ARTicles vol. 7 i.1: And The Women Are Tutsi

Hope Azeda is a beautiful woman. Though we thought she was extraordinary looking, she would probably consider herself a typical Tutsi – as she would describe herself, “Toll and skee-ney.” And then that wonderful laugh, an uninhibited giggle left over from childhood. Though Hope’s country had been through hell, she had more optimism, a healthier access to the creativity and energy of childhood than those of us who had lived in comfort and relative stability.

It was the late Elizabeth Neuffer, a war correspondent for The Boston Globe, who told me about Hope, a Rwandan playwright she had met in her travels, travels that inevitably took her to sites where death prevailed. Elizabeth was fascinated not with the rough face of war, or dodging bullets, but with how families managed to put themselves and their lives back together afterwards. Hope had lived most of her life as a refugee in Uganda and had returned to Rwanda after the genocide. There, she had produced a play that was meant to heal her country after the genocide. Elizabeth thought Hope would be perfect for a project I had just started at Harvard, the Institute on the Arts and Civic Dialogue, whose mission is to explore the intersection of the arts and political reality.

It was not easy to get Hope to Cambridge. When we finally had a way of getting her there, the phone lines were so bad, it took forever to actually speak to her. All hours of day and night I tried. All I ever got was a busy signal. When I got her on the phone, a voice full of melody made its way through a thick wall of static: “Ahna I have been so hangry and thursty to talk to you!” When the time came, I sent my assistant to the airport to greet her. Her plane was delayed for several hours. Finally, I got a call. “She’s here. And she’s gorgeous,” my assistant said.

Four years passed. Elizabeth Neuffer was killed in Iraq. Her driver was speeding. She and her translator were killed. The driver lived. I tried to imagine what it was like. I thought they’d fallen off a cliff. Sitting in a shining clean white wooden church in a bucolic town in Connecticut for Elizabeth’s memorial, surrounded by her colleagues, journalists, dressed in black, listening to those church bells toll, once for each year of her life, I couldn’t imagine what it was like. For the longest time, I had imagined a heartless driver who went about his life after the accident without guilt or accountability. Now I know that’s not what happened. It was near a populated area. Her boyfriend, Peter Canellos, had gone to Dover to identify the body. “She was not decapitated,” he said, quietly, when we talked about it and I got the whole story. I am learning how important it is to get the facts, especially when imagination fails you. Apparently, the driver got out of the car and over or near Elizabeth’s dead body, he screamed, “I promised to protect her! I promised to protect her!” And he had made such a promise to Peter.

Elizabeth’s legacy in my life continues. She had always thought I should go to Rwanda, and I had forgotten about that. A year before Elizabeth died I met Samantha Power, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book about genocide, A Problem from Hell. She “learned the ropes” from Elizabeth. I told Samantha my new play was going to be about the body and health care and about beauty and about death.

“If you are going to write about the body, you have to go to Rwanda!” she said as she put out coffee and fruit salad on the porch of her seaside flat not far from Boston. She pulled out a book of photographs of the Gachacha trials with Hutu murderers dressed in pink. The Gachacha is a traditional community court that has been reinstated in order to deal with the hundreds of thousands of Hutus in prison for the atrocities they had committed against Tutsis during the genocide. The modern justice system could not possibly handle the numbers. Whereas the South Africans speak of truth and reconciliation, the Rwandan national mantra is “forgiveness.”

“Why are they dressed in pink?” I asked.

Over the phone before I left, Samantha said, in her matter-of-fact way, “Thirty thousand killers are about to be released from prison. You have to talk to some.” Go to Rwanda and talk to killers? Just like that? These human rights people amaze me.

Hope Azeda met me with open arms at the airport in Kigali. The last time I’d seen her had been five years before, on the day she’d left Harvard. She’d been crying nonstop all day, then headed off to fly home with bags full of running shoes and bed sheets – someone had taken her to a discount house. How could someone whose country was in a state of trauma have tears left for the likes of us, people who freely use the word atrocious to mean a bad movie.

It’s a small airport, the same one where Clinton met with Kagame – the trip he took where he went no further than the airport. Diane Walker, the photographer who was traveling with me to Rwanda, had been on that trip with Clinton, whom she photographed for Time throughout his presidency. “I could tell he was upset,” she said, as we waited for our bags. It was like a 1950s American bus depot, say in a small town in the south. “When he gets upset, he clenches his jaw.”

