I was born Rwandan.
It’s all I have ever known; it wasn’t just that I knew
I had always been told. My mother told me stories
In hushed voices I was brought to the knowledge that I had lost something
People, we shared blood and yet they will never know my name.
But I had to know theirs.
I was born 4 years after those one hundred days that claimed the simple joy of just being neighbors.
I had to know how ignorance told us we were different and our eyes chose to see a different face.
I was little and yet I knew I walked on a land that saw blood.
It became a recital, Ndi Umunyarwanda
To engrave in our minds that we raised weapons against each other.
That Laughter of old should have been enough,
And yet that rotten seed seemed to intertwine our hearts in a weave of hate.
I saw sadness in My Mothers’ eyes,
To lose a father she had never had the chance to know,
To a war that claimed to survive was to slay a friend.
Every year the elders remember, and young ones are told,
How one night, many woke up to be called names.
To classify us like animals ready for slaughter.
I sound raw but those nights and days were those our history came down to,
Forget that we were a flourishing kingdom.
Men on horses came and we forgot we had legs that once ran to the greatest battles.
Liberation came from men who knew how home could turn into a myth.
The handshake of forgiveness was extended,
So, we could never turn into what we once ran away from.
For our vision to be that we shall rebuild,
That we never saw an end.
Our voices were never muffled, we just never knew high our pitch could go.
Decades have long passed, as a history that I never got to see unfolds.
My heart wrenches from that unforgettable journey my mother undertook to save herself and her own.
That tale that sounds absolute. How human we are, and how to take and to give can be blurry.
For we are each other’s’ mirror, for from the eyes of your companion you will know,
Will I be lifted if I fall?
By UBB
(I have no rights on this picture as most pictures posted on this blog; only the poems. just download them on Pinterest)
Comments