What I thought I knew about beauty

July 23, 2008

The issues of how I represent myself physically have always been tangly for me. It seems to me that body image, class, gender, age, boldness or timidity, money, intellect, availability, values, rebellion, profession, authority, sexuality, and personal history all vie to take precedence and so throughout most of my life I have represented myself in many ways, some of which are contradictory. I can do the skirts and suits and high heels, but really, I’d rather be in jeans and a t-shirt. My own need for beauty now manifests itself mostly in my home. And like I’ve written in other posts, for this trip I brought…well, mostly shabby clothes. They are clean and mostly new, but absolutely not stylish. And not beautiful. To remedy this error, I’ve had a few outfits made so I can present myself more appropriately.

People here dress, as I’ve written before. Julius tells me it’s a vestige of colonialism. When I ask him how he stays pressed, he looks a bit shocked. I follow up by asking if his houseboy does his laundry and ironing. Julius tells me he does it himself; it takes just one minute to iron a shirt and pants. Julius describes the style here as descended from the Belgian (and the French, indirectly): ironed clothes, belted pants worn close to the body, women in very put-together outfits, little girls in party dresses—what a Dutch intern called princess dresses—little boys in nice clothes and sometimes even suits.

Julius goes on to say that representation is hugely important here, that if you are dressed shabbily for a meeting, then no matter what comes out of your mouth, it will be perceived as bullshit. That was his exact word, by the way—bullshit. Julius also said that this pride in dress is unique to Rwanda. In East Africa, where there is more colonial influence from the British, people dress…how should I say?...less carefully.

Normally I might have a problem with the importance of this “superficial” aspect of presentation, but I think that here in Rwanda, emphasis on dress is productive: better to attend to a person’s external presentation rather than to his or her falsely-constructed group identity, especially when that group identity is fraught with trauma, pain, and political danger. Or perhaps this emphasis on external representation is another way to define group identity according to class or economic levels. But at least with this form, some Rwandans can, like I have, occasionally change how they are perceived based on what they wear.

This Rwandan emphasis on cleanliness, neatness, beauty, pride helps me make sense of why victims’ clothes are hung in some of the Genocide memorials here.

In Nyamata, about 45 minutes south of Kigali, there is a church where 5,000 people gathered seeking sanctuary in the early days of the Genocide. They had brought mattresses, jerry cans of water, huge bags of beans and rice. And even in this fairly remote village, they were dressed. The men wore suits and leather shoes. The women wore the beautiful traditional flowing dresses that resemble saris, and dress pumps and sandals. The children were neatly dressed.

How do I know how they were dressed? These garments hang now on the walls of the bombed-out church, bloodstained, torn, stained with senseless violence. They hang multilayered on a long wall, between a shorter wall with tall racks of skulls that are cracked or have unnatural holes or even a piece of wood still embedded, the smallest skulls in the front. Next to these are rows and rows of femurs, pelvises and other bones. The opposite wall has another tall rack filled with approximately twenty coffins. Next to the clothes are all their shoes, dusty now. The cooking implements are there, too, as well as the food.

If you look carefully, behind the rice and beans, there are three pangas (machetes) and a huge, heavy metal ball like a cannonball or shot put. The pangas are crude, one fashioned from a badly cut piece of metal. The handles are gone; one had wire wrapped around its base. These were left after the grenades opened holes in the walls and the génocidaires entered the church, its Sunday school room, and the sacristy to murder their friends and neighbors.

The clothes also hang from the rafters of the church, ghostly witnesses.

There is a large trunk among the beautiful flowers and wreaths adorning the coffins and former altar. In this trunk are all the books and papers gathered from the church afterward, when there was finally peace. There are bibles, bloodied identification cards, a blue book filled with notes on choir activities, books of liturgy, a voting card.

The Memorial grounds are now sacred in a different way. There are gardens, neat rows of flowers bordering a wall that has the names of only about 130 of the 5,000 who died here. Purple ribbons adorn the walkways, and there is a contemplation bench of polished native brick.

And it is both beautiful and horrifying.

I suppose that I had thought that beauty was secondary or otherwise apart from the basic necessities of life. I’m reminded now of the old American union slogan, “Bread and roses.” Yes, we need food. We need peace, and we also need beauty.