The fear, the claustrophobia, the sense of being hunted. I was back in the school with Claire, the one with no panes in the windows, the playground outside. I felt my hatred well up. I heard the woman crying, her cries that would not cease.
* * *
There was a book called On the Natural History of Destruction, by W. G. Sebald. It sounded like my history, so I signed up for a seminar on his work.
The class was taught by a comparative literature professor named Carol Jacobs. She had hooded eyes, exhausted eyes, but they were unwavering. Her thick German accent soothed me. She was both there and not there, engaged and deeply taken by her own thoughts.
Professor Jacobs’s first lecture to us was a warning. Be careful with assuming you understand Sebald. Be careful with thinking that you know what he thinks. Be careful with your assumptions about the way he presents space. Be careful with your assumptions about the way he presents time. Be careful with your assumptions about the images too—he will use images from a contemporary museum in New York and place them in Europe in the past. Be careful with your assumptions about the way he presents stories, because some people in his book really exist and others do not. Be careful with your assumptions about the truth. Your assumptions will not be of any service in this class.
Our job, Professor Jacobs said, was to be on all the time, to interrogate the details of our lives and create maps, however incomplete, of our interior worlds.
Sebald is not an easy writer. He’s intense and inscrutable, a German born near the end of the Holocaust but not a Jew, a man who came of age in a country that destroyed itself. He dropped into his books random-seeming photographs of libraries, eyes, animals, windows, and trees.
Professor Jacobs told us to expect to be confused, to embrace the confusion. Sebald did not intend to provide enough information. The odd images, the looping thoughts, the disorientation produced by the two—these were meant to capture the mass amnesia that fell over Germany after World War II.
In my Sebald class was a Mexican or Chilean boy—I never figured it out. He spoke with a spectacular sense of authority, tossing about references to semiotic literary theory. I had no idea what he was saying. I found him inspiring.
I can still pick up Sebald’s Austerlitz and read any sentence and it feels like the whole world. The book was my flashlight, my looking glass, my everything. The novel is about a middle-aged man who, as an infant during World War II, was shipped out of Czechoslovakia by his Jewish parents on the Kindertransport, an organized effort to save Jewish children by sending them to be raised in Britain. He spends his entire adult life searching, feeling inchoate, dislocated, lost. Nobody ever tells him about his past.
Sebald tells this story through a gorgeous haze, following Austerlitz as he tries to piece together his life story from his obsessions, curiosities, and habits of mind. Austerlitz’s parents died in the war, when he was still a young child. He sees traces of them everywhere.
I was mesmerized immediately. On page 9 Austerlitz describes Belgium as “a little patch of yellowish gray barely visible on the map of the world.” Belgium: a little patch, barely visible. Belgium, the country that colonized and brutalized Rwanda. Belgium, the country that changed everything, that ruined everything. If I looked at it from the right perspective, in the right light, it was pathetic, yellowish, and small.
Before taking this class, I’d often felt that my feelings were wrong, that my reactions to places were wrong, as my feelings and reactions were not consistent from day to day. Sometimes the architecture at Yale terrified me; other times it made me feel safe. That internal flip-flopping, I assumed, pointed to something flimsy in my thinking or unstable in my mind.
Sebald showed me that we live in all times and places at once. His central preoccupation was a kind of physics, an attempt to define and describe what he called “the laws governing the return of the past.” The past is all in there, all the time, a dark cauldron, bubbling. Different triggers cause different thoughts to rise to the surface at different times. All that changes is what we see in the moment.
* * *
Each day I made a practice of walking by Annette, a woman who stood in front of the Hall of Graduate Studies with a bucket of flowers that she purchased in bunches at the grocery store and sold as singles for a tiny profit. Almost nobody noticed her.
She had nothing to do with most students’ impressive, Ivy League lives. But to me, in my new Sebaldian mindset, she became a link to a buried past, a reminder of Claire selling goat meat, bras, anything, to get us out of our deadening refugee lives.
I’d been a masterful observer for so long, but I’d put that skill to use as a mimic and a chameleon, not as a detective. I gathered details, evidence, gestures and styles, and regurgitated them. I saw my aptitude as a trick, my hustle. Mimicry bought you the keys to the kingdom.
I had never considered using my skills for myself, gathering evidence about myself, scrutinizing my own tells and tics. But Professor Jacobs told us to be on all the time, to investigate all the time, to analyze everything, to believe it all had meaning.
I had tried therapy several times over the years, but it always felt too direct, too invasive, too medicalized. That Rembrandt painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, that’s what therapy felt like to me. On the canvas a group of eight men who look nearly identical, all rosy-cheeked and bearded, in black frocks and white collars, stand around gawking at the body of a ninth man who is naked, dead, and ghoulishly white, and whose arm is skinned and flayed. The image is voyeuristic, and to me, distasteful, both for its peering inside the dead, defenseless body, and for the smug, entitled looks on the faces of the men in frocks. They seem to feel all the world is theirs to toy with and probe, even this body in death.
