Bisesero, the French, finance

Sunday July 12, 2009

We went to Bisesero (http://www.museum.gov.rw/2_museums/kibuye/bisesero/pages/bisesero.htm). This is a place of resistance. A great many Tutsis lived here. At first the genocidaires began attacking educated or esteemed Tutsis in hard ways. They would cut off their hands. Come back a day later. Cut out their eyes. Come back a day later… And a leader emerged amongst the Tutsis’ who said we must organize. We must resist. If we must die, we will die fighting. So they did – for months.

Resistance looked like: Throwing stones. Throwing spears. (They had some guns stolen from genocidaires they attacked, but they didn’t know how to use them.) Hiding in holes in the hills. Sneaking in with the genocidaires and pretending to be part of their army until they started wearing coffee leaves grown on neighboring hills. The man who guided us said he was weak so his job would be to guide the old man to the genocidaire camps in the day where they would sleep while the genocidaire’s were out looking for people to kill.

Then the French came. They came and the Tutsi’s thought they would be protected so they came out of hiding. They came out of hiding and the genocidaires saw them and the French left. The French took the resistance’ guns. The French took pictures and left and the genocidaires started killing day and night because now they knew many more were alive. They killed many more people.

There is something in me that wants to be able to fill in the details about the French because I have a hard time believing that they could have supported genocide. But they’re part of the international community, my mind says. They have some distance from the year-long radio campaign of hate, the poverty, the propaganda of Tutsis as synonymous with the RPF (the army of mostly Tutsi ex-pats attacking from Uganda). Wouldn’t they know better? As if genocide were caused by irrational emotion. Irrational emotion is a useful tool manipulated in the construction of genocide, but genocide takes so much planning and financing. (It cost about $2million to ship a community of Jews in WW2 from Greece to extermination in Germany – according to the receipts in the office of transport that were discussed in Lanzmann’s documentary Shoah. The boats and the trains were funded by the property stolen from the Jewish people about to be murdered. And when they reached the border of Germany, the stolen property was sold in Greek drachma so the Nazis didn’t have the money in German marks and the train company transported the community to the camps on credit.) Genocide takes rational and sustained thought. It takes systems of governance.

And it takes cultural workers as a culture learns to see a group as other and that other as an existential threat. And this is a useful reminder for me. Looking at so much suffering, I often have an impulse or desire for heroism. (I have the image of Hannah Arendt when she talks about how we often want people in the face of totalitarianism to risk their lives to save others or to make a statement, but it is not reasonable to make heroism the standard.) It is useful to remember that genocide takes systems and that art is both part of a cultural system and tool for creating systems of culture.

I have been thinking about the room with the girls and the broken beds. How these girls’ commitment to the story of the world as they knew it changed the empty space in their room to a place of prayer – a certain way of being together. How that place of prayer became a church – it changed the architecture and it changed the narrative of the Catholic Church in that area.

I ask Erik: but what is the difference between that and when you make a space and nothing comes of it? They are both of equal virtue, he says. Or something like that. I guess it’s just a job – the work of seeing. Of letting others in on what you see. And maybe it is nice to imagine my work as part of an ecological system – that evolves in conversation with other distinct workers and that the outcome of all this work is something complex and living and beyond my control. Or maybe I’ve been drinking too much coffee.

Today is made possible by the generous and gracious support of Susan Wong. Thanks kindly!