Samedi détente

“How to speak about the unspeakable?

How to speak about departing from the place once cherished? Or about the circumstances under which,we had to leave the childhood nest, one day, hidden, moving in the streets where bodies, blood and silence abound ? How to speak about the heat consuming our bodies under the weight of layers of clothing, « mugondo », that we couldn’t carry around in suitcases as they would have been too heavy and cumbersome during the exodus? How to speak about the daily walks, the thirst and hunger that kept us company? How to speak about lice, or sleep on a piece of tarpaulin in the middle the forest, or waking up under a rainstorm in the middle of the night out in the fields? How to speak about fleeing among coffee fields during the night on a full moon? How to speak about the laughter, the songs, the psalms and dances?

How to speak about the golden honey so sweet and so rare when meat was being sold almost for nothing and flesh was rotting on the thousand hills? How to speak about the months spent without seeing one’s own mother? How to speak to those who were over there, far from us, where the information circulated superficially about a genocide that was devastating Rwanda entirely?

Little has been said about this genocide. And often the wrong way.

Nineteen years have passed by, nineteen years spent far from my country, nineteen years during which I have learnt to start living again, taking the time to grow, to think and to finally write.

On various occasions I have had the opportunity to return to Rwanda and to see members of my family who are still alive. I have lived through the void left by those who died. I have heard the testimonies of relatives or even of those to whom one lends an attentive ear. I recorded certain testimonies. I saw the physical scars left by machetes and those that are not visible but that one recognizes when one meets another that walked through the same dark valley.

I will speak through the eyes that saw. I will share the words of those who were there. And I will call it, Samedi Détente, like this radio programme broadcast on Saturday during which we listened to different kinds of music from abroad. We danced, we sung, we memorized them despite the fact that we didn’t understand half of what the lyrics meant. It was before.”

Dorothée Munyaneza

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