OK. I’m going to break the 4th wall for a moment and admit that I am sitting in a coffee shop in New York by Washington Square compiling my notes from July 17th into something that could be comprehensible to you. Being back in NY, I’ve received some feedback (thanks Chris!) that perhaps the basic plan of the trip or the festival is not clear. So, I’m going to backtrack while I drink my paper cup of coffee and watch women pushing their baby strollers to the park.Erik Ehn – the former dean of CalArts – started a program 5 years ago where he takes CalArts students, faculty as well as artists and cultural workers (mostly) from America to Rwanda and Uganda. We study the history and culture of these two nations, network with local artists, policy makers, activists, and this year also Erik co-produced a performance festival in Kigali with two Rwandan artists Carole Karemera and Hope Azeda. Our partners in creating the Rwandan portion of the trip are the International Genocide Studies Center, a survivor advocacy group. The exchange program is followed by a gallery presentation at CalArts and an international conference on arts and social justice at CalArts and now also Brown as Erik will be heading the playwriting program there.
The Rwandan portion of the trip looks like this: 4 days traveling around the countryside visiting genocide sites, museums, memorials; 3 days in Kigali (the capital of Rwanda) attending academic lectures on genocide, recovery, reconciliation and visiting organizations in the capital; 3 days devoted to a festival or workshops, readings and performances. IGSC in interested in cultivating an interdisciplinary summer study program of the Rwandan genocide. Students from universities at Missouri and – Ohio? maybe? - attending two weeks of academic lectures that overlapped with us. These students also came to the performances at Centre by Centre.
It’s a wide and brief conversation. Repeated annually. And builds a little each year. This year, we have a performance festival.
Today is day two.
Two NY HipHop artists – from Brooklyn and the Bronx – are touring Rwanda – with workshops and performances – sponsored by the US State Dept. So they came today and led a workshop on breaking (as in breakdance) and poetry – as in being an mc. Big turn out – a lot of interest in hiphop here in Rwanda. They started by talking about the difference between commercial rap and hiphop and community hiphop – as in art as a process of communal self-identifying and expressing – art not as cultural object, but cultural practice. Concerns of the Rwandan participants included: being taken seriously as artists, how to explain to their parents that art is a meaningful use of their time and study, what can art do to promote peace, how can one make a living as a hiphop artist?
I missed the workshop portion of the afternoon because yesterday, a woman named Lucie attended Jubilith’s Noh workshop. She liked Jubilith very much and invited her to her house. And me too because I happened to be standing next to her. So today, Lucie arrived at 1pm to take us to her house. After some chaos of finding Jubilith – eating lunch – and excusing ourselves from the planned activities, we walked with Lucie to the bus stop. Well, actually a man drove by and offered us all a ride to the bus stop which we gratefully accepted because it was a hot day and a hot walk. The roads are red dust and we take them with us on our feet.
Lucie tells us about her life. She lives in Kigali with her 4 children. She is from Congo. Rwandese. From Congo.
We take the bus. A 4 row van packed full of quiet people. When someone wants to stop, they rap on the window with their finger tips and the bus driver stops for them. Lucie’s stop. She guides us through a market with big open bags of rice and flour and dried beans. The smell of fish. Chickens. Folded fabrics of deep, vibrant colored patterns. Low tin ceilinged stalls. We walk down a dirt roads past many residences. Someone is making charcoal in their front yard and people from the neighborhood come to buy it. For cooking.
Lucie’s house. This is where the girls sleep. This is where the boys sleep. This is the toilet. This is the toilet. This is the toilet. There are three. This is our bedroom. This is the room for the visitors. Tile floors and cement walls . It is not finished, she says. It is not finished, she says again. The closets do not have doors. It takes 8 years to build a house .It takes a lot of money. Home feels like home. Dark like a cave and cool. Curtains on the walls catching the orange late afternoon sun.
She baked us a meal. Peas and cassava leaves and the corn flour staple and plantains and beef and rice and soda and fruit. Tangerines. She washed our hands in a pot and let us eat everything with our hands. This is a long standing dream of mine – to get my hands dirty eating a meal. We talked with her and her two sons about politics – do you think that the government will continue to be good when Kagame is no longer president? Yes, as long as the same people are governors, I think the next leader will continue to take Rwanda down the same path. What is lost when a child experiences or is witness to extreme violence? Are they still a child? Yes, and no. You do not trust in the same way. He says he wants to travel to Iran or the United Arab Emirate because he doesn’t like Islamic Extremists and so he wants to know more about these countries so he doesn’t rely on his prejudice. So he can understand them better. I don’t want to say that I do not like Islam. They cut off a boy’s hand for stealing candy in the market place in Iran. Why? He asked us what we thought of the Iraq War. I am reminded how easy it is to forget that my own country is at war. I think it is sad, I say. What can you say?
Tomorrow he goes to camp with 700 other people who have just graduated from secondary school and he learns how to shoot a gun – how to be a soldier and also how to be a good citizen – not to engage in divisive ideology. Rwanda has even worked to lessen community and gender divides. Alex was telling us how now he has to do tasks around the house that as he was growing up where exclusively girl’s tasks – like wash the floor. It is hard, he says, when my mom asks me to wash the floor. I don’t want to do it because I am used to it being a thing that only girls do, but I know that we have to change and become a more equal society, so I do it. He’s also the second young man I’ve spoken with who is studying cinema with Eric Kabera.
Lucie showed us how to make – posho: corn flour and water – over the open fire kitchen behind the house. It’s just such a different thing to be talking cultural exchange in someone’s dining room over the meal they have spent all day cooking for you then in a conference room. I am reminded that culture is the daily lives and aspirations of people, not abstract, not an object.
Alex rides the taxi with us back to Ishyo. Performances. Jubilith performs Noh. Some virtuosic Rwandan dancers perform. Rockafella and Rah Goddess perform a hip hop show. The theater dissolves into dancing. The theater is breathless with life.
Today is made possible by the gracious and generous support of Phyllis Stinson. Thanks kindly! Good luck in Senegal.
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