Nine of the Women for Avenir, plus the cooperative’s counselor, Emelienne (in purple). Kigali, Rwanda. June 2012.

Immediately after I returned from Rwanda in July 2012, I escaped from reality with books.

I physically escaped my reality by packing my car and driving north from Missouri to Minneapolis. I wanted to get away from “home,” from my familiar terrain, from friends wanting to hear about all the fun I had in Rwanda, from my own strange, unexpected behavior. For example, I wouldn’t have sex with my boyfriend for a month, because it made me sad. For example, I couldn’t talk about Rwanda. For example, my brain felt like it was detached from me and ever so slightly floating away, away, away. Slowly enough so I could see it happening but not control it. Slowly enough so I was still aware of reality and ashamed when I couldn’t participate, at least for the time being.

I went to Minneapolis to spend the summer on my father’s girlfriend’s porch. I decided to read literature outside of Rwandan genocide.

I read Elie Wiesel.

Night is an “easy” read, of course. I think some schools require middle-schoolers to read the Holocaust memoir. I required it of myself.

The text is haunting because the fate is known. I read with an icy realism, and I did not react, ever. Not even when his family is split up, not even when his father falls ill.

When I reached the final page, I finally spilled – but I quickly pulled myself together and reached for another book. Anything to divert me from thinking about Rwanda, and the stories I already knew, and the stories I could connect with Elie’s.

The stories I knew were women’s stories. I could connect the women’s stories with Elie’s story in blanket claims, but I wondered what threads could bind them together. A man’s experience of a genocide is very different than a woman’s. I continued to read Holocaust literature, because I felt it was nothing like a female Rwandan genocide.

While I was in Rwanda, though, my translator said that genocide perpetrators borrowed from Nazi tactics in order to carry out murders. When we visited the Genocide Memorial Centre in Kigali, we walked through a section of the memorial that documents the Holocaust and other genocides, like Armenia in 1915 and Cambodia in 1975. Our guide said the purpose of documenting these other genocides is to show that “the world hasn’t learned yet.” Also “to show the international community that genocide and those who perpetrate hate is possible in all parts of the world.” I remember feeling very sad while walking through this part of the memorial. I remember thinking that my great-grandfather was killed in the Polish Uprising, but not knowing any other details. I remember starting to feel that detached brain thing. I remember it started there. In Rwanda.

I couldn’t help – either intuitively or naively – noticing connections.

When I got home that summer and reflected on these connections I made while in Rwanda, I reached for Holocaust literature. Male-centered literature. After Night, I read Wiesel’s One Generation After. I also read part of Wiesel’s Dawn while sitting cross-legged on the floor at Magers & Quinn, a used bookstore in Uptown Minneapolis. I also scanned Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search For Meaning, his autobiographical account of the psychology of survival.

I tried to make these connections, while avoiding the realities of what I had just learned. Because men and women experience genocide differently, and I couldn’t face the women.

Yet.

In the spring of 2011, Granta 115 released “The F Word” issue, a collection of fiction, non-fiction, poetry and photography that discusses feminism. I discovered this while searching for writing about contemporary feminism and knew it was a Must Read for me. It arrived in the mail the next week, and I began catching up on my Education.

Caroline Moorehead published an excerpt from her book A Train in Winter, a biographical narrative of a group of 230 French women (that eventually succumbed to 52 women) at Birkenau during World War II, in this anthology. I read it accidentally after almost a year of trepidation and post-Rwanda anxiety.

After reading about the French women – about Charlotte Delbo and her insane craving for water, so insane that at one point, her friends pool together their bread to trade for a bucket of water, and when Charlotte is given the bucket, she plunks her head inside, “rather like a horse” and drinks the entire thing – I am reminded of what the core of feminism is, and the importance of being given a woman’s perspective. I know about Elie and his father, I know about Viktor, I know about The Pianist, I know about Schindler’s List, I know about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, and yes, I know about Anne Frank, and her story is an important permanence, but I did not know about the women of the Holocaust before being exposed to this literature. I did not know about the conditions at the women’s camp at Birkenau, and how they were worse than other conditions at Auschwitz. I did not know about the negotiation of the Polish women at Birkenau, and how they mastered the bartering of cabbages and potatoes. I did not know about the French women who had been arrested for resisting the German government, and how they gathered together and sang the French National Anthem when their spirits were down, rations low, possessions stolen, identities faltering.

In Charlotte Delbo’s memoir Auschwitz and After, she begins:

“Today, I am not sure that what I wrote is true.

I am certain it is truthful.”

We cannot lose women’s perspectives, and lose bits of the past. What a devastating threat to ourselves that is.

When I heard it from the women in Rwanda, I could taste the genocide as much as I was able in my social location as an American woman who was 4 years old in 1994, safe and probably stacking Legos with my brother in Iowa City, Iowa. I could taste it as a woman who wanted to hear about the rape, about the mutilation, who wanted to see the scars on her stomach, even though it made me feel weak and empty. I could taste it as a woman who knew about Roméo Dallaire and Shake Hands with the Devil and Hotel Rwanda, but recognized there were parts of the story missing.

I heard those parts from the women, and now I know a little bit of truth.