Scholastique Mukasonga the New Yorker, June 22, 2020
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Grief Scholastique Mukasonga The New Yorker, June 22, 2020 On TV, on the radio, they never slaughter had spared them for now? called it genocide. As if that word were Maybe they’d managed to escape into reserved. Too serious. Too serious for exile, as she had? Her parents, on Africa. Yes, there were massacres, but the hill, had no telephone, of course, there were always massacres in Africa. but she called one of her brothers, who And these massacres were happening taught in Ruhengeri. The phone rang in a country that no one had ever and rang. No one answered. She called heard of. A country that no one could her sister, who’d married a shopkeeper find on a map. Tribal hatred, primi- in Butare. A voice she’d never heard tive, atavistic hatred: nothing to un- before told her, “There’s nobody here.” derstand there. “Weird stuff goes on She called her brother in Canada. He where you come from,” people would was the eldest. If their parents were tell her. dead, then he’d be the head of the fam- She herself didn’t know the word, ily. Perhaps he had news, perhaps he but in Kinyarwanda there was a very had advice, perhaps he could help her old term for what was happening in her begin to face her terror. They spoke, homeland: gutsembatsemba, a verb, and then they fell silent. What was used when talking about parasites or there to say? From now on, they were mad dogs, things that had to be eradi- alone. cated, and about Tutsis, also known as From now on, she would be alone. inyenzi—cockroaches—something else She knew a few people from home, of to be wiped out. She remembered the course, friends she’d made at the uni- story her Hutu schoolmates at high versity here, where she’d had to start school in Kigali had told her, laugh- her studies all over again, her African ing: “Someday a child will ask his degrees being worthless in France. But mother, ‘Mama, who were those Tut- that little part of her—the part that sis I keep hearing about? What did still tied her to those she’d left behind they look like?,’ and the mother will in Rwanda, despite the distance and answer, ‘They were nothing at all, my the time gone by and the impossibility son. Those are just stories.’ ” of rejoining them—formed a bond that Nevertheless, she hadn’t lost hope. grounded her identity and affirmed her She wanted to know. Her father, her will to go on. That bond would fade, mother, her brothers, her sisters, her and in the cold of her solitude its dis- whole family back in Rwanda—some of appearance would leave her somehow them might still be alive. Maybe the amputated. 1 2 She felt very fragile. “I’m like an them to have their picture taken and egg,” she often told herself. “One jolt send her a copy? Was she a neglect- and I’ll break.” She moved as sparingly ful daughter? Had she forgotten them as she could; she lived in slow motion. as the years went by? No, they were She walked as if she were seeking her still there in her memory; she could call way in the dark, as if at any moment up their image anytime she liked. She she might bump into an obstacle and sat down at her table, took her head fall to the ground. Climbing a stair- in her hands, closed her eyes, focussed case took a tremendous effort: a great her mind, and pictured, one by one, weight lay on her shoulders. She found all the faces that death might already herself counting the steps she still had have erased. to climb, clutching the bannister as if Then, toward the end of June, she she were at the edge of an abyss, and got a letter. There was no mistaking when she reached her floor she was where it had come from: the red-and- breathless and drained. blue-bordered envelope, the exotic bird She tried to find an escape in mind- on the stamp, the clumsily written ad- less household tasks. Again and again, dress. She couldn’t bring herself she maniacally straightened her stu- to open it. She put it on her bookshelf, dio apartment. Something was always behind the Rwandan baskets. She pre- where it shouldn’t be: books on the tended to forget it. There were so couch, shoes in the entryway, Rwan- many more urgent and more impor- dan nesting baskets untidily lined up tant things to do: make dinner, iron a on the shelf. She was sure she’d feel pair of jeans, organize her class notes. better if everything was finally where But the letter was still there, behind it belonged. But she was forever hav- the baskets. Suddenly, she found her- ing to go back and start over again. self tearing open the envelope. She If only she had at least a pho- pulled out a sheet of square-ruled pa- tograph of her parents. She rifled per, a page from a schoolchild’s note- through the suitcase that had come book. She didn’t need to read the few with her through all her travels. There sentences that served as an introduc- were letters, there were notebooks tion to a long list of names: her father, filled with words, useless diplomas, her mother, her brothers, her sisters, even her Rwandan identity card, with her uncles, her aunts, her nephews, her the “Tutsi” stamp that she’d tried to nieces. This was now the list of scratch away. There was a handful her dead, of everyone who had died far of photographs of her with her girl- away from her, without her, and there friends in Burundi (which they’d had was nothing she could do for them, taken at a photographer’s studio in not even die with them. She stared the Asian district in Bujumbura, be- at the letter, unable to weep, and she fore they parted ways, so they wouldn’t began to think that it had been sent forget), there were postcards from her by the dead themselves. It was a mes- brother in Canada, a few pages of a di- sage from the land of the dead. And ary she’d quickly abandoned, but she this, she thought, would probably be never did find a photo of her parents. their only grave, a column of names she For that, she rebuked herself bit- didn’t even need to reread, because she terly. Why hadn’t she thought to ask knew them so well that they echoed in 3 her head like cries of pain. ined them waiting behind the veil of She kept the letter from her dead tears, nearby and unreachable. Maybe with her at all times. She never that was why she’d gone so far away, showed it to anyone. Whenever some- why she’d headed off into exile: so that one asked, “What happened to your there would be someone to weep for family?,” she always answered, “They all those whose memory the killers had were killed, they’re all dead, every tried to erase, whose existence they’d one.” When people asked how she’d tried to deny. heard, she told them, “I just know, But she couldn’t weep. that’s all. Don’t ask me anything “My father just died,” one of her more.” She often felt the need to touch friends told her. that piece of paper. She gazed at “I’ll go to his funeral,” she an- the column of names without reading swered, without thinking. them, with no tears in her eyes, and She immediately regretted making the names filled her head with pleas that promise. Was it right for her that she didn’t know how to answer. to honor someone else’s dead if she What she didn’t want to see: pic- couldn’t weep for her own? In her tures on television, photographs in mind, she summoned up images of newspapers and magazines, corpses ly- Rwandan women weeping over their ing by roadsides, dismembered bodies, lost loved ones, able to weep because faces slashed by machetes. What she the body was there in front of them, didn’t want to hear: any rumor that before it was buried. Yes, the women might summon up images of the frenzy of Rwanda knew how to mourn. First, of sex and blood that had crashed over they wept sitting up very straight, still the women, the girls, the children. and silent, their tears falling like rain- . She wanted to protect her dead, to drops from eucalyptus trees. Then keep them untouched in her memory, came the keening and the wailing; the their bodies whole and unsullied, like women shivered and quaked, racked the saints she’d heard about at cat- head to toe by violent sobs. Finally, echism, miraculously preserved from they huddled beneath their pagnes, corruption. disappearing, soundless but for their Most of all, she didn’t want to sighs as they choked back their tears, sleep, because to fall asleep was to de- and then even those slowly waned. liver herself to the killers. Every night Now the loved one could enter the land they were there. They’d taken over of the dead. He’d got the tears he de- her sleep; they were the masters of her served, and although the pain of the dreams. They had no faces; they came loss was still there, you knew that it toward her in a gray, blood-soaked would slowly ease, that you’d be able throng.