LISA: My piece is called And the Heart Became Child. Shortly before Rwanda’s independence from colonial rule in 1962, a Belgian historian supervised an extensive anthro-historical project throughout Rwanda. The project involved collecting more than 1000 ibitekerezo (orally transmitted knowledge/wisdom stories) from traditional knowledge keepers and storytellers. These priceless traces of Rwanda’s cultural history were preserved at a critical moment—between 1957 and 1961. They were collected by historian Jan Vansina, then director of the Institut de Recherche Scientifique en Afrique Centrale, a colonial Belgian research institution stationed in Rwanda and the Congo during the period of 1957 to 1961. Vansina left the country before the work was completed. However, the collection of ibitekerezo carries his name and is known as The Vansina Collection.

1959–1962 was a tumultuous time in Rwanda and more broadly in the rest of Africa as former colonising nations and the churches were seeking to protect their assets and privileges. Rwanda had been colonised by the German Empire and became a Belgian protectorate after Germany’s defeat in World War I. After World War II, the Cold War adversaries sought influence and resources on the continent and supported countries’ efforts toward decolonisation. Belgium was already exploiting neighbouring Congo. If the Rwandan process toward independence was granted too early or left to the Rwandan traditional governance, it might have triggered similar requests for autonomy from neighbouring Burundi or, more importantly, Belgian Congo. The Congo, five times the size of Belgium, is, and has been, one of the richest countries in the world in terms of natural resources. The Belgian plan for Rwanda became therefore to replace the Tutsi elite created by the German coloniser and to enact indirect rule by a Hutu elite sympathetic to Belgian interests and oversight. For the Church, the Cold War meant the threat of communism and the conflation of communism and the nationalist tendencies of a Catholic-schooled Tutsi minority coming of age and demanding independence and sovereignty. The Catholic Church would thus align with the Belgian plan to replace a Tutsi minority with a Hutu minority sympathetic to colonial and church interests.

In July 1959, Mwami Mutara (the traditional ruler) was killed or died in mysterious

circumstances after a visit to the Belgian administrator. The traditional council of elders (Abiru) quickly crowned a new mwami, Kigeli V, but the Belgian authorities rejected him. Elections held in 1959 were not recognised by the UN, therefore new elections were held in 1961 in which Grégoire Kaybanda’s ethnicist Parmehutu party won over 70% of the votes. On October 2, 1961, Kaybanda’s national assembly voted to abolish the monarchy and voted in a constitution. The existing cleavage between Hutu and Tutsi became more pronounced as Belgian colonel Logiest organised Parmehutu militia who killed tens of thousands of Tutsis, while over 150,000 fled into exile in neighbouring countries. Tutsi houses were burned, cattle were killed, people fled.

My grandfather, a medic, was one of those murdered. He had been chased from one post to another during that time. He refused to swear an oath of allegiance to the government, citing the UN refusal to recognise it. In March 1962, he was picked up at a friend’s home and shot three times. His wife witnessed the shooting. His son, my uncle André, says that his mother was haunted by those shots. And by the sight of his body being dragged away, never to be seen again. My grandfather’s murder wasn’t an isolated case by any means. As Randall Fegley writes, ‘Hidden in the euphoria of independence and a revolution that empowered Rwanda’s majority, a genocide began that would not be recognized by the world for another thirty-five years.’

That was the context in which the stories were collected. The tape-recorded ibitekerezo were transcribed, translated and carried away, ultimately coming to rest at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the USA, where Vansina completed his career as a prolific author and distinguished professor emeritus. In 1973, the 5,400 pages of typewritten text in the Vansina collection was transferred onto six rolls of microfilm. One copy was stored in the United States Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. and another went to the Africa Museum (then Royal Museum for Central Africa) in Tervuren, Belgium.

