And after the nightmare?

This post is the third in a series reflecting on the Rwandan genocide. Each post can be read on its own. To find the others, go to When the Nightmare Began and Confronting the Rwandan Nightmare. In this post, we examine what it has meant for the Rwandans to live through trauma and come out on the other side of tragedy. And what their experiences can mean for you and me.

Thirty years ago this month, the worst of the nightmare in Rwanda was fading. In a country smaller than the state of Massachusetts, between 500,000 and 800,000 people lay dead and mutilated at the hands of their neighbors. Two million others were fleeing. In the ensuing years, multiplied millions more would die or be displaced, when what writer Gerard Prunier has described as “Africa’s world war” enveloped neighboring and not so neighboring countries.[1]

But what happened to Rwanda itself? And how has the Rwandans’ traumatization worked its way out in families and individuals? Among the numerous books I read for this assignment, several attempted to answer these very questions. Catherine Claire Larson, in As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda,[2] has done so in a most challenging fashion.

I say “challenging” because, initially, I didn’t like her approach. The book flips back and forth between stories of Rwandans and chapters Larson calls “Interludes.” These interludes address how trauma and healing play out in all of us. At first, I thought her approach of including the reader minimized the trauma of the Rwandans, but gradually I came to sense that instead she was pulling me in, connecting me with them as fellow human beings.

Daily we see atrocities and tragedies played out on our screens – in stark video relief. With rare exception, these events are far, far away in remote lands with strange sounding names and even stranger customs. The visual-in-motion simultaneously brings the suffering into our personal spaces and otherizes it.

Such shallow intimacy can trivialize tragedy. Like Hollywood dramas, it becomes routine, every day even as it is incomplete. We don’t live with screened trauma like we do with trauma that is physically present. As a result, we learn to turn off, shut out any lingering effects – a mechanism those actually experiencing the trauma cannot do.

The playout of their tragedy doesn’t fit with what is going on in our lives. We shift from seeing other communities devastated to seeing our own neighborhood without the same trauma. We may even wonder why those who have suffered cannot cast off their suffering as we can do just by putting the book down or shutting off the screen. For a moment we may be caught up in their pain, but that pain does not play out for us as it does for them.

Larson doesn’t allow us that luxury. She shares the Rwandans’ stories and then connects them with traumas more at home in our own lives.

Young preachers are a blessing to the church. We need many more of them. But I’ve noticed that however articulate and trained a speaker may be, something is missing if they have had a shortage of life experiences. Especially the kind of experiences that involve pain and struggle. What they say sounds good, maybe even emotionally stirring. Yet it can lack humanness. It can lack connection with me.

That speaker speaks more clearly to me if she has walked through the valley. She may not have walked in my valley, but she has walked in a valley. And out of that valley experience, the mountaintop truths she is presenting hit home all the more vividly.

I remember applying for appointment to serve internationally back in the late 80s. The approval process was extensive and included a home interview. The man who came to check us out had read all that we had written, had gone through the results of all our tests, and had seen what others had written of us. I remember what he told me. In so many words, he said, “you have had the advantage of having struggled with challenges in life.”

You know what it is like to suffer and survive.

Larson does not allow her readers to cast off the trauma of the Rwandans like yesterday’s YouTube. She forces us to avoid the temptation of otherization. Instead, we are made to examine how we are linked with the pain that has soaked into the soil of those thousand hills in the heart of Africa.

Otherizing is dehumanizing and polarizing. It separates us from those others. For the Hutu in Rwanda, that meant they could view the Tutsi as cockroaches, something to be smashed underfoot, which they did – literally. That is the horribleness of the N word or so many other words we use to describe those with whom we choose to have no identification.

This polarization, this otherizing grows out of a lack of empathy. In contrast, as Larson writes, “Empathy rehumanizes the other.” (127) Empathy is the key to rehumanizing not only those we have otherized, but also ourselves. We can no longer look at that other person – whether victim or attacker – as an unrecognizable creature. We are forced to see in them the same humanity as ourselves.

