"Just Words" by J.T. Rogers
Published with the script of The Overwhelming, this piece is an excellent companion to the play, providing first-person accounts of the Rwandan genocide from real men and women who experienced the atrocities.
NOTE FOR STUDENTS/EDUCATORS: Teachers may wish to have students read this piece in preparation for the performance, or following the show to help instigate dialogue. Do the words resonate differently before and after seeing the performance of The Overwhelming? How does this piece illuminate some of the issues raised in the play? How does the play deepen or enhance your experience of reading the quotations?
Just Words
by J.T. Rogers
In February 2006, the director Max Stafford-Clark and I flew to Rwanda. Neither of us had been before, and we were keen to visit before the start of rehearsals for the play’s premiere at the National Theatre in London. I had written The Overwhelming based on research and interviews with expatriate Rwandais living in the United States. Having a chance to talk face to face with residents of Kigali and to walk the streets and visit the houses and buildings where my play takes place would show me what I had gotten right – and wrong.
We spent a week living in Kigali, traveling all over the city and to villages throughout the center of the country. We met and spoke with an extraordinary number of Rwandais from all walks of life. Some would talk on the record, some only off. All were remarkably forthcoming and generous with their time and insights. Our goal was to focus our questions on the Rwanda, and specifically Kigali, of early 1994, when the play takes place – and before most people had an inkling of the scope of the horrors to come. But that was not what people wanted to speak about. Once they answered our questions, they wanted to talk about the genocide itself: why it happened, what they experienced, and how they were living with what they had seen and done. They spoke sometimes for hours on end. They needed to speak; we were asked to bear witness.
Later, while we rehearsed the play in London, we interviewed other survivors of the genocide as well as journalists who covered it. They, too, quickly steered our discussions to their own personal experiences. They, too, needed to speak, wanting what they had seen and learned to be known.
Here are excerpts from some of the people Max and I interviewed. These are their words, transcribed by me.
WE WERE LIVING ALWAYS IN FEAR
We Tutsi were given names of insects, animals, viruses, snakes. If you are constantly told this, subconsciously you start to believe. You start to feel less than a human being. There was an intellectual genocide before the physical one. Tutsi were shut out of all important jobs. In a Tutsi family, only the weakest one was allowed to continue on in school. Tutsi were scapegoats when politicians needed scapegoats. A common enemy is easy: all will be on your side. This is much easier than a political solution. As the RPF formed, then attacked, Hutu here said: “If we had killed all the Tutsi before, we wouldn’t have these problems now!” Yes, the Hutu chanted, “Tuzabat sembat semba!” – “We will exterminate them!” – in the streets, but we thought it was just words.
JEAN GAKWANDI, director of Solace Ministries
I was a doctor for five years at Kigali Hospital. In October 1990, the weekend of the RPF’s first attack, during the bombing, we had to operate all night on patients without anaesthetics. It was very hard. At the end of it, my colleague turned to me and said, “What is Habyarimana waiting for? If he says kill Tutsis, I will – starting with you!”
SENATOR ODETTE NYIRAMILIMO
The Interahamwe used to run practice drills in front of the CND [Parliament building] to intimidate us. They would hurl insults. There was talk of killing people, but nothing like genocide. We had studied history, but we were taken by surprise by the extent of the killings.
GENERAL CHARLES KAYONGA, commander of the RPF troops stationed in the CND before and during the genocide
I thought when it finally came, they would kill the politicians. But not one million people. Not women and babies!
JEAN-PIERRE SAGAHUTU
LOOK, THE TRUTH IS MESSY
You can hardly differentiate between Tutsi and Hutu. I myself can barely tell. That’s why they had identity cards! Just as I can’t differentiate Europeans – French? English? Italian? That’s why, during the genocide, very many Hutu died. Someone is tall, they are comparing noses. They see you, and you are killed. And yet maybe you are a Hutu.
VÉNUSTE KARASIRA
We speak the same languages, we live in the same villages. Tutsis are tall and thin? Look at me, I am not tall or thin! Even ourselves, we are lost determining who is what.
