Issue 42 - Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art

soldiers and militiamen might interrupt months of rape and sexual
torture to take their victim to the hospital for an abortion of her
husband's child. It's startling to realize that at the height of the
genocide Rwanda's hospitals were still functioning, treating old
people with pneumonia, children with broken arms. And, of course,
delivering babies.
What was the meaning of that gesture? On one level, the abortion
was a continuation of the violence these men were inflicting on their
captive, an intensification of it, a rape committed in the deepest
parts of her body. As a Catholic, the woman would experience it as a
murder of the life within her, of her husband's life, because it was
his baby they were killing; they were killing him all over again. And
at the same time, she would know that she was being spared, since
it wasn't uncommon for genocidaires to terminate the pregnancies of
Tutsi women by cutting them open and ripping their unborn babies
from their wombs. And so, at some point in the procedure, perhaps
only for a moment, she might feel a trelnor of gratitude, and in recollection
this gratitude would be the most terrible thing of all.
If I go before the court, if I tell them what happened, ifI say what was
done to my body, people will mock me. All I want to say is that they made
me suffer. I want to tell the story of my suffering. And I want the one who
raped me to understand that he tortured me, that he's guilty. I want him to
understand what he did - freely, without being forced - I want him to
admit his blame.
The woman who told me this story was named Athanasie M. She
was 45, with a handsome oval face that had begun to soften with
age and very large dark eyes that looked even larger because of the
dark circles beneath them. The whole time she spoke she held my
eyes with hers. Once she had been a girl on one of the thousands of
haystack-shaped hills that make up the Rwandan landscape ­
Rwanda, pays des milles collines - destined for a life of farming beans
and sorghum. Against all expectations she had gotten an education
and become a gym teacher at a polytechnic in Kigali. She had married,
borne children. And then the life she had won for herself had
been torn asunder and she had been turned into a sort of domestic
animal, naked and speechless, kept alive only to be abused until it
would be time to kill her. It seemed a miracle that she could speak.
But she could write; she had a journal that she had written about her
ordeal. "Each page," she said, "is a thousand tears." Now Athanasie
worked at a women's center counseling other survivors of rape and
sexual torture, many of whom were sick with AIDS. In this regard,
she considered herself fortunate. As a result of what had been done
to her she could no longer perform any kind of physical labor, not
even sweep a floor, but she didn't have the virus and could look forward
to a long life. Perhaps it's better to say that she could anticipate
a normal lifespan, which for a Rwandan woman in 2002 was
46.8 years. 2
I had been recommended to Athanasie by someone in the
States, and when our interview was over she told me, "When you see
David, you must remember to tell him how fat I've gotten." The
pride in her voice took me aback until I remembered the possible
connotations of thinness.
The clinic was a complex of low grey cinderblock buildings decorated
inside with the drawings of the clients and their children, crude
productions of crayon, glitter and con- ..
struction paper mounted on the walls
with yellowing tape. When I left, a group
of women was dancing in the earth yard.
They were welcoming some visitors from
a Canadian aid organization. The dancers'
movements were fierce, strutting; they
held their arms out from their sides, their
fingers splayed and quivering, and lifted
their knees high, like wading birds.
Drums sounded. The women dipped,
took a step forward, a step to the side, a
step back, each pent inside her square of
an invisible grid drawn on the red earth.
Some of theln looked quite old, their faces
seamed, their eyes dim. Their limbs might
have been made of twisted rope. One
woman had only one leg, on which she
The women
dipped, took a
step to the side,
astep back, each
pent inside her
square of an
invisible grid
drawn on the
red earth.
hopped unceasingly, as if trying to pound a stake into :he ground. Up
and down she leapt, grinning and triumphant and ternble. I suppose
she was trying to proclaim victory over her disfigurement, but to me
she seemed like a reproach to the world of the whole.
A few weeks earlier, at a cocktail party at the American Club in
Kigali, I'd been introduced to a man who worked for a Christian
conflict-management organization. He was running reconciliation
workshops. Reconciliation was a word you heard a great deal in
Rwanda. You heard it from government officials, including elnployees
of the eponymous Unity and Reconciliation Commission, and the
spokespersons of victims' groups, from ex-detenus, perpetrato:s who
had served their time in prison, and, more rarely, from rescapes, the