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Clemantine Wamariya has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of non-fiction based on the experiences and recollections of the author.

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For Claire and for Mukamana, who taught me how to create and live in my own umugani

A NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS

This is a work of nonfiction. A handful of the people in the book have been given pseudonyms; otherwise, everyone is identified by their real names. We have worked hard to be accurate and, just as crucial to a book like this, emotionally honest. But memory is flawed and idiosyncratic, and many of the events described here happened decades ago to a child under intense stress.

Every human life is equally valuable. Each person’s story is vital. This is just one.

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?”

—Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider

PROLOGUE

THE NIGHT BEFORE we taped the Oprah show, in 2006, I met my sister Claire at her apartment in a public housing unit in Edgewater, where she lived with the three kids she’d had before age twenty-two, thanks to her ex-husband, an aid worker who’d pursued her at a refugee camp. A black limo arrived and drove us to downtown Chicago, to the Omni Hotel, near where my sister used to work. I now can’t think about that moment without also thinking about my own naïveté, but at the time all I felt was elated.

I was eighteen, a junior at New Trier High School, living Monday through Friday with the Thomas family in Kenilworth, a fancy suburb. I belonged to the church youth group. I ran track. I’d played Fantine in the school production of Les Misérables. I was whoever anybody wanted me to be.

Claire, meanwhile, remained steadfast, herself, a seemingly rougher bargain. Unlike me, she was not a child when we got resettled in the United States, so nobody sent her to school or took her in or filled her up with resources—piano lessons, speech therapists, cheerleading camp. Claire just kept hustling. For a while she made a living throwing parties, selling drinks and hiring DJs who mixed American hip-hop, the Zairean superstar Papa Wemba, and French rap. But then she learned it was illegal to sell liquor without a license and she started working full-time as a maid, cleaning two hundred hotel rooms a week.

All I knew about the show we were taping was that it was a two-part series: the first segment showed Oprah and Elie Wiesel visiting Auschwitz, God help us; the second featured the fifty winners of Oprah’s high school essay contest. Like the other winners, I had written about Wiesel’s book Night, his gutting story of surviving the Holocaust, and why it was still relevant today. The book disarmed me. I found it thrilling, and it made me ashamed. Wiesel had words that I did not have to describe the experiences of my early life.

I’d dictated my essay to Mrs. Thomas, as she sat in her tasteful Midwestern house—gracious lawn, mahogany floors—at a huge computer that took up the whole desk. “Clemantine,” she’d said, “you have to enter. I just know you’ll win.” Mrs. Thomas had three children of her own, plus me. I called her “my American mother” and she called me “my African daughter.” She packed my lunch every day and drove me to school.

In my essay I said that maybe if Rwandans had read Night, they wouldn’t have decided to kill one another.

ON THE WAY to downtown Chicago, Claire and I had the inevitable conversation—is this happening? this is so weird—which was as close as my sister and I got to discussing what had happened to our lives. If we absolutely had to name our past in each other’s presence, we’d call it “the war.” But we tried not to do that, and that day we were both so consumed by all the remembering and willful forgetting that when we arrived at the Omni and the bellhop asked, “Do you have any bags?” we realized we’d left all our clothes at home.

Claire took the L back to her apartment, where a friend was watching her children—Mariette, who was almost ten; Freddy, who was eight; and Michele, who was five. I stayed in the hotel room, lost.

Harpo Studios gave us each a $150 stipend for dinner. It was more than Claire’s monthly food stamp allowance. When Claire returned we ordered room service. We woke at 4:00 a.m. and spent hours getting dressed.

THAT DAY, FOR the show, the producers directed us to the huge studio. Oprah sat onstage on a white love seat, next to tired old Elie Wiesel in a white overstuffed chair. He was alive, old but alive, which meant the world to me. He kept looking at the audience, like he had a lot to say but there was no time to say it.

In this nice studio, in front of all these well-dressed people, Oprah’s team played the video of Oprah and Elie Wiesel walking arm in arm through snow-covered Auschwitz, discussing the Holocaust.

Then the producers gave us a break. We sat in silence. Some of us were horrified and others were crying.

