Here is what I read to a crowd of people at Homegrown Cafe in Hamilton, ON, last night for the Time and Place: A Cultural Quarterly event. And what a great night is was. "This is a photograph I took in Rwanda last year as part of a course I was taking at Western. Part of the course included an intense, and condensed ten-day trip in which we visited the six national genocide memorial sites and about a dozen local, community sites. Before I get into my experience of the time and place in this photo, i want to take you back in time to the events that led to the creation of this space. In early April 1994, many of us were focused on or distracted by Kurt Cobain's sudden death, the first democratic elections in South Africa since the fall of apartheid, the spectacular, sensationalistic murder trial of OJ Simpson, while there was also the news of a small African country in Joseph Conrad's deep, dark heart of Africa (as the press would continually portray it), where government-backed militias unleashed a most horrific, brutal, carefully calculated and unprecedentedly swift genocide against the minority Tutsi population. From April 6 to July 4, in the space of 100 days, over 800,000 people were killed at the hands of the militia, government forces, the Rwandan police and army, and at the hands of neighbors, friends, and in some cases even family members. Some of you may remember this, or have learned more about it since then. Some of you may recall that a Canadian general, who has since become somewhat of a household figure, Romeo Dallaire, was the head of the UN Peacekeeping mission in Rwanda at the time, there to oversee peace negotiations between the extremist government and the rebels that had been in conflict for the previous four years. Some of you may also recall the controversy over the fact that UN soldiers were not allowed to intervene as it was against their mandate. This photograph is of a forest adjacent to one of the six national memorial sites. It is the site of the largest resistance against the genocidaires. The memorial site on the Bisesero hill overlooks the hilltop where the resistance fighters held off their perpetrators for nearly the full length of the genocide, only to be overcome in its last few days. The memorial site also overlooks a nearby village inhabited by a few of the survivors of that resistance group. The memorial itself is an architectural wonder. It consists of several buildings connected by pathways that wind up, and are carved into the hillside. It is also a symbolic structure representing, strength, unity in resistance and eventual defeat. The guide, also a survivor, led us through the buildings, up the winding paths, past a mass grave site at the top of the hill, and eventually to this forest.
To myself, and to I know several of the other students i was traveling with, this site was so incongruous, so different from the rest of the Rwandan landscape we had been traveling through in the previous days. It was so unexpectedly familiar, so canadian, like the campsites in so many of my fondest memories. The tall trees, the powerful scent of pine, the thick bed of pine needles cushioning my feet, it was all so much like home. I let myself be transported by the beauty, it was a welcome shady respite from the heat of the day, a calm place so contrary to the extreme driving of the past few days, not to mention the extreme drive up through the hills to get to this spot, and it was a comforting place, so apparently distant from the extremes of emotions we had felt after visiting the many memorial sites and after having talked with several survivors. As i let myself be engulfed by the sublime beauty, i heard the guide explain that on this site, survivors come each year to commemorate the loved ones they lost by camping underneath these trees, each night, for the full length of time that the resisters held their ground. So for nearly 100 nights, survivors from the surrounding communities come here. They come and stay here rather than at the adjacent memorial site, or on the hill of the resistance, partly because of the protection of the trees (donated by the Belgian government, their previous colonial rulers), trees planted to ward off erosion, but also because the place under the trees is a mass grave site containing the remains of 50,000 people. I was shocked, I was jarred back into the moment, and I was reminded that beauty can be deceptive. That beauty can lull us into a sense of comfort, a superficial, anemic encounter with our world. There is little room for engagement, political or human, in the sublime. The beauty of this spot overwhelmed me, and i forgot that it can conceal so much more depth. A survivor i spoke with after coming back from this trip corroborated and reflected this when I mentioned, in a moment of small talk banter, the aesthetic beauty if the Rwandan landscape. His response to me was that each hill represented to him, loss, suffering and sadness. In a sense, that experience is what I am trying to do with this photograph. And photography is a great tool to do it with. Photos do not have any inherent meaning. They became meaningful when meaning is ascribed to them, either through words - spoken or written - or through conventional use of images. This photo could be of so many things, it could be an ad for camping in our national parks, it could be a environmental campaign against deforestation, or it can be - like the almost exact image I saw on the facebook page of local photographers' group that i follow, of a forest just for the sake of making a pretty image of a forest. But with my little caption, these few little words, I have ascribed to this photo a particular meaning, a depth that in the jarring juxtaposition of it next to the image of this pretty expanse of trees, is meant to poke you, prod you, prick you into plundering its depths. With this image, and its rhetorical designation, I want to invite viewers to enter the narrative from an unconventional point, in an unconventional way. I could have used images that, sadly, have become almost commonplace, images of piles of bones, or row upon row of bleached-white skulls. Or I could have submitted an image of the memorial site itself. But then I'd run the risk of people turning away, or shutting down. Shocking images are often as superficial, anemic and deficient as the sublimely beautiful. And to use those, you would miss a part of the narrative that I really want to draw attention to. This image refers to tremendous hate, greed, and violence. But it is also of love, comfort and homecoming - as that is how staying with these human remains was explained to us by several survivors. Many people don't know exactly where their family members' s remains are, so this place, and the many others like it across this small country, becomes a familial place, which is a distinct kind of beauty in itself. Mostly, coming to this narrative at this point, nearly 20 years after the fact, is about recognizing that even though a story is no longer in the headlines, it does not mean that it is over, that it has been resolved. This story continues. The trauma borne by the survivors is something they will live with for the rest of their lives. And the burden of it can be lessened, to a degree, the more it is shared. Thus, in exploring the forest for the trees is one way to distribute the weight of that burden. Thank you."
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