100 Days

Juliane Okot Bitek

• Publisher: The University of Alberta Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781772121520
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: African Poetry
• Index: Literature

100 days... 100 days that should not have been... 100 days the world could have stopped. But did not.

For 100 days, Juliane Okot Bitek recorded the lingering nightmare of the Rwandan genocide in a poem—each poem recalling the senseless loss of life and of innocence. Okot Bitek draws on her own family's experience of displacement under the regime of Idi Amin, pulling in fragments of the poetic traditions she encounters along the way: the Ugandan Acholi oral tradition of her father—the poet Okot p'Bitek; Anglican hymns; the rhythms and sounds of the African American Spiritual tradition; and the beat of spoken word and hip-hop. 100 Days is a collection of poetry that will stop you in your tracks.

Itwas the earth that betrayed us first

itwas the earth that held onto its beauty
compellingus to return

itwas the breezes that were there
&then not there

itwas the sun that rose & fell
rose& fell

as ifthere was nothing different
as ifnothing changed

Day 1

Acel aryo adek aŋwen

acel aryo adek aŋwen

acel aryo adek aŋwen

acel aryo adek aŋwen

acel aryo adek aŋwen

acel aryo adek aŋwen

we have run out of days

Author’s Note

AT THE BEGINNING OF APRIL 2014, Wangechi Mutu, a Kenyan American artist, posted daily photographs tagged #Kwibuka20#100Days on Facebook and Twitter. I knew immediately that they presented an opportunity for me to engage with the 1994 Rwanda Genocide, a period that I’ve thought about for the last twenty years. I contacted her and we began a collaboration of sorts; I wrote a poem and she posted a photograph for all the hundred days that has come to symbolize the worst days of the genocide in Rwanda. One hundred days of killing, one hundred days of witnessing, one hundred days of everything else that seemed to matter and then it didn’t, it couldn’t. And just like that, twenty years had passed and there was a need to remember.

In July 2008, I had attended the International Poetry Festival in Medellín, Colombia where I met Yolande Mukagasana, a poet from Rwanda who had lived through the genocide and had lost her family in it. She spoke tirelessly about what it meant to have survived those hundred days. Hers wasn’t a litany of losses, and yet she’d lost her whole family. She spoke from an incredible place of strength and pain and received a tremendous applause when she delivered her poetry. I couldn’t forget her and so when I started to write 100 Days, I was thinking about voices like hers, imagining a country of poets like her. How and where do the experiences of survivors of genocide in Rwanda match those of survivors from Bosnia and northern Uganda? All three places were steeped in war and violence at the same time. What is it to be from a place where bloodshed of your kin darkens the soil, makes the river run red and that’s not newsworthy?

I wrote furiously. I wrote every day. Sometimes more than a single poem emerged and sometimes just fragments showed up. I wrote like someone possessed. Every day I posted a poem alongside Wangechi Mutu’s photos on social media. Sometimes the match was incredible even though we worked independently from the east and west coast of North America, she in the US and I in Canada. She, an American Kenyan artist and me, a Canadian Ugandan poet—we both had something to express about a war that was close enough to our homelands that it could have been ours. We come from the same region, from countries that have deeply been affected by violence, from pre-independence struggles to dictatorships and in Kenya, the post election violence in 1997. How could it be that we could have nothing to say? How could it be that the only Africans to think about the genocide would be from Rwanda? And yet the genocide was ours, too; it was a crime against us, East Africans and Africans. It was a crime, as all of them are, against all humanity.

For some people, time twists memories, intensifying them in some places and loosening them in the details that don’t seem to matter. What one day was like from another, how cold it was, whether or not there were flowers alongside a ditch on a long road—these dissolve for some and for others they are the markers of time and distance in those days.

Here are 100 Days as I imagined them. Stylistically, I draw from various narrative traditions. From the Acholi oral tradition, I take on a strong and ever present narrator as well as the call-and-response style of storytelling. From the Christian liturgy and the lyrics of the Anglican Church, I claim a space from which to question an enduring faith, and from the American Spirituals, a place to challenge it. I drew on the spoken word and conventional poetry that disrupts the conventions, but these outward forms mean less than knowing that these poems speak to memories of those days, in solidarity and in fact. These are voices that resist the dominant narrative and imagine other ways to think about those terrible days through to today. At least one poem is directly inspired by Yolande Mukagasana’s stories. I am grateful to Wangechi Mutu for parting the curtain enough to give me the courage to be part of this conversation. I am also grateful to the readers who responded so heartfully and sent encouragement along the way.

The memory of the 1994 Rwanda Genocide cannot be contained within borders. I hope that 100 Days will open the conversation on how to think about war in general and about one of the most enduring and painful episodes of our lifetime.

Acknowledgements

MUCH APPRECIATION goes to the first readers, every day of the 100 Days: Omer Aijazi, Chrissie Arnold, Erin Baines and Wangechi Mutu. Readers on social media supported and shared these poems, sending them off to a myriad of spaces beyond the places they first landed on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Thank you to Alexander Best from Zocalo Poets for seeing the poems through to Day 1. Cecil Abrams, James Gifford and the faculty at Fairleigh Dickinson University, thank you. Jasmine Pr...