Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda: Engaging with the Lives of Others [1st ed.] 9783030565619, 9783030565626

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xviii
Going to Rwanda (Laura Apol)....Pages 1-16
Turning Research into Art: The Process (Laura Apol)....Pages 17-31
Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision (Laura Apol)....Pages 33-48
Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry (Laura Apol)....Pages 49-64
Self, Audience, and Activism: Poetry of Witness (Laura Apol)....Pages 65-76
Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness (Laura Apol)....Pages 77-92
Public/ation (Laura Apol)....Pages 93-102
Poetic Respect; Poetic Letting Go (Laura Apol)....Pages 103-110
Conclusion: Engaging with the Lives of Others (Laura Apol)....Pages 111-118

Citation preview

Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 3

Laura Apol

Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda Engaging with the Lives of Others

Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research Volume 3

Series Editors Barbara Bickel, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL, USA Editorial Board Kakali Bhattacharya, Kansas State University, Manhattan, KS, USA Pam Burnard, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Walter S. Gershon, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA Peter Gouzouasis, University of British Columbia, North Vancouver, BC, Canada Andrea Kantrowitz, State University of New York at New Paltz, New Paltz, NY, USA Kelly Clark-Keefe, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA Alexandra Lasczik Cutcher, State University of Southern Cross, East Lismore, NSW, Australia Morna McDermott McNulty, Towson University, Catonsville, MD, USA Richard Siegesmund, Northern Illinois University, Dekalb, IL, USA

Arts-Based Educational Research continues to garner increased interest and debate among artists, arts writers, researchers, scholars and educators internationally. Further, the methodologies and theoretical articulations associated with Arts-Based Educational Research are increasingly employed across the disciplines of social science, education, humanities, health, media, communications, the creative arts, design, and trans-disciplinary and interdisciplinary research. This book series offers edited collections and monographs that survey and exemplify Arts-Based Educational Research. The series will take up questions relevant to the diverse range of Arts-Based Educational Research. These questions might include: What can Arts-Based methodologies (such as Arts-Based Research, Arts-Informed Research, a/r/tography, Poetic Inquiry, Performative Inquiry, Arts Practice-Based Research etc.) do as a form of critical qualitative inquiry? How do the Arts (such as literary, visual and performing arts) enable research? What is the purpose of Arts-Based Educational Research? What counts as Arts-Based? What counts as Educational? What counts as Research? How can Arts-Based Educational Research be responsibly performed in communities and institutions, individually or collaboratively? Must Arts-Based Educational Research be public? What ways of knowing and being can be explored with Arts-Based Educational Research? How can Arts-Based Educational Research build upon diverse philosophical, theoretical, historical, political, aesthetic and spiritual approaches to living? What is not Arts-Based Educational Research? The hinge connecting the arts and research in this Arts-Based Educational Research book series is education. Education is understood in its broadest sense as learning/transformation/change that takes place in diverse formal and informal spaces, places and moments. As such, books in this series might take up questions such as: How do perspectives on education, curriculum and pedagogy (such as critical, participatory, liberatory, intercultural and historical) inform Arts-Based inquiries? How do teachers become artists, and how do artists become teachers? How can one be both? What does this look like, in and beyond school environments? Arts-Based Educational Research will be deeply and broadly explored, represented, questioned and developed in this vital and digitally augmented international publication series. The aesthetic reach of this series will be expanded by a digital online repository where all media pertaining to publications will be held. Queries can be sent via email to Mindy Carter [email protected].

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/13575

Laura Apol

Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda Engaging with the Lives of Others

123

Laura Apol Michigan State University East Lansing, MI, USA

ISSN 2364-8376 ISSN 2364-8384 (electronic) Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research ISBN 978-3-030-56561-9 ISBN 978-3-030-56562-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56562-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover design: Sun Kyoung Kim This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

An artist and an activist are not so far apart. —Ava DuVernay

Series Editor Foreword: A Poetic Inquiry of Withness

In 2014, I was in the midst of proposal writing for a new book series with Springer, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research (ABER), now in its fifth year. I asked Laura to propose a book based on her poetic inquiry research in Rwanda, as I felt it would be an exemplar ABER book to include. I was more than delighted when she agreed. Thus began a six year relationship of author and editor, with intermittent pauses along the way, as Laura honored the rich cycle of her poetic inquiry (unknowingly birthed from her first trip to Rwanda in 2006) intertwined with her own complex life. This book is one outcome of her fourteen-year engagement with Rwanda and the community there—an evolving experience moving her as teacher, poet, investigator, vulnerable observer, and witness, culminating in this publication and letting go. The publication of this book, for me, is a remembering of my entry into this book series, as well as a closing marker in letting go of my role as Editor-in-Chief of the series before I rotate out and onto the Editorial Board. It is fitting that Laura’s book brings my tenure serving as Editor-in Chief for this pedagogically and arts research-rich international series full circle. I first heard Laura present her poetic research on Rwanda at an American Educational Research Association conference in 2013 in San Francisco. I was moved by her project and resonated with her experience of poet as witness, while simultaneously in awe of her compassionate and ethical way of being with Tutsi genocide survivors and their stories. I spoke with her about artist and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger’s matrixial theory and Ettinger’s concept of wit(h)nessing. Ettinger herself is a first-generation survivor of the Holocaust. Her matrixial theory articulates a relational process of co-becoming that unfolds through the aesthetic, to the ethical, and lastly to the political (in that order). It is a theory that articulates well the ethical, caring, and compassionate research Laura carried out within the Rwandan community—research preceded by and foundationally impacted by Laura’s many years of teaching and practice of writing as healing. Research that “turned over” her life with conflicting questions of her colonial heritage as a white American woman raised in the Christian church and the impossible possibility of returning to a place of amnesia in her life. Carrying always with her the weight of vii

