Voices from Rwanda

“i lost my husband because he was a man and a threat to the soldiers so after trying to recruit him walking with him and reasoning then threatening him one evening they took him to the edge of the road they shot him no men can be left and now i own a disappearance in this war now i share fever with other women and now i am definition less in a geography of sorrow— but we are women and tradition says women can be inherited by a brother or other family male but who claims this charred heart these bitter breasts?”

“he looked like my son the way he leaned in the doorway half shadow half my mother his outline in the late evening sun like our country desperate and cool he was so ordinary at times his anger almost practiced and read even after the rapes outside even after hurling bones in jest even after refusing the old woman water his smooth face in the doorway was a placid moon in a swirling red universe his eyes beautiful and precise like my son his ebony adolescent hands a uniform all these kids wear as if you could love them all if anything at all could stop them and erase the holocaust they create”

“the earth is dead and in the eyes of each ragged stranger lingering on its corpse fresh from deathwork or bargaining at the cusp of greater death the earth the killers the living right here with our words we begin a century of cancer it is us here who claim this holocaust and cannot shake the shock from our bodies it is us who will continue into the world kin to evil”

“they were high when they came in the bushes they painted their faces their eyes dreaming they presented their hands as choices one held death and the other eternal absence the radios siren to siren with static worshiped the killing spawned it from town to town and in that screaming treble sadness tilled the land and in that procession time was a rotting corpse in the mission yard they kicked the babies with their boots hit them as if they were men i hated the roads that gave them sure footing the ever present indifferent air the seasons beautiful and pronounced behind the bell hung decaying bodies it was a madness examined and let loose it was a madness constructed and taxed and in the end there were no children”

“i came here seeking safety following what stars could not escape the country even night in refuge from the world seeking a stranger’s hand but the officials here forbade me to speak kinyarwanda so in my best french i sketched my desire opened my hands so they could see i was no soldier but they said it was not enough they asked if i had money but the country was disappearing on my knees asking to be saved i said i was no thief and had been walking for three days hiding among bodies pretending to be blind after interrogating me for several hours and beating me there was silence then a man came in and threw buckets of water on me then a woman with food and clothes and bade me sleep”

“face up in the debris my husband mouth agape stilled in the second syllable of my name my husband is a poster and it is no magic that thins the crowds no nobility to die and decompose and become spectacle man into meat the wild dogs feed”

“i saw death today he looked directly at me like we had shared a summer of music or had known someone in common it was a familiarity that countrymen have that a township shares i saw death today waiting at the police depot casually sitting tapping the bench examining the large warm room he was a stranger who one knew was well traveled he was comfortable and patient he sat in the waiting area without fear checking the creases in his linen shirt turning his watch from one side of...