Discuss: Healing Rwanda

This year, in April, I went to Rwanda for the third time. I was in Butare and in Cyangugu for the Commemoration. I had just finished writing a novel on Rwanda, and I went to pay tribute to the voiceless who had given me their stories. I began this essay nodding and nodding, understanding so completely what Terry Tempest Williams was saying. I ended the essay weeping and weeping. Twibuke! Amahoro!

I usually find myself avoiding stories such as this one, because I can’t bear to be confronted with another of the world’s horrors, to be reminded of the horrible things we human beings do to one another.  But I forced myself to read it because I know Terry and love her work.  And I realized that my “depression avoidance technique” of not learning more about what’s going on in the world is just like closing your eyes and not speaking out against a wrong.  Thank you, Terry, for your honest, heart-rending piece that opened my eyes in a way they needed to be opened.

“Twelve white egrets skim
the lake, their wings
barely, just barely,
gliding above the water.
Beauty is not
a luxury but a
strategy for survival.”

Divide it where you will, it can scan like a poem.  To me, it is among the truths that are most important to our shared humanity.

“Beauty is not a luxury but a strategy for survival.”

Ritual activities to honor and grieve the stolen, towards healing the unforgivable.  Dignity and presence that exposes the hollowness of blame and calls for vengeance, the useless bigotry of self protection through more of the same.

Instead of vengeance, make beauty, make places and ways for those who were most harmed to grieve and to reclaim dignity.  Allow those who were spared to honor that grief, and those who were not there and would not help to recognize, to feel what happened, both the grief and the shame.

Thank you so much for giving me a means to share in this acknowledgement of what happened, happens, is happening—the human sacrifices that hide behind our communal denial and shared self indulgence.

“Beauty is not a luxury but a strategy for survival.”  At least the sorrow feels more clean than the denial.

Thank you for this.  I am at a loss for words, but I echo the comments of those who have already responded.  I am grateful for this heart-breaking and beautiful rendering of a world that I am all too ignorant of and all too complicit within.  Thank you again to all involved.

I too was in tears during reading this heart opening piece from Terry. And like Kristen and Nora, I needed this awakening, silence is too dangerous.

Thank you, Terry. All the other commentators have said all I could say.

I look out from the window of my high rise office and think of all those who have closed their eyes and ears. I disgusting include myself in this group…All those that continue to close themselves off as though they are an island in the vast sea of humanity. Care for their island and its inhabitants is all that they seemingly have time to focus on in this day of high speed internet, multi-tasking, juggling kids-career-friends-family, and all the other things that fill up life…we run, no, we race steadfast pressing forward, always forward trying to maintain that island of ours. Although many pay some tribute to others in tragedy, we largely fail to truly feel compassion for what is happening off the shores of our island. Only when the storm blows upon our beach and brings tragedy to us do we truly understand. Yet it is too late to avert the tragedy then. The time for that was many days/weeks/months before when the storm was gaining strength out in the sea as other islands were being swept away. There are no islands, we are all one. What befalls on one befalls on us all. The Native Americans have a saying “Mitaku Oywasin” (Pronounced Meetaku Wayasin) which is loosely translated as “all my relations” or “the spirit of all”. I’m by no means an expert on tragedy, Native American wisdom or anything else in particular. However, we seemed doomed to repeat tragedies such as this as long as we continue to view ourselves as separate from others in the many ways that we define ourselves either through religion, culture, country, color, etc. The story of genocide in Rwanda is unfortunately not an isolated incident. America had its own genocide against Native Americans that we have still not officially acknowledged as a huge genocidal tragedy. We literally wiped out entire tribes and all their culture. To this day many of the tribes that remain are still struggling to survive. Yet as a nation and, in many cases as individuals, we have not accepted this nor have we reached out to help heal this wound. If there was a glimmer of hope in Terry’s story it was the fact that there is acknowledgement to the tragedy,  justice being upheld for some of the autorcities and memorials being raised…only then can people begin the long process of recovery and healing. Terry, thank you for your most poignant story. It will hopefully touch the hearts of many and help us all to open our eyes and ears and fight to keep tragedies like this from occurring again.

Perhaps forgiveness is another form of mosaic ...

... One relationship is broken, and another is created from its shards ...

Thank you, Terry ...