National Museum, Murambi

Wednesday July 10, 2009



Today is a new day.

I’ve been leading yoga in the morning which I’ve really enjoyed. To remember to have that space to be here. To be here together. To breathe together – and how much choice lives in that when we make space to recognize it.

The people in our group are lovely. 6 CalArts students – 2 alums, me and Darius – a playwright from NY named Katori, a beautiful woman who has been working for Unicef and other organizations doing education and art therapy named Orena, a woman who grew up in a joint Palestinian and Israeli community in Israel, Evas, a Rwandan woman who has been organizing the trip for the last couple of years, several Rwandan students – of law, of tourism, of agro business, of economics. They travel with us and help us with translation and arrangements. The trip fees pay for them to take time off their regular jobs to be with us. Everyone has many jobs in addition to being in school. It’s kind of like being an artist in America.

What did we do this morning? Oh, yes. We woke up early and drove to Butare – a university town in Southern Rwanda. (Keep in mind Rwanda is about the size of Vermont). The second large city in Rwanda.

We went to the national museum of culture which was showing photos and artifacts of pre-colonial Rwanda. I haven’t been exposed much to this before – images that feel more like “Africa” – people dressed in animal skin, home made weapons and agricultural tools, weaved huts, weaved straw. It was such a quick journey through the museum that I’m not quite able to let you in in detail – a lot of ornate necklaces, older women in ankle bracelets piled up the knees. I saw a picture of a woman who decorated her hair with fanta bottlecaps as if they were beads. I wonder how old these photos are? I wonder who took them?

I have such different feelings about all these images. Stereotypes aside, I am struck by how quickly and drastically culture has changed in the past 100 years. It makes me think – when my friends are talking here about sorting through traditional culture and colonial culture to acknowledge and create their current identity – this is not an abstract work.

At the museum, we ran into Immaculée Ilibagiza – a survivor who wrote a book about her experiences called Left to Tell. She tells us about a religious site called Kabuye where in the 80s people were having visions of the Virgin Mary that apparently included images of the genocide. Our interest in piqued and I think we will go. There is so much to see.

We leave the museum and journey to Murambi – a famous genocide memorial where the bodies of 5,000 men, women and children are preserved in lime and laid out on beds in classrooms. Again, Tutsis were congregated in solid structures – churches and schools – in the hopes of refuge. 50,000 Tutsis gathered at this school on the top of a hill overlooking farms, green hills, small clay homes, cows. Then the water was cut off. They were left for two weeks with no food and no water. After that, maybe 5000 maybe 7000 men went to “work” and came in and started killing. Then they came in with bulldozers and pushed the bodies and the people hiding under the bodies into mass graves.

This was part of the zone turquoise – the area held by the French towards the end of the genocide – when the French army came in on a “peace keeping mission”. The French were still allied with the genocidal government. They allowed the genocidaires to cross the border into what was then Zaire. They used Murambi as a fort and set up volleyball nets next to the mass graves – maintaining the vision of ordinary life.

Today is made possible by the gracious and generous support of my friends Camille Acey, Clayton Smith, Arjuna Greist, Tara Peyman and David Gran. Thanks!