulls that I saw. But how do you imagine a million bodies, a million bones, the billions of screams, of minutes of fear, of anguish, of disbelief, of pain, that make an event like this one? The confusion engulfs not only visitors like me, but Rwandans, who lost their country, their families, and their lives. They played dead among the corpses of their loved ones to avoid death. They came away maimed and traumatized. They grew up fatherless or motherless or both. They survived to be traumatized, to attempt to rebuild a nation with a history that cannot be understood, but a pain so real it is tangible.
I want to cry, to ask, how is it possible to continue under this burden, this blackness of sorrow, this emptiness? But is it for me to ask? They do continue, no doubt they cry, they mourn, they remember. They are braver than I can ever imagine being, a whole nation of people of subtle strength, who are attempting to move forward together. They are 25 year-old orphans holding each other as they go to sleep on the bus after staying awake all night together, to remember those they lost. They are singing out their pain, singing out their memory, in an attempt, if not to understand, simply to make known what happened. They are recognizing.
And I am angry. How could we have done nothing? Allowed children and parents, fellow human beings to be slaughtered? What is the evil? The evil that prompts such acts, and that that allows them to continue as we stand by watching? It is both.
To this day in Rwanda, bodies are still being uncovered. The figure of 800,000 cannot be accurate, far more than 1,000,000 Rwandans were lost during the darkest time in their recent history. As I walk these streets, make friends, meet people, I wonder how they go on. I have asked. They say that you don’t always know how you continue, but you do. One way or another, you do.
I find it hard to express both my amazement and my admiration for Rwandans. They are braver than I can imagine being in the face of their experience. This week, they pack schools and community centers to watch documentaries, talk, ask questions, to remember. Their genocide and their loss is nothing they are trying to hide. These days they ache to remember, to ensure that it cannot happen again by instilling it in the national consciousness. Though I do not imagine that it needs to be reinstilled, this national time of mourning seems to be serving the purpose of nation building through mutual support. In the face of it, I feel awed, impressed and inspired. The wells of strength in the human spirit are immeasurable.