Women, War, and Survival Theme Analysis

I work every day now to erase [the] language of ruin, to destroy it and replace it with language of my own. With konona (rape, ruin), you’re told, there is no antidote, no cleansing agent. […] You’re polluted, you’re worthless—that’s it.

My body is destroyed and my body is sacred. I will not live in that story of ruin and shame.

It felt surreal and awful. I’d lost track of who I was and who we were to each other. None of us were the same people who’d lived together in that house in Kigali. Those people had died. We had all died.

My hustle was getting through the day. How to claim dignity. How to keep the kids clean […] How to “shine” the house, which was really just dousing the floor with petrol to keep out the bugs. How to wash my loud, floral, short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, which I loved and which I wore with my jean skirt, tied at the waist. How to make the kids cute, and thus make them lovable and seen.

For that one hour, I felt proud. Not just dignified but certain, impermeable, a rock. The sun that turned the window glass into a mirror had confirmed my existence. But I needed to see my body—I needed to own it.

Almost every other minute of my existence, I felt the pain of being nobody’s child, the sting of the assumptions people make when you don’t have a mother and you don’t have a father. People assume you’re adrift, at play. They assume that you are vulnerable. They assume your needs are lesser, that your will is broken, that your body can be bent to theirs.

My body itself remained alien, a burden. I’d had to carry this thing around with me—this body with its dark skin […] this body, with its liabilities, this body that had been vandalized, stolen. This was the hardest thing in the world: to remember the ravagement and still believe my body was magic, to remember the shattering and still believe my body was spectacular, holy, and capable of creation.

Rape is the story of women and war, girls and war, hundreds of thousands of mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, cousins, and aunts in my country alone, hundreds of millions across the world. So many men were murdered in the massacre. So many women later died of HIV. Rape, ruin—corporeal, psychological, social—lingered in even the most polished, sophisticated, private spaces decades after the war.

Every time I need to summon my toughest, most self-actualized persona, I channel [Claire]. […] But […] my most generous feelings [towards Claire] are clouded by my own need to be recognized.

[…]

These days, when I’m with Claire, we have so much love and so much fear, and we want to kill each other.