The Theatre of Genocide: Four Plays about Mass Murder in Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, and Armenia

Maria Kizito

178 Maria Kizito Erik Ehn The hour is coming when everyone who kills you will think he is offering worship to God. John 16:2 Author’s Note This play meditates on the recent trial and conviction of two Rwandan nuns charged with genocide. They were accused and found guilty of encouraging and facilitating the murder of seven thousand refugees seeking shelter at their convent during Rwanda’s genocide (which just recently marked its ten year memorial). The play is about faith. In what did these nuns (Sr. Maria Kizito and her mother superior, Gertrude Mukangangwa) believe? What was the architecture of their inner prayer space? With what kind of God were they intimate? Maria Kizito doesn’t seek to explain the source of the genocide or to fix blame. It attempts to enter into the inner life of a perpetrator. The form of the piece is built on the Office of the Hours; Maria and Gertrude are Benedictines and spend many structured hours in prayer each day. In the play, nuns and refugees pray out of the Bible of Genocide: all readings, psalms, hymns relate to the atrocity. In this way the text is liturgical—for chant, song, dance . . . The play incorporates witness accounts from African Rights’ Obstruction of Justice: The Nuns of Sovu, along with material from Maria’s trial and the Catholic Divine Office. Singing and stylized movement are indicated by enjambment and other textual cues. Choral speech is divided and assigned variously, as well as chanted in unison. Asterisks indicate areas of dialogue overlap. Music should be nearly continuous. It could be scored lyrics or just sound and could include Brahms’s Concerto for Piano and Cello no. 99; Africa: Music from Rwanda (Anthology of World Music [Rounder CD 5106]); songs by Gene Vincent, the Skylarks, Mexicano 777, Captain Beefheart , Rancid, and Cécile Kayirebwa. It comprises the global/temporal drizzle in the gray space of ambient cultural static, always authentic, never sentimental. This play is the second of three dealing with acts of collective violence. The first (Heavenly Shades of Night Are Falling) centers on the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 and takes on a survivor’s point of view. Maria examines agency. The third, Drunk/Still Drinking, adopts the perspective of a witness , one who fails to recognize complicity. Cast of Characters maria gertrude sisters a, b, c, d, e, and f teresa radio/rekeraho The nuns are Benedictine. Sisters A-D play all the refugees and the Interahamwe. All the nuns are Rwandan, except for Teresa, who is a white American. Radio/Rekeraho is a Rwandan man (and other men as necessary ). He could be accompanied by music. Historical Note The swiftness and scale of the Rwandan genocide, and the world’s complicity , bring conscience to acute focus. In 1994, 800,000 Tutsis and Hutu moderates were killed, largely with hand tools, largely by neighbors, in an Maria Kizito 179 intense outburst of violence framed by the assassination of the president on the one hand and the rebel army’s victory on the other. The world community was aware and turned away, justifying inaction (in effect, collaboration with the genocide) by claiming that the situation arose from intractable “ancient tribal rivalries,” that the killing was an aspect of civil war (an internal political matter, horrible, but not a breach of international law), and by arguing that any effort to intervene could only lead to deeper confusion and more widespread entanglement. There are no ancient tribal rivalries. There is one language, one monotheistic religious history and a nearly homogenous postcolonial religious history (Catholic). “Tutsi” means “leader” and “Hutu” means follower; the Tutsi represent the traditional ruling class, generally herdspeople , and the Hutu are the cultivators. There was intermarriage and social mobility. The Germans, and then the Belgians, introduced the idea of racial difference; they declared the Tutsi genetically superior, gave them privileges, assigned identity cards, and promoted the oppression of the Hutu. That is, until independence in the 1960s, when the Belgians perceived that a strong leadership along classical lines might promote a level of self-sufficiency out of keeping with their postcolonial sense of propriety. The racial myth was reversed; stability along new lines, invented by the Belgians, would allow the former overlords to maintain a presence in Rwanda. The Tutsi were cast as invaders, stripped of rights, and the Hutu majority was promoted. The heavy abuse of...