Survivor Heritage and the Healing Journey (Reflections on Black History Month)

By Omar Ndizeye

“Some people want to forget where they’ve been, other people want to remember where they’ve never been”

– Eli Cohen and Gila Almagor, from their film under the Domim Tree

We must understand that completing our mourning is important for us to avoid living with immense depression and to overcome grief. This allows us to build our shared future without any complex; to deconstruct the myths of our past by rethinking about the best way to build a shared future.

This may not be an easy way to move forward, as dealing with personal and collective psychological wounds left behind by our past reminds us to focus more on behavior and attitude change. However, as the late Professor Naasson Munyandamutsa once said:

When we survive an extermination project, the survival will depend on what we will accept as a heritage and which we will take with us to be able to become the vector for transmitting the memory of the excluded.

– (Late Dr. Naasson Munyandamutsa, La survivance)

The key word to consider here is heritage and how to build on that heritage to create a shared future where vicious, destructive cycles are impossible. At the same time, accepting this heritage is a test for the following generations. This is because repairing a divided past to build a shared future requires (in my view) wisdom to know how to tell and transmit a memory to keep the

James E. Young (2,000) At Memory’s Edge, After Images of the Holocaust in Contemporary Art and Architecture

matter alive, while at the same time being invited to remember that the body retains memories of pleasure as well as pain (Edward S. Casey).

As I was wondering how one overcomes dark memories to change one’s behavior and to enable us to build corrective memory beyond the traumatic darkness of our past, I was reminded that;

Survival once again calls up a double imperative, that relating to the conception of “other” words that differ requiring a new language, which is built up against that of the other, and that more essentially still the acquisition of a specific language. Historicizing one’s victimology as an event and no longer as a way of life is in reality the deep sense of self-repair, it should be noted that in the absence of the re-emergence of this proper language, conquering an existence in the face of the other or strange third party becomes hypothecated, yet the proper language is deployed from the memory more exactly from the heritage of the disappeared whom we have unfortunately lost.

– (Late Dr. Naasson Munyandamutsa, from his presentation, La survivance)

I continued to reflect on the wisdom of Professor Naasson and on how to relate this month to my book, which tells my painful darks days and the lives lost from the 1960s, 1973, 1990, 1992, and the genocide in 1994. I thought about the genocide against the Tutsi and what I call its three phases: Classification, Persecution, and Extermination. I wanted to increase understanding of the Genocide as well as help the young generation draw a lesson from it while reflecting on this Black History Month.

In an attempt to provide some detail about three phases I mentioned above, by Classification I meant the time of classifying Rwandans – especially the elites – from 1917 to the time many of them became politicians in 1959. By Persecution I mean those years of persecution from 1960 to 1994, culminating in three months of cannibalism, rape and hunting Tutsis without leaving behind even the babies who were still in the wombs of their mothers.

By Extermination I was referring to what I saw in Nyamata, where Interahamwe, supported by the former Government, silenced souls including my young brother and my father for two days using heavy guns, machetes, wooden clubs, and other killing tools. I remember all that period of genocide when songs, radios, meetings from the national level to the local leader called ‘Conseille’ – all had a plan to leave none among us Tutsis to tell a story. “We shall kill them until our children will ask what a Tutsi looked like,” they used to say.

The most difficult thing for a survivor is to remember this as an event of life – and not just any life but one’s present life today, within which we must develop our successful future.