After that, Oprah said glowing things about all the winners of the essay contest except me. I told myself this was fine. Fine. I hadn’t really gone to school until age thirteen, and when I was seven I’d celebrated Christmas in a refugee camp in Burundi with a shoebox of pencils that I’d buried under our tent so that nobody would steal it. Being in the audience was enough, right? Plus, I kept wanting to say to Oprah: Do you know how many years, and across how many miles, Claire has been talking about meeting you?

But then Oprah leaned forward and said, “So, Clemantine, before you left Africa, did you ever find your parents?”

I had a mike cord tucked under my black TV blazer and a battery pack clipped to my black TV pants, so I should have suspected something like this was coming. “No,” I said. “We tried UNICEF …, we tried everywhere, walking around, searching and searching and searching.”

“Well, I have a letter from your parents,” Oprah said, as though we’d won a game show. “Clemantine and Claire, come on up here!”

CLAIRE HELD ON to me. She was shaking, but she kept on her toughest, most skeptical face, because she knows more about the world than I do, and also because she refused to think, even after all we’d been through, that anybody was better or more important than she was. When we were dirt poor and alone, she’d be in her seventh hour of scrubbing someone’s laundry by hand and she’d see on a TV an image of Angelina Jolie, swaggering and gleaming, radiating moral superiority, and even then Claire would say, “Who is that? God? You, you’re human. Nothing separates me from you.”

I have never been Claire. I have never been inviolable. Often, still, my own life story feels fragmented, like beads unstrung. Each time I scoop up my memories, the assortment is slightly different. I worry, at times, that I’ll always be lost inside. I worry that I’ll be forever confused. But that day I leapt up onto the set, smiling. One of the most valuable skills I’d learned while trying to survive as a refugee was reading what other people wanted me to do.

“This is from your family, in Rwanda,” Oprah said, handing me a tan envelope. She looked solemn, confident in her purpose. “From your father and your mother and your sisters and your brother.”

Claire and I did know that our parents were alive. We knew they’d lost everything—my father’s business, my mother’s garden—and that they now lived in a shack on the outskirts of Kigali. We talked to them on the phone, but only rarely because—how do you start? Why didn’t you look harder for us? How are you? I’m fine, thanks. I’ve been working at the Gap and I’ve found it’s much easier to learn to read English if you also listen to audiobooks.

I opened the envelope and pulled out a sheet of blue paper. Then Oprah put her hand on mine to stop me from unfolding the letter. It was a huge relief. I didn’t want to have a breakdown on TV.

“You don’t have to read it right now, in front of all these people,” Oprah said. “You don’t have to read it in front of all these people …” She paused. “Because … because … your family … IS HERE!”

I started walking backward. Claire’s jaw unhinged in a caricature of shock. Then a door that had images of barbed wire on it—created especially for this particular episode, I assume, to evoke life in an internment camp—opened stage right and out came an eight-year-old boy, who was apparently my brother. He was followed by my father, in a dark suit, salmon shirt, and tie; a shiny new five-year-old sister; my mother in a long blue dress; and my sister Claudette, now taller than me. I’d last seen her when she was two years old and I still believed my mother had picked her up from the fruit market.

I’d fantasized about this moment so many times. In Malawi, I used to write my name in dust on trucks, hoping my mother would see my loopy cursive Clemantine and realize that I was alive. In Zaire, I’d saved coins so I could buy my parents presents. In Tanzania, I’d collected marbles for my older brother, Pudi, who wasn’t there for this reunion. Pudi was dead.

Claire remained frozen for a moment. So I, in my TV clothes and blown-out hair, ran toward my Oprah-produced family, arms outstretched. I hugged my brother. I hugged my father. I hugged my tiny little sister. I hugged my mother, but my knees gave out and she had to pick me up. Then I hugged her. I hugged Claudette, my little sister, little no more. I walked across the stage and hugged Oprah. I hugged lovely, weathered Elie Wiesel.

The cameras were so far away that I forgot I was participating in a million-viewer spectacle, that my experience, my joy and pain, were being consumed by the masses, though I was aware enough to realize that everybody in the audience was crying.