The customs officer insisted on inspecting each of my audio tapes, DATS, and mini DV tapes. They were all sealed, and I had over a thousand of them. Hope managed to change the course of things. I had not yet seen such authority emanating from her, but then, I’d never seen her speak her native tongue. Was this what would be called “haughty” by those who stereotype Tutsi women as such? The customs officer let us pass on.

We headed the next day to a Gachacha trial. People were assembled on benches under an open wooden structure. I sat across from two killers, one whom the community “forgave” and released. The other, they determined, was lying. They sent him back to prison. Rich, dark brown skin, beautiful features. “Broad,” yes, but sculpted, bone meeting skin. Pink pants that didn’t quite reach the ankles, just as pink as in the photos that Samantha had showed me. Tennis shoes. With the immediate defeat of the trial on his face, the one who was headed back to prison declared his innocence into my tape recorder (still referring to the Tutsis as cockroaches). Members of the community stood around, saturating themselves with his every word, sucking their teeth, gasping, and then pushed themselves into my mike – pronouncing the man a liar, a murderer. I loved the Rwandans because they are expressive. One rainy Saturday, we went to a genocide memorial that we were told had corpses dug up from mass graves. As our van climbed the hill, we saw perhaps street clothes, these “killers.”

I talked to one man and one woman. I have no frame of reference for them. I can’t make a metaphor. It would be false, it would be full of me and you and our idea of normal, our idea of atrocity.

“Did you learn anything in prison?” I said, studying the Hutu prisoner’s face and speaking to Gabriel, the Tutsi translator. He repeated the question in Kinyarwanda. The prisoner looked at the translator and then at me. He didn’t seem to want to speak to me, nor did he seem not to want to speak to me. The Hutus it seems are followers. “Go out and kill the cockroaches,” and they did it. “Speak to this lady with the tape recorder,” and he did it. I noticed his neon multicolored flip-flops. He answered, now, studying my face: “Only some Swahili, and that, not very well.”

On the last day, I interviewed the translator. He had been telling me what people had said – it was through his lens, his voice, that I was hearing. How to move from beside his lens to behind it? How to translate his voice?

Gabriel was downright handsome and he had a perfect smile and eyes like you’d known him all your life. On an American television show he would play the boy next door, even in a show with an otherwise all white cast. His pants fit him perfectly – like he’d had an Italian tailor, and the same with his shirt; a tight European cut that showed his long lean torso.

Listen to this:

GABRIEL: Yes, there was always a belief in Rwanda that Tutsi women were much more prettier than their Hutu counterparts, and this was also from history from colonialists. When Belgians came in, they say that Tutsis were not Bantu. They say Tutsis were originally from the north of Africa, nomads, and that whole sort of thing. But, anyway, not only that, that was one of the stereotypes, but when it came to it, it extended, and people always say that Tutsi women were the prettiest, and, generally, in Rwanda at the time, if you look at… while there are some… while Hutu politicians were calling on people to sideline Tutsis, to kill Tutsis, and that sort of thing, you would be surprised to notice that most of them, actually, had Tutsi wives, even those who are in detention in Arusha on trial. A big number of very senior government officials, the most radical at the time of the genocide, had Tutsi wives.

ADS: Did they kill them during the genocide? Those wives?

GABRIEL: The big politicians did not kill them, but they advised most other people to kill their wives, to kill anything Tutsi. So there were other… there were many other cases whereby people gave away their own wives. Quite often, they did not kill them on their own, but they advised most other people to kill their wives, to kill anything Tutsi. Quite often, they did not kill them on their own, but they handed them over to militias or in cases where they did not have their wives anymore, they handed over their kids because they told them there was nothing with Tutsi blood that was to survive.

I’ve seen cases of grandmothers who handed over their grandchildren because there was Tutsi blood somewhere in their lineage. But it never … when it came to the senior ranking politicians who made all of this, they did not hand over their own wives. They still have their Tutsi wives. There is documented evidence, cassettes and all of that, of politicians calling for Hutu men to have their chance to see what a Tutsi woman is like, and this, of course, encouraged the rape, mass rape everywhere. It was a chance for every militia to take on, to have what most people had only thought to be a special sort of possession, in fact, if I may call it that.
They say there was this phrase in Rwanda: “Watches are Swiss, cars are German, and women are Tutsi.”

Reprinted from A Public Space by permission of Anna Deavere Smith and the Watkins/Loomis Agency.

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