My Dearest St. Pauls,
I miss you already. It has only been three weeks since I drove away from you in a taxi with its bass blaring, yet I remember the walls of your guesthouse as if it was only yesterday that I saw you. While I do not miss the many crawling critters you also held under your roof, such as geckos staring down on me in the showers, scorpions wishing to stowaway in my bedroom, or cockroaches greeting me upon my arrival, there are many, many things I miss about you. I miss the people I met during your tea times and while sitting out at your picnic table or gazebo you so graciously let us use. I miss crawling up the hill many nights to use the wifi — or to curse when it wasn’t working. I miss sneaking over to the supermarche for early-morning mandazis or a mid-afternoon snack of samosas. I am surprised to discover that I miss being without a cellphone. I miss Mutzigs and moto gangs of muzungos, all trying to get to the same location, but all trying to save money and all trying to use English to get there.
I’ll be back!
Ni ah’ ubutaha,
Marisa
PS: As I mentioned in my first post, I brought a fair number of books with me to Rwanda. Most of the titles I brought because I thought I’d be able to especially relate to them during my trip. Because my studies focus on using art as advocacy and art as a means to bring about social change, and because I volunteered with Ishyo during the delegation, a cultural and art promotion organization whose mantra is “culture for everyone,” I thought I’d share a few excerpts that particularly stood out to me while I was there.
From I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights
Bearing Witness, by Ellen Bass
When the long-fingered leaves of the sycamore
flutter in the wind, spiky
feed balls swinging, and a child throws his aqua
lunch bag over the school yard railing, the last thing,
the very last thing you want to think about
is what happens to children when they’re crushed
like grain in the worn mortar of the cruel.
We weep at tragedy, a baby sailing
through the windshield like a cabbage, a shoe.
The young remnants of war, arms sheared and eyeless,
they lie like eggs on the rescue center’s bare floor.
But we draw a line at the sadistic,
as if our yellow plastic tape would keep harm
confined. We don’t want to know
what generations of terror do to the young
who are fed like cloth
under the machine’s relentless needle.
In the paper, we’ll read about the ordinary neighbor
who chopped up boys; at the movies we pay
to shoot up that adrenaline rush—
and the spent aftermath, relief
like a long-awaited piss.
But face to face with the living prey,
we turn away, rev the motor, as though
we’ve seen a ghost — which, in a way, we have:
one who wanders the world,
tugging on sleeves, trying to find the road home.
And if we stop, all our fears
will come to pass. The knowledge of evil
will coat us like grease
from a long shift at the griddle. Our sweat
will smell like the sweat of the victims.
And this is why you do it—listen
at the outskirts of what our species
has accomplished, listen until the world is flat
again, and you are standing on its edge.
This is why you hold them in your arms, allowing
their snot to smear your skin, their sour
breath to mist your face. You listen
to slash the membrane that divides us, to plant
the hard shiny seed of yourself
in the common earth. You crank
open the rusty hinge of your heart
like an old beach umbrella. Because God
is not a flash of diamond light. God is
the kicked child, the child who rocks alone in the basement,
the one fucked so many times
she does not know her name, her mind
burning like a star.
Poem Wrapped Around a Quotation from Samantha Power, by Donna Brook
It is strenuous to mentally
encompass events,
how much harder
to act on them.
Sunday bather
lined the Jersey Shore as my stepson
cried for help from a riptide.
Alone my brother-in-law
dove and did not hesitate
to save him. Believed he could
and forthwith did, so becoming to us
a hero, no longer Sy,
but otherly brave.
Saying he did
what anyone would have done.
“To earn a death sentence, it was enough in the twentieth century to
be an Armenian, a Jew or a Tutsi. On September 11, it was enough
to be an American. In 1994, Rwanda, a country of just 8 million,
experienced the numerical equivalent of more than two World Trade
Center attacks every single day for 100 days….When the Tutsi cried
out…every country in the world turned away.”
But what would anyone
have done?
How demanding
to wrap the mind
around the Earth
as if plucking a drowning
man from the sea
because one conceives
it is possible.
The Tutsi were killed
with machetes and sharpened
car parts, means
of mass destruction
just as water becomes
for those not snatched
from it in time.
From an essay called Iraqi Poetry Today, from the collection entitled A Human Eye: Essays on Art in Society, 1997-2008, by Adrienne Rich
“Subjective, emotional experience everywhere lives and converses in poetry. Yet subjective emotions exist of necessity in dialogue with objective conditions. Poetry springs from a nexus of individual and shared experience, above all an experience of location—geophysical realities visible landscape, space marked out by religion, education and politics, poverty and wealth, gender and physiognomy, subordination and independence. Poetry both articulates new upshootings of particularity and grows out of a traditional compost. And it is often written in a desire to change the composition of the very soil from which it grows.”
“‘Whether or not a piece of literature is translated into English practically determines the artistic value of the work. At this early stage of globalization it is difficult to determine whether this phenomenon is enriching Arabic literary tradition…’
In his introduction to Iraqi Poetry Today, Simawe observes that ‘whether we like it or not, English has become the world language, and thus has come to belong to people of all nations. Hundred of the poets who lie in exile have lost their audience and have begun to write either in English or to get the poetry translated into English or the language of their host country. The outcome of this hybrid poetics has become an important feature of western modernism.’”
This is my last post. Thanks for listening, thanks for reading.
At Kigali International Airport for the long journey home--farewell for now!