A FEW HOURS later, though it seemed like minutes, we found ourselves on the sidewalk outside the studio, and my family took a black limo north to my sister’s apartment. She lived in the front unit of a squat brick low-rise, across the street from the L tracks and a block away from an abandoned wooden house with a gable roof, a once fantastic, now forgotten home that I hoped would someday be ours. I would put everybody in it. We would be a family again.

Nobody talked in the car. In the apartment, nobody knew what to do either. My mother, in her long blue dress, kept sitting down and standing up and touching everything—the living room walls, the TV remote—and singing about how God had protected us and now we must serve and love him. My father kept smiling, as though someone he mistrusted were taking pictures of him. Claire remained nearly catatonic: rocking, stone-faced. I thought she’d finally gone crazy, for real.

I sat on Claire’s couch, looking at my strange new siblings, the ones who’d replaced me and Claire. They looked so perfect, their skin unblemished, their eyes alight, like an excellent fictional representation of a family that could have been mine. But they didn’t know me and I didn’t know them, and the gap between us was a billion miles wide.

THE NEXT DAY was Friday. Of course, I didn’t go to school. We needed to start making up for so much lost time. Yet I couldn’t look at my parents—they were ghosts.

I felt gratitude, yes. Oprah had brought my parents to me. But I also felt kicked in the stomach, as though my life were some psychologist’s perverse experiment: Let’s see how far we can take a person down, and then how far we can raise her up, and then let’s see what happens!

Saturday, my family, along with the Thomases, drove up the lakeshore to the Chicago Botanic Garden, where we stared at the Illinois lilies and roses. We all wanted these to be beautiful links to the lilies and roses in Kigali, threads knitting this present to that past, but everything was awkward, and it felt as though cameras were still following us around. Sunday we did Navy Pier—the gaudy Ferris wheel, the sticky cotton candy, all the tourist stuff.

My father kept smiling his fake, pained smile. Mine probably looked the same: a smile covering a scream. Claire barely said a word. Then, Monday morning, my parents and new siblings left on the flight back to Rwanda that Oprah’s people had booked for them, and Mrs. Thomas picked me up as usual at Claire’s apartment. I had no idea how to make sense of what had just happened. So I just ran out to her Mercedes and she dropped me off at school.

WHEN I WAS a regular child, I lived in Kigali, Rwanda, and I was a precocious snoop. My nickname was Cassette. I repeated everything I saw or heard, including that my sister Claire, who was nine years older than me, wore shorts under her skirt and played soccer instead of doing family errands after school.

When she did follow directions—go buy tomatoes, pick up six Cokes for guests—she spent only a quarter of the money my mother gave her, because Claire, even at fourteen, could look out for herself. She understood value. She knew confidence was currency. She realized that if she told the tomato vendor she’d pay him less today but return every week and buy only from him, he’d accept the bargain, she’d pocket some money, and they’d both walk away happy.

She also knew life was harder and more costly when I tagged along. I talked too much. I tattled. I asked too many questions. I also had a lisp and was difficult to understand. Claire made fun of me, how my tongue got in the way. She told me to repeat words, and laughed.

We lived in a gray stucco ranch house on a gravel road, up the hill from the market, near one of the few tennis courts in the city. The houses in our neighborhood sat close together, each with a red roof and fenced with creosote bushes, thick and dense, and trimmed weekly into tidy partitions.

In our backyard was an outdoor kitchen, with a big sandbox in which my mother buried carrots and sweet potatoes to shield them from the heat and make them even sweeter. In the front yard stood a mango tree, old and wet, with sturdy leaves. You could sit in it and it would hug you. Every day when we came home from school, Pudi and I climbed up and stood in the branches, in what was then my whole world, shaking the leaves, pretending the tree was a bus that would take us to Butare, where our grandmother lived, about three hours away, or even to Canada.

My mother was short and curvy and regal and poised, with high cheekbones, like my grandparents, and bright white teeth with gaps between them, which Rwandans consider beautiful. We have a word for it in Kinyarwanda: inyinya. She’d fallen in love with my father and they’d decided to marry against his family’s wishes.

