Rwanda: food, lectures

Monday July 13, 2009

One is not an observer unless one sees what is going on in its freedom. - Jalal Touffic

Today is a different kind of day for our project. The past three days or so we’ve been traveling the Rwandan countryside and visiting sites. Now, we are in Kigali, back at Saint Paul’s. We are attending lectures with IGSC (Interdisciplinary Genocide Studies Center, our partner in Rwanda: http://www.igscrwanda.net/) and some students from 2 other schools. I paid bad attention. I don’t remember where. I think one is Wisconsin. The other one starts with a vowel.

I want to take this opportunity to backtrack and mention the Rwanda landscape. It’s called the land of a thousand hills. You can hear it in the bus engine. Green banana trees. Green. Or the dark dirt farmed down the slope of the hill. Every inch of the country farmed. Tea. Coffee. Banana. Beans. Maize. Cassava. Green til the earth ends and the sky is blue. We came during the dry season.

We eat a lot here. We eat a lot everyday. Big buffet lunches and dinners – lots of protein and starch. Fish, chicken, beef and Irish potatoes, Cassava, posho, rice, mashed bananas, cooked bananas, sometimes bread, beans, cassava or cassava leaves, peanut sauce, sometimes noodles, green beans, sometimes avocado, sometimes soup – chicken, mushroom, goat. For desert, we eat fruit: little sweet bananas – fat finger size, passion fruit, this fruit that no one knows the name for in english that is like fish eggs in a round fruit shell if fish eggs were tangy and sweet. And we drink fanta. Or coke. Or tonic. Or African Tea – which is tea with massala and ginger and milk and I wish I knew how to make it.

I could make a hinge here between the nourishment of food and the nourishment of history in digestable form, but I choose not to.

Something Darius mentioned to me that came up in lectures (do you know Darius? He’s a CalArts alum, like me, who has come on this trip since its inception who I am working with on my performance here): recent thinking – the best description of the genocide – not the “Rwandan genocide” but the “Tutsi genocide”. He inquired about this further to Chantal – one of the professors – from the vowel school- who is also a founder of IGSC. For her, she prefers “Tutsi genocide” for its precision – people were killed for being Tutsi. Even if they were not Tutsi, their killing was explained by saying they had become Tutsi. The holocaust is not the European genocide. (the recent memorial in Berlin is called the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe– though there is some controversy for who it leaves out: the political prisoners, the gays, the gypsies – to say the murdered jews vs. the holocaust feels like an attempt to wrest individuals from the abstract. Museums and memorials I’ve seen in Germany are careful to state these murders were carried out by the National Socialist Party – not ahistorical Germany.) Again it’s the work of seeing – or precision – that genocide is not synonymous with evil or with suffering – although it forces confrontation with both. Genocide is a humanly and methodically planned process by a group of individuals with power against another group of individuals (with not so much power). Who benefits from genocide, anyway?

And, as Darius points out while we stand on a small tile balcony of the Ministry of Culture and underneath us two women wash clothes in small blue plastic basins and the sun of the equator warms us all from the inside out, it will be interesting to see in Rwanda– if now there are no Hutu or Tutsi, only Rwandans – who will own the Tutsi genocide? How will it be remembered as a thing concerning real people, real life?

Today was made possible by the gracious and generous support of Kelly Rouse and Deborah Wallace. Thank you both!