It’s funny what stands out, what sinks in. What you really
see, and what glides beneath your notice.
Write about the
details, I tell my oldest daughter. We homeschool, and every day we begin
with writing: my expert field. It’s so easy to sound like an expert when you’re
not the one sitting before a blank page. Trying to remember, trying to
translate.
Stretch your story out
by telling the reader about what you saw or heard, what you thought or said,
what you smelled or tasted. Help your reader make a picture in their minds.
I don’t tell her that it can feel like you’re trying to
recreate a photograph by ripping chunky pieces from a magazine and collaging
them together. Colors may vary. Shapes will never be exact. Also, the glue is
mostly dried out, and so pieces of the collage keep falling off, scattering.
I don’t tell her that writers present this mess, this
collage, this horrible pastiche, as a
photograph, like: “This is what it’s like here. Read these words and paint
the picture in your minds. Then you’ll know.”
Think how many filters the city of Kigali has gone through
before it reaches you, reader. First, the filter of my eyes, wide and searching,
yes, but ultimately drawn to what all human eyes are drawn to: novelty,
perceived differences, movement.
Next, the filter of my body, the spaces it occupied, the
opportunities it gave or denied my eyes. What does—really, what can—a person see in only a few weeks in
a foreign country? I crop the picture every time I walk out my door and head
one direction instead of another.
Next the filter of my memory (enormous losses!) and of my biases
(what do I find noteworthy?), and then
the filter of my pride (how far into the memories shall I allow you, reader?
Because at a certain point I might feel your heat a little too close, might
wall things off for my own purposes of privacy, or of how I’d like to skew the
thing. You’re not just seeing Rwanda, here, you’re seeing how I see Rwanda, and thereby seeing me.
Frankly, at the end of the story, I’d like your impression to be good. So I
make my lens even narrower.)
Then there is the filter of your own experiences, because my
description here will sort of paint a new wash over a picture of Rwanda, or
maybe Africa, you probably already have in your minds.
And finally I pass it all through the filter of language
itself: spoken, written. My ability to fit the experience into words, when it
feels like none of these black-and-white containers are quite large enough. The experience runs over the words like too much water
poured in a glass, and so much is lost.
And sometimes there is no word to act as a container, to
pour the experience into. Language evolves, after all, in the context of
culture: We engineer our words to contain a certain collective experience.
If you leave your culture, and new experience happens, you
may find your native tongue suddenly comes up short. English has not found the
need to contain every experience in the world. Sometimes there is no
word.
So. After all that. Here it is.
The first thing was the flowers: orange, yellow, pink.
Bursting from trees and smattering roadside bushes and absolutely everywhere. Clouds
tumbled in from one side of the sky, and the other was perfectly clear. The
weather felt like it was what God always intended when God made our bodies.
It smelled very faintly of car exhaust, and of something
different. In the mountains in Colorado, I sometimes felt as if I was smelling
the soil when I walked down the road. It reminded me of the scent of giant
boulders crumbling and evergreen sap and Aspen leaves rubbed between your palms.
The smell of Kigali reminds me of cooking oil, wet cement, and
what I imagine an empty chrysalis must smell like.
We piled in the car.
But there's something here I'm leaving out--some sudden awareness, or maybe a self-consciousness. Maybe it was the color of my skin or maybe it was the cost of my shoes or sound of my tongue or the way I carried my children.
Without permission, I found my body announcing for me: I'm different; I don't belong. I felt split open, a bit exposed. I would prefer to go unnoticed.
I was very noticed.
We piled in the car.
On every side of it, we were surrounded by motos so close I
could have reached out and high fived the drivers. The motos squeezed between
the lines of cars, and where the road
stopped, the pedestrians began.
There were so many people walking. It was like someone had
opened a tap at the top of the road, and people just poured out of it like
water.
People walk here, like in any place, at a particular pace—not
the ambling I noticed in Saudi Arabia, and certainly not the business-like
stride you’ll find in Denver, where there’s always somewhere else you need to
be.
In Rwanda, it's a steady beat, as if people had begun walking a long time ago, and must keep walking for a long time yet.
In Rwanda, it's a steady beat, as if people had begun walking a long time ago, and must keep walking for a long time yet.
On the horizon, hills rose between valleys, one tucked
behind another, just as if God had spread his fingers and dragged them through
the earth, over and over again to make the furrows and crests. This is called
the land of a thousand hills, and it does give that impression: as far as you
look, another valley drops, and another hill rises, and if you didn’t know any
better you’d think the whole world looked this way, like the hills and valleys
go on forever.
How did this find a beginning, and how could any of it ever end?
The people and the cars and the roads and the hills and the valleys: All of it.
They all stretched every way, filling space like water, disappearing over every
horizon.
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