Now here was Sebald, telling me I didn’t need to do that. I didn’t need to peel off my skin until I screamed, I didn’t need to expose my wounds for others. I could work the problem myself. I could take my whole world as my text. I could learn to understand my own mind.
His books offered a method, or at least implied one: if a person wades deep enough into memory and pays close enough attention to the available clues, a narrative will emerge that makes moral and emotional sense.
His theory of memory meant that the residue of my history was already there. I just needed to ask the right questions and look for answers with a discerning eye. Why did I use the GPS map on my phone, even on campus, when I knew where I was going? Why did I talk so much—was I afraid I’d disappear? Why did I drink only tea, never cold water? Why did I cringe when the sun turned red?
After seeing Annette, I turned down Prospect Street and took pictures of the roots and vines growing outside Yale’s Grove Street Cemetery. I wanted to find order and connection in the world. I wanted a live link, a route back, to all of my dead who were not buried and never would be. I studied the patterns in the images of the cemetery vines to see if they matched the patterns of the veins in my hands.
* * *
The following summer I interned at Google, in the diversity program. One day our program director instructed all of us to show up early and surprised us by saying, “We’re going to Disneyland!” A van drove us to the San Francisco airport.
On the short flight to Los Angeles I told a coworker about my Mickey Mouse backpack. It still made me cry.
His response was perfect. “Clem,” he said, “we’re going to do EVERYTHING.”
Disneyland stunned me: not just the employees walking around in Minnie and Mickey suits, a surreal, joyful reminder of my lost treasure. The whole place was, to me, a paradise, a triumph of imagination, a testament to the possibility of assembling a self and saying to yourself, What do you think happened next? and then making that story come true. I bought cotton candy and ate it without fear. I floated through It’s a Small World. I was in Walt Disney’s world, inside his imagination and no one else’s. My favorite ride w
as Pirates of the Caribbean—I loved being on that boat. It wasn’t the boat of all my nightmares. It was just ibulayi, away.
18
I had long assumed the ghosts of my past would keep me from ever wanting to return to Rwanda. I had barely recovered from Kenya. Yet during my sophomore year at Yale, when I was twenty-two, a woman on campus asked me to join her spring-break trip to Rwanda. She was part of a group that had fund-raised to buy water tanks for the Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, a community in Rwanda funded by Americans and modeled on a kibbutz in Israel set up for Holocaust orphans. This Yale group was flying over in March to install the water tanks. I agreed to go.
On the plane, Zach told me everything would be fine. He was in far over his head. I panicked throughout the flight and we arrived at the youth village late at night. I took an Ambien but still woke before sunrise. Before I left I’d promised myself that while in Rwanda I would just sit with my pain. I would not bury it, display it, or disavow it. I would keep it as my own.
The sunrise was bright orange—the orange of disaster, the orange of safety cones, the orange that Pudi had once told me meant that a nun or priest had died. Zach took a picture of me sitting on the porch, half awake, regarding the dawn. My hair is wild and unbraided, and I look relieved.
* * *
That feeling didn’t last. I studied more Sebald. I made more dresses to try to purge my demons. I introduced Elie Wiesel at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and President Obama appointed me to the board. It was such an honor, and a great solace, to work with those committed to remembering. Then, in 2014, when I was twenty-six, I flew to Kigali with a delegation from the museum for an event to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide.
I was the youngest person in the group, the chosen emissary to tell the story of genocide to future generations. I was also the only Rwandan. From the airport, a van took our delegation to our hotel. I told myself I was fine, though I still scanned every room for exits, in case I needed to run, and I still meticulously read people’s faces and body language so I would know exactly how they wanted me to walk and talk, what they wanted me to do.
The air in Kigali smelled like orange and lemon blossoms. The streets were clean, no one begged. The city, nestled among the hills, looked like a provincial capital in Tuscany, modern yet still pastoral, churches galore, a few bigger office buildings downtown, cell phone purveyors on every corner. Not far from the Kigali Genocide Memorial, a gorgeous new public library had opened—glass walls, soaring ceilings, all light, intelligence, hope, and space. The whole country felt to me like it was engaged in that project: holding its chin high, determined not to swivel around to see who might be creeping up from behind. The burden of history, the presence of history, was overwhelming. Rwanda did its best to contain and partition off the past by labeling everything prior to the genocide before. The word “before” is simple yet effective: that was then, this is now; so clean, so Zen (before genocide chop wood, carry water; after genocide chop wood, carry water), a look out to the horizon over a windless ocean, so smooth, so blue, no corpses floating on the surface, no body parts sticking out.
Now, at nearly every major intersection stood young men with guns, pants tucked into their shiny black boots. They watched the traffic and the passersby. I hated this and yet Rwanda needed this. We had brought this on ourselves. When a country’s citizens start killing one another, you need to reestablish order, you make a display of safekeeping. You can’t allow everybody to sink into their totally reasonable fears.