I accessed the microfilms in 2005 through the library at Concordia University in Montreal, where I was very active in a community-university research project. An uncle had told me about the archive of precolonial stories years earlier and it piqued my interest. As soon as I received the six little boxes, I went up to the fourth floor of the library, where the microfilm readers were, and sat down with these strange objects. My mind offers up une bobine, in French, to describe the solid piece of plastic the microfilm is rolled around. One end of the film slides onto a peg, then you slide the film under a glass and feed it onto another reel. You lift a lever, drop it, turn a crank and push a button and the film starts winding. On the screen appears an image of the file. I saw typewritten pages, faded in places, some maps, more pages and then the first story of the collection, written in phonetically transcribed Runyarwanda like this: ‘Kigwà n ùwaa, Kazi níwe Shyérezo.…’ The French translation follows: ‘Kigwa est fils de Kazi, Kazi c’est lui Shyerezo…’ It means ‘Kigwa, son of Kazi, known as Shyerezo….’ And even though some things were written in English or French, languages I am fluent in, I could not take anything in. I tried several times. Finally, I sent the tapes back. But I never let go of the desire to one day explore and make something with those stories.

That first encounter with the archive was over a decade ago. Several times since then I have faced the same feeling of not being able to take anything in, most recently during my research with life stories, especially my own family’s stories. I called this feeling ‘the stuck’. For the longest time, I thought it meant something was wrong with me. That I was unwell. I have spent almost three decades seeking ‘wellness’. I have sought it through research creation, religious studies, psychotherapy, community arts, arts-based approaches to memory, life story work and oral histories with living witnesses. Throughout this whole time, I kept encountering ‘the stuck’. When I was an undergraduate ‘the stuck’ was an existential dilemma, like Shakespeare’s ‘To be or not to be.’ I resolved to be. Through religious studies I found a framework to think and live with: life as the in-between of birth and death, the sacred and the profane as qualities of experience, myth and ritual to navigate the sacred and enchant the profane, time and space as axes to orient, liminal space to trouble it all. In graduate school, I borrowed Jean Cocteau’s La difficulté d’être, or the struggle of/with being, to express ‘the stuck’ I was feeling and worked through it in my Masters thesis in Counselling. I practiced as a psychotherapist for several years. Then, realising the limits of psychotherapy in relation to the social and political dimensions of the wellness I was seeking for myself and my clients, I embarked on life story work, more specifically, embodied and art-based practice, and centred the work on my Rwandan family and community. I’ve spent the last fifteen years and more exploring ‘what was wrong with us.’ When I speak of ‘us’ I think of my family, my community, my country of origin.

As I read this essay in progress, I am struck by this idea I had of things being ‘wrong’ with me, or with us. I no longer agree. A trauma-informed perspective asks instead, ‘What

happened to us?’ My family history, like so many other Rwandans’, has been greatly impacted by Rwanda’s century of colonial and missionary dispossession, imprisonments, persecution, assassinations in the 1950s and 1960s, exile and migration, war and genocide. Many like me, born after 1970, especially those raised in the diaspora, were raised with both these challenging traces and confounding silences. For me, it created an existential malaise. It was to better understand what such silences were made of that I undertook the Montreal Life Stories project and then my PhD. Oral history with living witnesses has allowed me to inquire into the historical events in Rwanda up until the generation of my grandparents. In my PhD, I centred the knowledge contained in, or made from, these stories. I spent a long time trying to find words to articulate an epistemological contribution I could make. I worried that my contribution was very subjective and I didn’t know whether or not the disciplines or the academy might recognise it. But in the end, I crafted my own understanding of this knowledge and it was different from the stories and history told about me and mine by scholars, missionaries, journalists, and other ‘experts’ that serve their interests and never our own. In the aftermath of large-scale political violence, ‘seeking wellness’ became the centring and valuing of lived knowledge and the making of voice and authority.

In 2019, I was able to go back to the archive of stories. Through Concordia University Libraries, I accessed the microfilm set again and they even made arrangements with the Centre for Research Libraries to digitise these thousands of pages of texts written in Runyarwanda, French and English. When I encountered the stories the second time, ‘the stuck’ was still there, but this time I was not alone. My friends and fellow artists Ursula (Ulla) Neuerburg and Ramona Benveniste and I had created an artists’ collective called Seedings. Together we explored the first story in the archive. The story of Kigwa.

