My descent into the labyrinth of mental illness felt, to my mother, like a cruel accusation. It felt like a verdict delivered against every choice she had ever made — among them, the choice to uproot my elder sister and me and bring us from Burundi to Rwanda. It was a silent judgement she imposed upon herself. She never voiced it. She never did. But I knew, because I watched her carry it: that particular, wordless guilt that settles into a mother like sediment.
As I grappled with my own inner turmoil, she retreated into the only place she knew how to survive: work. We existed in the same space, our paths crossing daily, but we rarely truly connected. We occupied the same house, the same rooms, the same table at mealtimes — and yet something vast and untraversable lay between us. We were two people mourning in completely different languages, neither fluent in the other’s grief.
What I did not fully understand then was the enormity of what she was already carrying, long before I ever became a burden to her.
Grief in Knots
Unseen by her own mother and siblings, my mother carried a weight heavier than any of them could have comprehended. But grief in Rwanda does not come in single threads. It comes in knots. The loss of her daughter — my sister — a loss that should have been enough grief for one lifetime — was compounded by the memory of her uncle and his wife, both of whom had drawn their final breaths in her arms. And still, life pressed onward, demanding her participation, indifferent to what it cost her. She became the linchpin: providing for her siblings and the relatives who came to live with us in the aftermath of the Genocide. Provision was her expression of love. It was also her armour.
Our shared tragic history remained a hushed secret, an unspoken understanding that permeated every corner of our lives. During Kwibuka — the annual week of national remembrance — a tacit agreement bound us. We would avoid the television, the radio, any conversation that might disturb the buried memories. She spent that first week almost entirely within the confines of her bedroom: not sleeping, I think, but existing in some private chamber of memory that had no entrance for the rest of us.
When the Silence Cracked
This fragile, habitual silence held for years. Then came the Gacaca — the community-based courts convened to address the crimes of the Genocide — and the silence cracked open. Suddenly, my mother was asked to choose: remain in the familiar numbness, or step forward and speak, fulfilling her duty to the victims of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi.
She chose to speak.
My mother was among the fortunate few who survived the killings in the Kimihurura area, her old neighborhood. During the hundred days of slaughter, she did not hide. Instead, driven by a strange resignation, she moved from one place to another, navigating roadblocks. It was not bravery that propelled her; she had surrendered her will to live, feeling utterly powerless. She had given herself over to something that is not quite fate and not quite despair, but something poised between the two. Perhaps the killers, in their own distorted way, sensed this emptiness in her — a woman who had already left herself. Perhaps it unnerved them. Whatever the reason, they waved her through, again and again, with words that have stayed with her ever since: “Go. You will be killed at the next roadblock, or by the next group.”
She was granted passage in the form of a sentence of death that never came.
A Repository for Others
This perverse act of mercy transformed her into more than a survivor of her own tragedy. She survived, and in doing so, she became a repository for others’ — for all the neighbours, all those who did not live to recount their own survival. During Gacaca, her memory became an act of justice. She gave names of perpetrators, gave dates of their crimes, offering a sliver of closure to the bereaved.
But that act of witness exacted its price. Anxiety crept in; depression followed; and then paranoia. Even now, years later, she cannot bring herself to return to Kimihurura willingly. The body remembers what the mind tries to forget, and hers has drawn its own borders around the places that broke her.
The Good Ones Are Buried Within You
For Kwibuka30, the thirtieth commemoration, I asked her to come with me. I wanted to lay a wreath at the grave that holds my sister, my grandmother’s brother, his wife, and their children. Her reply came in the profound cadence of Kinyarwanda, in a phrase that carries more weight than translation can bear: “Umuntu ashyingura imfura mu nda.” The weight of her words and the nuances elude a simple English translation, but the essence resonated deeply: “the good ones are buried within you.”
I did not agree with her choice. And yet I understood it. She was telling me that she does not need a grave to grieve. That the people she loved are not located at a coordinate in the earth; they are located inside her, held there, intact. That this is not avoidance. That this is, for her, the only form of faithfulness she has left to offer them.
The paradox of genocide is that grief, in its most profound form, is brutal, devastating, and remains intensely, irrevocably personal. There is no single correct way to remember. There is only the way you can bear to live.
Beer, French Fries, and Quiet Communion
The following year, for Kwibuka31, we spent the day in quiet communion. We shared a bottle of beer— the kind her uncle had favoured — a silent toast to him, and savoured French fries with mayonnaise, a small, tender tribute to my sister. We did not utter words of remembrance, but our shared actions spoke volumes. Thirty-one years had passed, and yet in the small, domestic space of that afternoon, something passed between us that had no name in English or in Kinyarwanda. Something that was not healing, exactly, not yet — but was perhaps its beginning. A willingness to sit in the same room with our grief, instead of merely beside it. A recognition that we had both been carrying it, separately, for a very long time, and that perhaps, just perhaps, we did not have to. We are learning to grieve together.
A Presence, Not a Weight
It is Kwibuka32 now. My mother is still here. I am still here. The work of remembrance does not end — it only changes shape, year by year, as we change with it. What I know now, which I did not know then, is that remembering is not only an act of fidelity to the dead. It is also an act of survival for the living. We remember so that we do not have to carry it alone. We remember so that the good ones buried within us do not become a weight, but a presence.
We are, slowly, learning how.