My mother spent her mornings at church, just up the hill, and her afternoons in the garden, which was her Eden. There she taught me the names of plants—cauliflower, bird-of-paradise—and how to care for each, which ones needed to be in the cool soil under the mango tree and which needed direct sun. She grew oranges, lemons, guava, and papaya; hibiscus, plumeria, sanchezia, anthurium, geraniums, and peonies. I would pluck the stamens off the tiger lilies and rest them above my lip, the orange pollen leaving a bright powdered mustache.

Saturdays my mother dragged me, Pudi, and Claire to clean the homes of old people. The old people were so cranky. They yelled at us if we ate the fruit that had fallen off their mango trees. My mother didn’t care if they were mean.

She also took in girls from the country, young women who, before they married, wanted to spend a year or two in a big city with malls, office buildings, cathedrals, and paved roads, earn a little money, and see the world. These women worked as nannies, or they helped in the kitchen, or they cleaned and laundered clothes. My mother insisted that Claire and I learn how to do these chores alongside them. We were never to think we were better. I didn’t mind the work. I wanted order in my world. Even at four, I was compulsively neat, straightening the shoes by the door and re-sweeping the slate in the courtyard.

Claire hated housework. She did not want to be slowed down. She had big plans and could not wait to break free—to go to college in Canada, where many Rwandans dreamed of moving because it was like America except that they spoke French. French was the second language Rwandans learned in school, as the Belgians had colonized Rwanda. If not Canada, Claire wanted to travel to Europe—anything to live in iburayi, Rwandans’ all-purpose expression for “abroad” or “away.” Claire had a godmother who lived in Montreal who sent her the most fabulous gifts: a watch with a silver band, a green rain set with matching slicker, umbrella, and boots.

My dreams, at age four, were far less adventurous. I wanted to be fed ice cream and pineapple cakes. I wanted to wear a teal-blue school uniform and grow into Claire’s clothes.

MY MOTHER DRESSED tidily, modestly, always, as if to say, I’m here but I’m not here. Don’t look at me. She wore a T-shirt and bright kitenge, or long wrapper, to garden, and a long pleated skirt with a high-necked blouse and sensible black low-heeled shoes to church. Her heels never made noise. She never wore makeup, only a bit of Vaseline to brighten her lips. She’d absorbed the potent Catholic-Rwandan-postcolonial ethos: You want to stay as invisible as possible. You don’t want eyes on you. Mastering that was my job growing up: to learn how to be proper, how to be quiet. I was an unenthusiastic student.

Many of our neighbors’ families were exuberant and different—Muslim instead of Catholic, Zairean instead of Rwandan. I wanted to taste how they prepared their beans and study the designs on their plates. I wanted to celebrate Ramadan and the Indian holiday Diwali. Some days, when I visited neighbors’ homes, I picked through their bedrooms and bathrooms, looking at their hairbrushes, toothbrushes, medicines, and soaps. I wanted to know their secrets—not the deep dark ones, the little human ones. I wanted to know what their bodies were like.

My mother would try to discourage my curiosity, reproaching me with the words ushira isoni—you are not shy. Rwandans, especially girls, were supposed to be reserved, contained, nearly opaque. When I walked with my mother into town, I’d point to each house and ask, “Who lives there? How many kids? Is anybody sick?” I didn’t fit in.

One day, when she was in her kitenge in the garden, she heard on the radio that a friend had died, or kwitaba imana—the idiom means “responded to God.” She started to cry. That was the first and only time I saw my mother cry. Adults in Rwanda do not cry. Children can cry until they learn to speak. Then it’s time to stop. If you absolutely must cry after that, you have to cry like you’re singing, like a melancholy bird.

I begged my mother to let me go to the funeral. I wanted to know how funerals worked. My nanny, Mukamana, who I loved and adored, ironed my best cotton dress and buttoned me into it, and I took my mother’s hand as we walked down the gravel road and across the bridge toward town.

Rwanda is all hills. Mukamana said that the creator, Imana, hadn’t wanted to stretch out the land, as he wanted Rwanda to be unique. Near the church, we joined fifty people sitting on long benches arranged in a rectangle under a tree. Everybody was silent or whispering. My mother, like the rest of the adults, remained calm and composed. I sat there, staring at the adults’ faces, very confused.