The Kigwa story is Rwanda’s origin story. Kigwa was born of the heart of Mana, the multicoloured sacrificial bull. He was born of the longing of his mother, the barren Queen Gasani, to have a child. Through a ritual involving milk being poured into a jar onto the heart still attached to the lungs, the heart became a child. Kigwa did not know he was not the biological son of Gasani’s husband, King Kazi. When it was revealed to him, Kigwa was crushed and left the kingdom, convinced that those whom he thought of as brothers would not recognise him as their own. When he left, he was accompanied by two women and a man, a bull, a cow, some sheep, a rooster and a hen, some doves and some other animals. He and his followers wandered for a long time, until he finally chose a place to settle down. Kigwa is the ancestor of all Rwandans. Or so it goes.

When we started working with the stories we organised a conference. I wanted to tell you a little bit about this conference, about the people that I met in Rwanda organising this conference. There was a man called Kanyandekwe who said, ‘If I hear a cattle herder sing his song I will know where he comes from. In the east it is flat, there are rivers, in the west there are mountains and wells. He will sing a different song if he drives his cows to the river to get water than if he digs a well.’ To Vansina the stories he collected held historical value if critically handled. To me the stories are traces. Portals. Traces of the ‘the time before’ and portals into reflection and creation. But also, and especially, the stories are symbols of resistance to the violence of history in a nation which has been violently rent. For diasporic me raised elsewhere, working with those stories I am a part of—or that are part of me—has meaning. My work is one of remembering, of creating an inalienable relationship with my story and history. I am inquiring deeply into the relationships, encounters and learnings that emerge from my intuitive work with stories. It is an exploration, a doing before thinking and a feeling before doing. Rather than engaging only the usual themes in relation to Rwanda, I would like to think beyond familiar categories.

The Awakening the Archives conference took place online, on June 8th and 9th, 2022, during the international week of archives and brought together traditional scholars and artists, informal scholars, local youth and Rwandan youth in the diaspora. Its focus was to connect people interested in working with archives, heritage and culture so that we could get to know each other and present our work to each other. It was also an opportunity to meet elders and local experts and to hear (sometimes challenging) reflections, like the idea by the Honourable Charles Uyisenga that colonial archives are not ‘our’ archives. Or Albert Rudatsimburwa’s presentation on the ways the initial transcription of Runyarwanda from the oral to the written, by non-speakers, inadequately grouped sounds into ‘words’, obfuscating the language’s internal logic and creating a written language that no longer affords modern Runyarwanda speakers access to all of the ideas, concepts and roots available to elders to think and create with. Five generations of Rwandans presented over two days. It was challenging to find a language of communication. The older Rwandans were schooled in French, while the younger people spoke English. Not everyone spoke Runyarwanda. Elder and professor emeritus Gamariel Mbonimana Sr taught about the concern for intergenerational transmission, intrinsic to Rwandan oral tradition. He taught about narratives and about different interpretative lenses (historical and psycho-historical, mythical or symbolic). He taught the ways that Rwandan myth and history are grounded in the land, the rivers and lakes and volcanoes, as well as in the trees and the animals. He gave us examples of the ways the different lenses reveal different aspects of a historical character. He sang pieces of the classical traditional repertoire and taught about different types of narratives, the different ways children were trained to sing and remember, and how it came together over time. He challenged: ‘How many songs were lost in the colonial transcription of oral tradition because no one wrote down the music, or the music cannot be written down, or because no one wanted us to remember?’ He mentioned a colleague who passed away: She had known many of the songs he wanted us to find and gather before they disappeared.