DR. VINCENT BIRUTA, president of Rwanda’s senate
Look, the truth is messy. The truth is that most Hutus were perpetrators and bystanders and protectors – it all depended on the day and the situation. Every Hutu was involved in every part of the genocide. Every one. They had no choice, not if they wanted to live.
ANONYMOUS
IT WAS SYSTEMATIC
It was systematic. Taxi drivers killed taxi drivers, doctors killed doctors. All knew each other here. Colleagues killed colleagues. My father was a doctor. Another doctor killed him.
JEAN-PIERRE SAGAHUTU
Those who organized the genocide used the tool of using everybody. If everyone is guilty, there is impunity. At the end of the day, who are you going to punish?
GEOFFREY NGIRUWONSANGA, Program Manager, Survivors Fund
People were told, kill as many as possible. Whatever you kill, you occupy. This is why there was massive participation with the poor people. It was like a competition.
VÉNUSTE KARASIRA
THEY CUT LIKE THEY WERE CUTTING FLOWERS
My husband was killed on the night of April 7, 1994. My mother and two children were killed. My children were burned alive. I was alone with my nine-month-old. Killers found me hiding. “Come, we will help you,” they said. Then they raped me. No one would help me. I was an animal in front of them… I was alone on the road for three days. I could not walk. A man came by and said, “You will die, not with a gun but painfully.” He took me home and passed the time raping me. In the morning he took my baby, he took him to a big tree and beat his head, here and here, then hung him by the feet. Then he let him down, but he was already dead. I was made to dig the grave. After three weeks walking at night to find relatives. No food. No water. When I got there, they were all dead. I lay down and slept for three days. Kids fetching water found me and said, “Oh, here is an old woman,” but I was twenty-three. I had spent three weeks looking for death, but I had not found it. By my looks, everyone feared to come near me… I was white. They thought I was a spirit.
SARAFINA
The day the president’s plane was shot down, young people came to my house. “You people killed our president, and we will kill you.” But we thought it was a joke, a mockery. These were our neighbors. My husband said, “We are safe; they will not kill.” A group of Interahamwe came, and they cut like they were cutting flowers. My husband and five of my children were lain on the ground, in a line, and they were killed.
AGNES
During the genocide, my family was killed, and I was raped and kept as a sex slave for four weeks by a gang of Interahamwe. I was lucky that I was taken by one who was strong and not shared by five or twenty. I was locked in a house all day while they were out killing; then they came home, and I would be raped. I never knew if I would be killed, too. We had a family of not less than a thousand people. The whole village was made up of my family. Today there are only fifteen.
MARGARITA
I’ve been places with malevolent forces – people – before, but here it felt like the moral energy of the place had been sucked out and nothing had replaced it. It really felt like right was wrong and wrong was right. You could hear the leaves whispering – very bad things. All your senses were attenuated. The first day was very difficult. Dead people wherever you went: ditches, banana groves, schools. You walked into a school and saw piles of bodies. Houses of murdered Tutsi were entirely stripped, down to the wiring. Almost like soldier ants going through a body. It was medieval, really. Inexplicable. At a church we saw, I kept imagining God sitting on the roof, looking down on the bedlam. And then I imagined the devil was there with Him, dancing gleefully. “Look at what I’m doing!”
DAVID BELTON, former journalist and producer of the film Beyond the Gates, interviewed in London
I was in hiding for two months and sixteen days, in an empty septic tank in Nyamirambo. I lost forty kilos. I came out only at two A.M., to try and find food and to stretch. I spent the days and nights hunched over, unable to move or stand. It was always loud, from the killings. Finally, one day it was so quiet I came out during the day. I saw soldiers and knew I was going to die. So I shouted at them, taunting them so that they would become so angry they would shoot me quickly and not cut me slowly with machetes. But they were not the government soldiers, they were RPF. I did not know the war was over.
JEAN-PIERRE SAGAHUTU
I dreaded going back, but I had to go back. This was June, after a month away. The country was empty. We flew to Goma and got there just ahead of a column of two million people who came through a corridor the size of this room, nonstop for two days. They were terrifying and dangerous: a beaten army who knew what they had done. I know they knew because I asked them.