I did not hear God talking to anybody. I just heard a priest offering comfort, some hymns. After the service I asked a few of my mother’s friends if they’d heard or seen God, and they took my hands in theirs and patted them, as if to say, You’ll understand soon enough.

But soon enough was too far off. I wanted to understand right then. In my short life, death was an idle threat, a sibling’s joke—Pudi or Claire saying our mother would kill me if I picked too many roses. My mother did her Rwandan best to explain. She told me death was a welcoming home. But I felt aggrieved, even insulted, by the obvious oversimplification of what it meant to die. In my four-year-old imperiousness, I believed I could handle the truth. I thought I deserved to know. I demanded it.

After the funeral I spent as much time as possible around old, sick people. I tagged along with my mother when she went to read them scripture. I wanted to listen for God talking to them, calling them home. Did a person need to respond to God when God called? What if you wanted to live? If God was just extending an invitation, you could decline, right? You could say no thank you and stay where you were.

MY DAYS WERE filled with the indignations of being young and spoiled. I hated the lotion my nanny applied after my bath. I hated my bathrobe. I wanted the robe with buttons, like Claire’s, and if not that, I wanted to be allowed to dress like Pudi. Pudi’s given name was Claude and his nickname came from his love of Puma and Adidas. My mother indulged him by letting him wear his bright red Adidas soccer jersey under his school uniform, even though the jersey smelled.

Daily, maybe hourly, I begged Mukamana to tell me stories to help me make sense of the world, like that the gods shook out the ocean like a rug to make waves. My favorite was that there was a beautiful, magical girl who roamed the earth, smiling beads. When Mukamana told me this story, she said, “What do you think happened next?” and whatever I said, whatever future I imagined, Mukamana would make come true. Mukamana wrapped her long, curly hair in a magnificent cloth, and she slept in my room with me, each of us on our own bed. She taught me songs to get me through my morning ritual: rise, pray for the day, make my bed, brush my teeth, wash my face, fix my hair, get dressed, greet everyone.

I refused to do anything until she told me a story, and she used my desire to get the upper hand. “Well, if you take a nap, I’ll tell you a story. If you don’t do it then I won’t tell you.”

Growing up, I wanted to be like her. I wanted to tell stories and dance for others like she would do for me. All Mukamana’s stories involved singing and dancing, tapping out rhythms with her feet. Her stories never had set endings. She always asked, “And then what do you think happened? Can you guess what happened next?” She was the only one willing to help me understand why the sky was so high, or where water first came from.

MY FATHER OWNED a car service. He built the business gradually, like any good entrepreneur: first one car, then two, then a small fleet of minibuses, and by the time I was born a big commercial garage on a busy street that smelled like car oil and dust.

He was solid, thick-chested, broad-shouldered, with a wide forehead and a broad smile, plus ears that stuck out just enough to take off his intimidating edge. He worked long hours. I didn’t see him much. On the evenings he was home, I fought with Claire over who would bring him his leather slippers. Claire knew this was the best time to ask for money or new Nikes. I wanted to trade his slippers for a taste of his beer.

My father worked so hard to build this—a middle-class home. When my parents married, they didn’t have enough money to throw a wedding. Now, some afternoons, if it was hot or business was slow, my father came home to nap. I knew that I was meant to be quiet while he slept, to stop playing and screaming in the garden, especially near his open window. But one afternoon Pudi and I started playing in the mango tree and I forgot.

Discipline was usually my mother’s province. She was strict and understated. When we misbehaved, she made us kneel in the corner and face the wall, sometimes holding stones over our heads. It was awful. When someone in the family lied—usually it was me—my mother would boil water and have all of us sit around the pot. “If you’re dishonest and you put your hand in there, it will burn,” she said. “If you didn’t do it, your hand will be just fine.” One of us always confessed.

Claire hated my mother’s punishments more than the rest of us. They enraged her and filled her with shame. “Why don’t you just beat us, like everybody else?” she asked our mother.