The conference opened avenues I had not anticipated. It allowed me to see how much work is being done and not only with the stories I am working with. I met people I fell in love with, like Jean-Pierre Kanyandekwe, who taught me Rwandan culture as a culture of listening to where life is. ‘How did Rwandans know where to build their homestead?’ he asked. I listened. ‘When they found a place where they wanted to build, they took a branch (of a specific tree) and made a stake to put into the ground. The piece above the surface would be tied to a long wick and covered in a specific oil (or grease) and left for a time. If, upon their return, (specific) insects had eaten at the wick and grease, that meant there was life. And it was therefore a good place to make a home.’ Kanyandekwe’s idea of being able to identify where a herder is from based on the song they sing, and his insistence that there are many different ways to sing a song based on the singer’s living conditions, echoed the work of the youth group Ikiringo and their quest to travel across the country and document different ways and forms of cultural expression. A different narrative becomes available if, as Ikiringo suggests, we listen to different stories, different voices, to people talking about their own ways in their own terms, in ways that have nothing to do with being Hutu or Tutsi. These ways relate instead to the land and the waters and the plants and the animals and the ways in which we live in different environments.

NUZHAT: Thank you, Lisa. We now turn to Yasmine and I’m thinking a lot about questions of land and I know your piece speaks about silence, about land, so please go ahead.

YASMINE: Thank you. Speaking of music, I’m going to read from my piece first and it’s called On Music. When the panic comes, there’s a sour ball that creeps up from your abdomen and lungs. It trembles like a monster inside and gnaws through your oesophagus. You taste it in your mouth and try to swallow it, push it down. And often in these cases, it is only language that can alleviate the dull pain, pain that is not sharp enough to kill you, but blunt enough to hurt. Né né né is a combination of words you hear often in Elláda, Hellas, land of the Hellenes, or Greci as Romans called the ancient tribes from Elláda. Né is yes in Greek but sounds like no in northern Europe. How does a soothing reassuring mixture of words and music become a word to deter people from doing things, a negation of sorts? I forgot who it was (Veblen? or some other translator of the human psyche) that said it is the little joys and catastrophic miseries of others that we can sympathise with, but never the grander joys or more trivial sorrows. Were the big joys of the South, the triple sound of reassurance, rendered a trivial mundane sorrow for the North? Too large to stare at without turning them into a hurdle? Like a deer rendered into a tiger? One that glides and one that stupefies? Is this how we construct ourselves? By nonchalantly replacing letters and words to better grasp life. Or is it the opposite? Is it language that traps us? It’s hard to be sure, but I do know that when I want to feel authoritative, I speak Hebrew, naturally; to be neutral and semi-intellectual, I speak French. I play around with its peculiar music. In my mind, English is innocent grounds. That’s how I grew up with it. I would later find out it was anything but. We’re still trapped in that sense of English. We grow up with films and stories in English and the entire functioning of the world is introduced to us in English. To survive, we must translate, almost everything, into English—sometimes even the rhythm of our thoughts. And so, it becomes the way we think, the way we write, the way we talk to ourselves. The way we dream. And so, Arabic remains a dreamless jumble of love, melancholy, nostalgia and an inability to properly express ourselves or anything for that matter—an obsession with accents, stumped travels and halted communal growth, mother tongues and beautiful people that we could never meet. Arabic is all the moments snatched away by borders, colonisation and other languages that descended on us from heaven or some in-between hell. Arabic is all the jokes we couldn’t tell, the stories we couldn’t share or co-create. It is all the cities and towns we had to leave and resettle and rebuild. All the places we were forced to call home. Arabic will never be innocent. Arabic will always trap us, whether we know it or not—the fact, that is, not the language. Other languages might offer the privilege of playfulness; we might be able to escape them, mould them into whatever we like. But Arabic, to me, will always be there, like a little ghost, friendly and ready to help sometimes. It keeps you company but terrifies and suffocates you at times in all the missed chances it carries. All the poetry it could have unfolded but never did. How does one wear it without being strangled? How does one translate oneself with utterances so randomly composed yet so historically hefty? But then, it is exactly this language business, any language, that reminds us of history at all—that stands witness to it, traces our past and entertains our present. It is exactly language that stops us from being goldfish, with short-term sorrows but no record of our joys. Perhaps the answer is in the repositioning of our keyboards—in an H that refuses to type when first pushed down, where its أ (aleph) counterpart hides in plain sight—a playful mistake here, a misplaced letter there. Maybe this is the little crack that allows for an escape, if that’s what we desire, that is.