That first night we all ate dinner at Hôtel des Mille Collines, the “Hotel Rwanda” of the film to my traveling companions, though to me it was the hotel where my mother’s brother used to take us swimming. He’d buy us ice cream and we’d sit under the umbrellas in the shade. When we left he always joked, “I better keep working hard so I can keep buying you ice cream!”
He was now dead. Not called to God—dead.
* * *
On our second day there, I dressed up and, along with the other women in the Holocaust Memorial Museum delegation, went to a luncheon with the First Lady at the President’s house. All the streets in Kigali were numbered now—they hadn’t been named or numbered before. Most of the trees had been cut down. Everything out of the shadows, into the light. Nowhere to hide.
The tablecloth was embroidered with chain-stitched flowers and birds. The First Lady was elegant and gracious. She wanted to hear our stories and she wanted to tell us hers.
The Rwandan government now had an official narrative. Before the Belgians arrived and colonized Rwanda, Hutus and Tutsis lived in peace. But colonization is built on the idea that we are not the same, that we don’t possess equal humanity. The Belgians imposed their cruel ideology: their belief that people with certain-sized skulls and certain-width noses were better and smarter than others, that they belonged to a superior race.
This ideology leached into the Rwandan psyche and caused the country to self-destruct.
* * *
On the morning of Remembrance Day, a bus came to the hotel to drive us to Amahoro Stadium. I had a hard time believing this event was happening in a stadium at all. Twenty years earlier, in eastern Rwanda, government officials had told people to gather in Gatwaro Stadium. Twelve thousand did. They were all murdered.
Still, we rode toward the horror. People arrived at the stadium from all parts of Rwanda, switching from one bus to another, walking for days, because this was the anniversary, the one time of the year Rwandans were permitted to grieve. Before the government had designated a grieving season—a period of one hundred days beginning on April 7—the country had existed in unstoppable tumult and upheaval, its citizens constantly wailing, screaming obscenities, burning things in anger.
With the exception of that hundred days, Rwandans greeted one another with the word komera. Everyone was gentle, firm, wary, and opaque. Komera means “be strong.”
A marching band played as we entered the stadium. I sat in the VIP section with the others from the Holocaust museum. On my seat was a small gift box with a beaded Remembrance Day pin. None of the Rwandans behind me knew who I was or that I was one of them. I wanted to disappear. I had brought a scarf and now I closed myself inside it. I kept on my sunglasses. I did not want to see.
All around me, people started screaming. First one woman, then another, then another. Then the men. The Remembrance Day program began with an extremely compressed reenactment of the history of Rwanda, from colonialism to the present day—singing, dancing, a huge production. More than six hundred people performed. Everybody knew the basic plot.
“Dehumanization started. And humans became objects,” a voice blared over the public address system. A few minutes later the dancers who played the white colonizers morphed into the white aid workers.
Several minutes after that, hundreds of Rwandan actors pantomimed killing and death.
The screaming continued throughout. Unhinged. The wailing became so florid, so vibrant, so volcanic and out of control that guards in yellow vests began carrying out the most spastic of the bereaved. On the stadium floor the actors playing peacekeeping soldiers from the current government brought the dead Rwandans back to life.
I didn’t like the staging, but what staging would have been right? There was no way to do this—to gather the country for a few hours to remember nearly a million lives exterminated and the millions more destroyed.
President Kagame, lithe, sophisticated, and somber, stood up to speak. He explained to the assembled, and to the world, that Rwandans needed to unite and heal themselves, because if we didn’t take care of ourselves, nobody would.
Kagame, during his speech, switched from English to Kinyarwanda and back again, so that both the dignitaries and his citizens would understand. The genocide was the fault of colonization, he said, a grotesque reflection of a diseased mentality, the Europeans’ dark id. The narra
tive strategy Kagame deployed in his speech made sense. He offered a simple, digestible story: The Belgians came, spread evil, and left. The rest of us remained here.
We 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 speeches continued. The crying continued. The screaming continued throughout. The guards in yellow vests removed two hundred–some people from the stadium. There was so much pain. I felt profoundly ashamed. I did not want to be an emissary of this. I did not want to keep telling this story to future generations. It would destroy me. I wanted instead to crawl inside my scarf. I wanted to be blown away.
A woman next to me fainted. I found myself wondering whether she was real or if I hallucinated her. She could not be real, yet her body was right there.
I flew home and stayed in bed for a week.
* * *
A year later I traveled to Israel with the Carter Center as part of a delegation to learn about refugees. I packed my books and my candles and I visited the Aida Refugee Camp, just a mile from Bethlehem, in the West Bank. The refugees here were Palestinian. This was the first time I’d been in a camp where the residents didn’t look like me.
Near the end of the trip we visited the security fence, the giant barrier of concrete and concertina wire that separates Israel and Palestine. I’d read about it, I knew about the walls, but seeing this monstrosity, this monument to intimidation and fear, and then lining up to pass through security…it shut me down. You see men with guns. You see children with guns. You’re herded by disembodied voices into a space that feels like a cattle chute.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads Page 19