But that afternoon, when my father came home to nap and I neglected to be quiet, it wasn’t my mother who punished me. It was my father. He opened the window, called me into the den, and smacked me in the face. I can still feel the heat. I peed on myself.

WHEN I WAS five, I started kindergarten. By then I had a new baby sister. I felt threatened, as all older siblings do, and begged every day for my mother to return her. I considered running away.

Kindergarten was a privilege. Neither Claire nor Pudi had gone, as my parents hadn’t had the money when they were little. My school was beautiful, nestled on the hillside, with a glamorous teacher who wore high heels that clicked against the hallway floor. The place smelled like crayons. We sang, made clay bowls and mugs, and ate lunch in the shade.

Each day, with my lunch, I carried a green thermos of milk tea. I considered myself the most special child there, maybe the most special child in all Rwanda, because one day Mukamana picked me up carrying the green umbrella, slicker, and rain boots that had belonged to Claire. It was monsoon season, warm and pouring. I slipped on Claire’s green boots, and I begged Mukamana to take the long way home, around the next hill through town, not directly over the bridge. I wanted to be a one-girl parade showing off my posh rain gear.

But Mukamana told me that we couldn’t take the long way because it was flooded. I was furious.

I forgave her only when I found Pudi waiting to play. The rainwater was gushing off our red roof into the slate courtyard. He stole the soap from the kitchen and slicked up the slate. We ran and slid until my mother snapped and demanded that we come inside.

Shortly after that, Mukamana disappeared. I asked my mother why and she said the intambara—the conflict. That word had no meaning to me, no story attached.

ANOTHER NANNY ARRIVED, Pascazia, and she was not Mukamana, so I hated her. She did not tell me stories the way Mukamana had. She did not wrap her hair in an elegant cloth. One day, Pascazia came to pick me up at kindergarten in the rain, and she did not bring the green rain boots and slicker.

On our way home, we passed a group of men singing and dancing in the street. They were sweaty, carrying green, gold, and red flags. It looked so festive, like a carnival. I was entranced by the large drum. A dozen pickup trucks were parked by the side of the road, with a crowd gathering behind them to watch. I wanted to stop and sing and dance with the men, and usually Pascazia was happy to dawdle. She liked to ply me with mandazi, or beignets, so I was always patient while she talked to her friends. Now I begged for mandazi so I would at least get to join the crowd and stare. She refused.

The next week, just before we crossed the bridge and were starting up the hill to our house, we saw a crowd in a circle. People said someone was getting stoned for stealing. I didn’t understand what was happening. There were more flags, red, black, yellow, and green, and more singing and marching. I was transfixed. Mukamana had told me an old story once, about men fighting each other with spears, up in the hills. Those spears left many broken hearts and broken bodies. The broken men, she’d said, still lived in hiding. Were we among those men, in those hills, now? I asked Pascazia. She yanked my arm. She made us leave.

At home I tattled to my mother. I didn’t know what I’d seen, but I’d been mesmerized and I knew that my seeing it was wrong.

“Where did you go? Why did you pass?” my mother said to Pascazia, a sharp rebuke. Her lips pulled tight over the gap in her teeth. She almost never raised her voice. “You shouldn’t have walked that way.”

YOU KNOW THOSE little pellets you drop in water that expand into huge sponges? My life was the opposite. Everything shrank.

First I was forbidden to play in the mango tree. Pudi tried to entertain me in the house, fake-reading to me in French. He was supposed to be learning French in school but he never studied. So we just looked in the books at the pictures of Tintin, and Pudi made up stories. We traveled together to the jungle with Milou, Tintin’s dog. A lion would appear and we’d escape to the caves.

Next I was forbidden to play with my friend Neglita. She was my oldest playmate, one of my few friends my age, and I thought she was perfect. We made up fairy worlds. She let me set the rules. We collected petals and bits of moss, and the fairies wore the petals as dresses and lived in the moss.