On Landscape

Millions of years ago, almost the entirety of the landmass on Earth was held in one continent, Pangaea. In Greek, it means ‘all the earth’. 140 million years ago, Gondwana, the supercontinent that held what is today South America and Africa together, among others, was split up by cold and warm currents and other speculative effects and created the Atlantic Ocean. If they hadn’t been separated, would translation have been needed to translate one to the other? Never mind colonisation and the division of the two continents into Dutch, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and what have you—would they have needed translation or better yet colonisation, where need is used in irony—if they had remained one? Is landscape the first shaper of how we translate? Are the mountains that separate us players in the way we feel, think and listen to words? Then, as a side note, does the geography of a question carry more of an answer within it? Are questions meant to wonder or to translate? Were questions and answers once a Gondwana, now separated by this ocean of question marks? How do questions arrive? And why do we entertain them? Are they a hermaphrodite’s wandering half? Its ancient spirit?

Aquí Estamos هيّانا (hiyana)

In Chile, possibly Mapudungun for ‘where the land ends’ or ‘the deepest point of the earth’, when you ask how one is, ‘here we are’ is their answer—aquí estamos. In vernacular Arabic, or at least in Palestine, hiyana (aquí estamos) answers that same question. Is it because they were once so close on that mega continent? Or is it because Palestinian merchants and investors arrived in Chile to escape the First World War and changed not only Chile’s landscape and access to views and resources but also the people’s speech mannerisms? Words externalise our music; they open us up. As long as we live connected interior lives, only music comes out—sounds in constant flux that never come out the same. Words make sense of the chaos inside, but, while music thrives off a certain interior order, external order annihilates our music. To preserve a text, a street, a tree in an act of translation, the latter must preserve its internal music and, if it’s been annihilated, then act to revive it.

Jokes

Don’t laugh if you don’t find things funny. If you’re angry, don’t speak it. Translate it. To speak is to recite, to translate is to show. Be silent more often; silence, too, is an ancient act of translation, musical in essence, magnificent in power. It amalgamates centuries of rhythm like black absorbs all colour. In silence, the interior respects another’s exteriorised music and quiets down—in reverence of a fallen pine cone, of a pigeon’s scurrying across a zinc rooftop, of a fire in the making. Acts of translation must absorb before they can sing. Details can then organically merge. While aesthetically pleasing, lone details are probably insignificant. When joined by others—in humour, rhythm or geography—they construct mountains, as mustard seeds move them.

Artemis

Never mistress anyone with words. One carries one’s homeland, and language, like an ambassador. One can’t play around with their language too much lest it scorches their hometown. What is a mother tongue? It must be the images one sees come out of their mother / mothers however they manifest in that child’s community, mouthing shapes and rhythming out sound vibrations to make the words that shape a human’s understanding and, thus, future translations. It is home. It is the home one finds and refines, and re-finds, wherever they see or hear similar forms. They feel comfort in its rhythm. It is an invitation to mouth circles with smoke and spring in an arrow of understanding, an understanding so basic it dissipates into thin air, so profound it cannot linger for more than a split second, of light years or whichever planetary energy time is emitted from.

Chariots in Cards

The minute chosen for translation shapes it. It is part of that translation’s geography. It sculpts it, like winds erode mountains into rugged sketches. A minute, a form of Chronos, and like it, born of earth and water, can later bring forth Aether, Chaos and Phanes. An upper sky, a primordial void and a hermaphrodite. It is the Atlantic Ocean that separates one potential from another. It is to choose one warring notion over the other. It builds rhythms like one accompanies music with one’s foot—by one’s heartbeat, its past of walking and dancing. It engraves pathways like a chariot headed for victory, like water currents split landmasses. It draws energies and erases others. To translate is to anticipate a compass and look everywhere for its chronology, creating bliss, mess and new ways of being.