Larson adds that this empathy-induced depolarization moves us “away from ‘you always’ or ‘they always’ statements back into a more nuanced view of personhood or group culture.” We start seeing individual trees and not merely the forest.

In my first post on the Rwandan genocide, I said I had yet to meet a survivor. By the time I wrote the second post, that had changed. At last, I could put flesh and blood to the stories I was reading. I don’t know that I needed to meet an actual survivor to make an emotional connection with the Rwandan stories. Yet somehow seeing Emmanuel living and working in my own state, driving one of Portland’s TriMet buses, thriving in this new space, even as I listened to and read the horrors of his past, helps me keep it real.

As Larson shares the stories of Rosaria, Phanuel, Seth, and Monique, we see how universal are the processes they experienced even if the degree or form of their suffering is not. Larson walks us through the interplay between survivors, abusers, enablers, rescuers, and offspring. Instead of stopping at the moment of horror, we are forced to journey with them to the other side of tragedy, wherever that may lead them – and us.

Public Domain Photo by Adam Jones: Sign with Commemorative Bouquets at Genocide Memorial at National University of Rwanda 

Their journeys are not isolated paths, but intersecting trails in which those who have suffered and those who have caused the suffering are brought together. That reconnecting is accompanied by great pain as the scabs of old wounds are ripped off and victims and attackers are both made to resuffer in these reunions. But through that renewed suffering comes healing. In a nod to Dietrick Bonhoeffer and Miroslav Volf, Larson explains that “forgiveness is an active form of suffering offered on behalf of the victim to create a pathway of redemption, of peace, of shalom.” (263)

Larson writes of one “transfigurative” moment, one in which she “saw an orphan whose very name means ‘weak’ standing in strength and extending forgiveness. I saw a man who was anything but innocent covered in the grace of the one who could accuse him – and covered in the grace of Christ who died so that Innocent could become exactly that.” (262)

I find much to digest here. We live in an age where suffering is an experience to be avoided, where it can even be considered scandalous to suffer. Not that we should ask for it.

When I lived in China, I remember a young American coming to work with us for a summer. He said he had come to be a martyr. I am pretty good with a poker face, but I think the “What!” in my brain contorted my expression. He explained that years ago missionaries to India took wooden coffins with them because they were likely to die while they were there. I said to this guy that he could never be so fortunate. I was glad to send him home.

Martyrdom is not ours to choose as if earning a badge. But suffering is part of what it means to be human. We just hope our forms are not as severe as what others face, but who can say but God?

As Yente says in Fiddler on the Roof, “Meanwhile, we suffer. Oh-ho-hoh, we suffer.”

Though we do not need to be masochistic about suffering, suffering teaches us how it can bring meaning to life. In her interludes, Larson develops thoughts on forgiveness, restorative justice, and peacemaking, and talks about restoring human flourishing. Having walked us through the darkest of human experiences, she wants to show that the Rwandan survivors demonstrate transformation in living color. To capture just a few lines:

“Faith called into question leads to doubt. But doubt can drive us to seek God.”

“Likewise, the loss of hope can lead us to despair, but even despair may serve a higher purpose…. When we come face-to-face with despair, we may find a hope no evil can shatter.”

“Only through repentance can evil be transfigured. Only through love can such transformation occur.” (161)

And so, as I read the stories of Joy and Chantal, I begin to walk with them and discover how much we have in common. No, I have not experienced what they have. But I too have been through the valley and I’ve come out on the other side. I’ve discovered that doubt can lead to God and that despair has a higher purpose. I’ve seen how repentance can transfigure evil. And I’ve experienced the transforming power of love.

If you missed the first two parts of this series, you can find them here and here. We’ll continue to develop these themes in future posts. To ensure that you don’t miss any, subscribe for free here. Check out the resource page on my website for books and links used in writing this series.

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[1] Gerard Prunier, Africa’s Word War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide, and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe (Oxford University Press, 2009).

[2] Catherine Claire Larson, As We Forgive: Stories of Reconciliation from Rwanda (Zondervan, 2009).