Not long before the stoning, my mother had walked me to Neglita’s house to play. On the way we gathered seedpods, and in Neglita’s yard she and I set the pods on hot rocks and waited for them to pop. I slept over at Neglita’s house that night, and when my mother came in the morning I didn’t want to leave. As a sort of promise, she suggested that I lend a sweater to Neglita and that I take one of hers home. That way we would have a reason to see each other soon, to trade our sweaters back. Neglita’s sweater was blue and smelled like eucalyptus. I wanted mine back, but I never saw Neglita again.

The radio was now on all the time, a horrendous hiss. Pudi took me to see Rambo, screened on a bedsheet at a neighbor’s house. I had never seen a gun fired, let alone real combat. I was so scared that I ran home alone without my shoes. After that, all the kids in the neighborhood became obsessed with Rambo. They cut their T-shirts into tank tops and wore bandannas on their foreheads. The boys found sticks and hid behind trees and pretended to shoot.

Houses were robbed, simply to prove that they could be robbed. The robbers left notes demanding oil, or sugar, or a TV. I asked adults to explain, but their faces had turned to concrete, and they nudged me back into childish concerns. Sometimes the men left grenades—that’s what I heard, though I didn’t really know what a grenade was. I just knew they could cut you into a hundred pieces. I thought there must be hundreds of tiny fires inside. How else could one blow up a whole body? That little thing, that much power?

SOME DAYS THE world felt green, some days it felt yellow, but never a happy yellow.

All the girls who lived with my family returned to their hometowns. The only person who worked at the house now was a security guard, who stood in the front garden and smoked cigarettes in the evening while my father was at work. When my father returned home I still brought him his slippers and he still gave me a sip of his beer. But he listened to the radio and there was no wide smile. Just here’s a sip, be quiet.

Our curtains, which my mother had always thrown open at five each morning, suddenly remained closed. The drumming started up again, loud and far away. Then the car horns. My father stopped working after dark. My mother saw men, not boys, wearing Rambo-style boots and marching near the church. She stopped going to church. Instead she prayed in my room, where my siblings now slept sometimes, because it had the smallest window.

No one came over for dinner anymore. My mother served carrots and lentils, so many carrots and lentils. The potatoes she once used for stews came from the market, and nobody in my family went to the market anymore.

The electricity flickered on and off. The water stopped working. There was shushing, so much shushing, so much pressure to be quiet and still. Checkeka—shush, be silent. My parents said checkeka to me a hundred times a day.

There were more nights than days. I cried when the sun went down. Someone left a grenade at our neighbor’s house. By then I was six.

Soon after that, my uncle died. That’s what my mother said: He died. I asked if he was called to God and she said no. I heard conversations I didn’t understand about them coming. Them—always them, plural, spoken with a hiss. Guests had always been important. Guests were special. When guests arrived my mother put out roasted nuts and Coke. Them was not guests.

We sat in the house. Lights off. Everyone prayed, but nobody talked. No more teasing from Claire and Pudi that I was adopted, no more fearmongering that when my tooth fell out a new one wouldn’t grow in its place. There was nothing—no parable for the world closing in on itself, no fantastical story like the sky kissing the ground to make the morning dew.

Nobody tried to explain anything at all, except Pudi, who on occasion would step out of his Rambo fantasy to make up ridiculous tales: There’s this one bird who takes chickens and babies and little kids, and that’s why you can’t be outside at noon. If it’s thundering you can’t wear red, because if you wear red that’s a target for the thunder to eat you up.

It thundered a lot in those days. Every time we heard an explosion Pudi said, That’s thunder, and when I looked confused he added, Haven’t you heard thunder when it’s not raining? He told me that if anything worse than thunder happened, I should climb up into the space between the ceiling and the roof. It would take a long time for anybody to find me there.

My parents’ faces turned into faces I had never seen. I heard noises that I did not understand—not screaming, worse. My mother cried again. My parents whispered and I eavesdropped. I heard them say that some robbers had ransacked yet another neighbor’s house. They stole their money, tore their pictures from the walls, destroyed their furniture and lit it on fire. They nailed a note to the front door saying they’d soon return for their girls.