Love in the Cards

Disappointment is translation, too. It is the mind’s visualisation unmatched. Unapplied, invisibilised, blocked. It is the failure to see with one’s eye, feel with one’s hands, heart, its own writing, on the mind’s retina. It is a music composed that failed to play, failed to beat well or play long enough. Disappointment in French: déception or décepcíon, but in Spanish, both allude to a form of tricking: deception. It is to be deceived, hurt by the ill translation of a vision sown and watered—which then withered, or finished, into a magician’s cap of illusions. Hence disillusionment. To love Palestine is to love a trick one never touches, yet keeps constructing time and again, in the hope that one day the translation will hold for longer than a split second.

NUZHAT: Thank you, Yasmine. I invite everyone who is listening to please go and read these beautiful essays. I was rereading all of them this morning and there is so much in there and I’m so grateful to everyone who’s written. And there’s a lot, more than just about language and translation. Nedra, will you take us to the end?

NEDRA: I feel so privileged to sit here and listen to you. I’ll maybe start with a couple of stories that will help contextualise the thing I’m going to read because I’m a bit of a theory head when I write, so the stories help ground them, I think, materially. Last month, the latest novel Terrorist—I translated the title as ‘Terrorist’—by a poet that I translate, Devakanthan, he’s a poet and novelist and screenplay writer, was translated from Tamil to Sinhala. And last month he was taken in and held by the police under the Prevention of Terrorism Act because the police wanted to interrogate him about the protagonist of the story. They wanted to know where this person lives and who was helping them and so on. So this idea of the inability to tell between fact and fiction—and this is someone who wanted his work translated into Sinhala to help bring about some healing between the Tamils and the communities. Another translator I work with mentioned to me that back in the 80s when he also worked as a journalist for a newspaper, every time they had to deliver the newspaper, before they were allowed to deliver it he was taken into the police station and someone would translate the newspaper when he was held in custody and then if they thought it was okay, they were allowed to distribute it. So this experience of translating can be a very fraught thing for people living under oppression. But to contrast that with another story: a friend of mine who works as a translator at refugee hearings told me that he often asks people going through the hearing process to speak in Tamil and to have a translator there because even if they’re fluent in English, just that moment of having a translation gives them a little bit of respite so that they can pause because often they’re narrating very traumatic things and this just gives them a little bit of space. So when I think of decolonising translation, that’s what I think about. I think of these colonial forces that can use translation as a way to surveil and to monitor people and translation used in a way to provide healing or to provide safe spaces. I’ll read a little from my essay Crossing Terrains.

As the moves to Sinhalisise place names of traditionally Tamil areas become normalised and Google searches no longer reveal Tamil names, translated words hold the possibility of being repositories or rhizomes of cultural and historical intersections for words that possess meanings excluded by the dominant language. The rhizome repositories appeared most vividly as I returned to translate Rashmy’s long poem ‘E’ Forgot its Name after a hiatus. Rashmy’s use of East Coast Tamil was already a challenge for a Colombo Tamil like me and I had to draw on distant memories of childhood trips to the East, before the embargoes were put in place, to think through the cadence of his poetry. Compounding the difficulty was his occasional use of archaic Tamil terms interspersed with neologisms and the difficulty of translating the horrors of war that had no precedent in the Tamil tradition. Close to abandoning this work, I only returned to it after a space of time when I had read his more recent poetry. There, in the landscape, was the key that gave me a small point of entry to the translation. I went back to edit the section titled ‘Thalaiyaatikalin Kaalam/The Time of the Scarecrows.’ The east coast of Sri Lanka has folkloric tales and practices associated with the thalaiyaatti/nodder or verutti/frightener:

They saw…

One day passed and the next day

A little past midnight

In the paths where

Erikalai and kalli remain

Where adamban vines spread

Where nerunji pierced their bare feet

They awaited their turn

And they saw death…