DAVID BELTON
I HAVE NOT TOLD ANYONE THIS
Forty percent of the women survivors were raped during the genocide. It was organized, a tool. Deliberate, this infection of HIV. Only peasant women will admit to being raped. Wealthier women, they won’t talk about it. In our culture, we don’t talk about sex, even forced sex. It’s a taboo. They are ashamed to ask for help. If they do seek counseling, they end up seeing their tormentors. They go, they stand in a line – the same line with the men who raped them, or those men’s wives. The survivor says, “I would rather go hungry and die than stand with these people.”
GABO WILSON, Rwanda country director, Survivors Fund
There is a phenomenon here of survivors’ guilt among the Tutsi who lived through the killings. Especially among women who were not raped or disfigured. This feeling that they got off easy, that they wish, in a twisted way, that they had been raped. One of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.
HELEN VESPIRINI, Agence France-Presse
I had a child by my rapist. Working here, being helped by social workers, this is what taught me finally to love my child for the first time. This is why I have trained and become a social worker myself. But I have just tested positive for HIV. I am trying to be strong, but deep in my heart of hearts, I am asking – Why? Why? Why? I am told my child tested negative, but I think the doctors only told me that because they felt sorry. I have not told anyone else this. I cannot tell my family because I am supporting all of them. If they knew, they would lose all hope and sunlight. I have always liked acting and always wanted to be an actor. This is why I am telling you this. The theater is important for this – to tell this.
MARGARITA
THE VICTIMS WILL NEVER FORGET
I live here with my sisters, Beatrice and Joseanne. I am the head of the family. Our parents were killed in 1994. During the genocide. They were thrown in a lake. We saw this. I exchanged my life for my sisters’, so they could have a better life. I take care of the gardens and try to make sure there is food to eat when my sisters come back from school. I till the land, I sell soap and salt. It was very hard at first to become used to all the responsibility. At first we had no money. I was selling tomatoes, and people were buying them not because they wanted tomatoes but because they were supporting me. My sisters may not appreciate what I do, but they do not have a problem with it, either. When they finish school, I think they will help me to learn a trade and be a tailor.
DROCELLA NYIRANEZA, age twenty-two
What we are seeking is a repatriation of memory. We are testimony that the genocide happened. There is no way we live the way we do without a genocide. The victims will never forget. The more you think and talk about it, there is a slow healing. If not, it will just erupt.
ODETTE KAYIRERE, Coordinatrice Région Est, Association des Veuves du Génocide Agahozo
A FIRE UNDERGROUND
I’m sorry I keep looking over my shoulder before answering your questions. It’s a habit we have here.
ANONYMOUS
I was there. This eight hundred thousand – this is not true. Four hundred thousand, at most. This is how many that died. The RPF took my country only to take the Congo. Where is the talk of that? It is all about money and power; they had to get to the Congo, as Rwanda has nothing. This is what you must understand: It was a war, not a genocide. All these dead bodies lying around after the war was over – tell me, who would leave their families like that? Not bury them like that? This was a plot. These bodies were placed there. Propaganda. It is very simple: The RPF wanted wealth. They passed as Hutu to do this killing. The Tutsi are clever. Please do not say that I said this.
A HUTU SURVIVOR, interviewed in London
These killers convicted and imprisoned in Arusha, with their so-called human rights. They have Internet! They have everything! It is just that they are not with their families. Otherwise, they are okay.
A GENOCIDE SURVIVOR
So my question is, how do you get past it, when every street is framed with communal bloodletting? This wasn’t Jews being secreted off to be gassed in Poland – it was all in plain sight.
DAVID BELTON
Could it happen here again? I don’t think so. It was the Hutu Power leadership that supported all that. This government of reconciliation gives us hope. Once the older generation passes, once we are all gone, I believe Hutu and Tutsi will be a problem of the past.
A SURVIVOR
Now it is two hundred percent safe here. But until when, I don’t know. Rwanda is like a fire underground: The killings will come again.
ANOTHER SURVIVOR