THEN ONE DAY my mother told me and Claire to pack a few things to go to my grandmother’s farm in Butare, a few hours south, toward the Burundi border. Claire loved it there and I loved it there and we revered our grandmother. She lived in an adobe-style house with small windows, a thatched roof, and rows and rows of sunflowers behind it—a house out of a fairy tale. I felt free there and never wore shoes. After the previous war, my grandmother had returned to her land with her five children, including my mother, the second daughter. My grandfather had stayed behind in Uganda.

A friend of my father’s arrived in a van early the next morning. It was still dark. I wanted to show my grandmother a ceramic mug I’d made at school. I asked my mother to take it off the shelf where she kept our artwork, but she insisted I leave it behind. I was furious. My mother didn’t care. She just handed me a bag of clothes and put me in the van alongside Claire and made me promise to behave. As we left she said, “Please do not talk.”

On the way out of Kigali, we stopped to pick up two of my cousins, girls Claire’s age. Their father, my uncle, was the one who had died but had not been called to God. The driver knocked on the door. Nobody came out. We stopped at other houses; other girls entered the van.

We all squished together in the middle of the bench seats, away from the windows. Sometimes we crouched on the floor. We rode up and over the hills, the curved slopes soft, like a body, past the stands of trees, the rice paddies, the hibiscus flowers, the homes with the red roofs and the homes with the tin roofs, the university.

The ride took forever. Claire insisted we play the silent game whenever I asked a question. We didn’t eat kabobs or buy the soap that we always brought to my grandmother as a gift. We didn’t even stop to use the bathroom.

In Butare, when we arrived, some of my cousins were already in my grandmother’s kitchen, the older girls peeling potatoes like city girls—not well. I idolized these cousins, their black freckles and fancy clothes. Now my grandmother circled my cousins like a lion, livid, determined to keep her pride safe and together. Earlier that day they’d snuck out of her house and walked down the red dirt road to borrow a neighbor’s dry-skin lotion.

Every hour I demanded an update on when my parents were coming, or at least my brother, Pudi. I missed him. My grandmother, cousins, and sister all just said, “Soon.” Nobody would play with me. I felt outraged at my mistreatment. I stopped eating and bathing and refused to let anyone touch my hair. After a few nights my grandmother took me, Claire, and my cousins to a different house to sleep.

The following night she took us outside and told us to climb inside the deep pit in the ground reserved for burying the wooden cask she used to make banana wine. Colors and sounds bloomed, then exploded around me. I didn’t sleep.

WHEN IT HAPPENED, we heard a knock on the door. My grandmother gestured for us to be silent—checkeka checkeka checkeka. Then she motioned for us to run, or really to belly-crawl, out past the beaming sunflowers through the sweet potato field.

I carried a rainbow blanket, which turned out to be a towel. Claire pulled my arm. The earth felt soft and lumpy, a bucket of broken chalk. Once we reached the tall trees we ran, for real, off the farm, out of the ordered rows, and deep into a thick banana grove, where we saw other people, most of them young, some of them bloody with wounds.

I had so many questions. The cuts looked too large, too difficult to accomplish, gaping mouths on midnight skin. Claire shut down. It could have been a second, it could have been forever.

We walked for hours, until everything hurt, not toward anything, just away. We rubbed the red-brown mud and eucalyptus leaves on our bodies so we could disappear. Prickers grated my ankles. We walked up and over and around and down, so many hills. We heard laughing and screaming and pleading and crying and then cruel laughing again.

I didn’t know how to name the noises. They were human and not human. I never learned the right words in Kinyarwanda. I hope they don’t exist. But without words my mind had no way to define or understand the awful sounds, nowhere to store them in my brain. It was cold and green and wet and then bushes and my legs were shaking and eyes, so many eyes.

My thoughts and senses became jumbled. Time felt hot. Silence was dizzying. My fear was bright blue.

WE NEEDED TO listen, so we avoided roads and walked instead only on the little paths animals used to pass through the scrub. If we heard any noise we crouched and froze.

Claire’s face—I’d never seen anything like it. I couldn’t look at her eyes. We stopped and knelt by a stream to drink. I started to shiver, despite the heat. I said to Claire, “I want to go home.” She stood up, pulled my wrist, and said, “We can’t stay here. Other people will come.”