viii

Series Editor Foreword: A Poetic Inquiry of Withness

awareness, poetry was her guide and teacher, from the early scribbling of notes on her first trip to Rwanda to the clear articulation of the powerful poetic inquiry path in the pages of this book. The compassionate foundation that lies under this book is writing as healing. Reading can also be healing and transformative, especially when the words are written by a seasoned, articulate, and wise teacher. In my first encounter I was startled by the push into confrontation with the raw lived genocidal experience crafted by the poet’s aesthetic plan. I was fragilized by the self-fragilization of the poet and her companions so present in the poems—poems revised again and again to meet the aesthetic, ethical, and political line of the poet, teacher, researcher, and activist. Following Laura’s model of honoring one’s capacity to listen while emotionally managing the unimaginable truth, I allowed myself to step back and prepare more fully to be with the truth-telling so poignantly placed with love and care onto the pages of Poetry, poetic inquiry and Rwanda: Engaging with the lives of others. This book is a heart-rending teaching, a post-traumatic aesthetic map laid down with clear and poignant theory and praxis to extend, serve, and guide poetic inquirers and the growing field of poetic inquiry. Emerging and seasoned poetic inquirers committed to interweaving the social, political, and historical aspects of life relationally, aesthetically, and ethically will be called to action by this book. Through direct and deliberate poetic voice, Laura Apol reveals to us how, as she puts it, we “cannot look; [and] cannot look/away” from the horror of genocide nor any other human-created atrocity in the world. Barbara Bickel Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL, USA

Preface

I first went to Rwanda in 2006 to plan, with U.S. and Rwandan educators and mental health professionals, a collaborative project using writing as a way to facilitate healing among young adult survivors of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. The project involved creating, delivering, and training others in a writing workshop model. During the course of the project, I made several trips to Rwanda, and when I worked with survivors and listened to their stories, I could not help but turn what I was experiencing and learning into writing of my own. Because I was a poet, that writing took the form of poems. With each return to Rwanda, I did more writing, and eventually my poems were published as a full-length collection, entitled Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015). However, the poetry that grew from my early experience in Rwanda was not, at the start, intended to be made public. Rather, in its early iterations, the process of writing poetry of my own played a more personal role: it increased my ability to listen deeply, to understand myself and others, to process what I was learning, and to respond to the trauma of survivors. It allowed me to document my own experiences and responses and to build and maintain relationships. It allowed me to tell a story, if only to myself, of what was changing over time—both in me and around me. In my subsequent returns to Rwanda, I came to understand my writing as “research poetry” or “poetic inquiry.” These aspects of the work emerged in the doing of them. I was inquiring into my own “lived experience” of Rwanda, conducting poetic reflections on my own learning and on the relationships that were developing, prompted by my need to communicate my understandings to an audience that was at first primarily personal but that later reached beyond myself and close others. The work brought together several aspects of my identity: myself as a poet, myself as an inquirer, my own ethical commitments, and myself as a collaborator in relationship with others. These facets both enriched and complicated the work in myriad ways. Always in tension, the poetic, the investigative, the ethical, and the relational aspects of the writing challenged what I knew about aesthetics, about scholarly inquiry, and about personal and professional interactions.

ix

x

Preface

This book is the story of that work. In Chap. 1, I begin with an account of my many trips to Rwanda, their purposes, and the relationships and reflections that they made possible across time. In Chap. 2, I outline the process of using arts-based research (in this case, research-poems) to tell the story of my learning—the increasing engagement and my own experience of and in post-genocide Rwanda. Chapters 3–6 use poems to demonstrate some of the priorities that arose and the complications that occurred in my use (and expanding understanding) of poetic inquiry: attention to aesthetic aspects of the poem (Chap. 3); the investigative demands of inquiry (Chap. 4); the ethical self-awareness of the poet (Chap. 5); and the relational accountability inherent in the work (Chap. 6). Chapter 7 identifies the way these aspects of poetic inquiry gain both richness and complexity as poems are moved into the public realm through public/ation. Chapter 8 provides a closer look at the intersecting obligations of trustworthy research practice, sensitivity to competing demands in inquiry, my own commitment to poetic craft, and an acknowledgment of the need for awareness, responsiveness and respect when working across cultures. The final chapter (Chap. 9) revisits the various affordances and tensions inherent in poetic inquiry and explores how an engagement with the poetic —both in research and in art—complicates and strengthens understandings of each. I conclude by advocating for poetic attention as social action, and, through the work in Rwanda, propose broader implications for arts-based research writ large. Throughout, my examination of poetic inquiry is grounded in my own lived experience and my commitments as a poet, as an inquirer, as an activist, and as a witness to the experiences and stories of others. I have used my own poems to demonstrate my growing understanding of myself, of poetry, and of the process of poetic inquiry as each evolved across visits and across years. Laura Apol Michigan State University East Lansing, MI, USA

Acknowledgements

All books are the result of collective effort, and a book that is decades in the making is particularly indebted to a wide circle of colleagues, friends, and family. While my errors are always and only my own, I owe to a great many people my deepest gratitude for the shared wisdom and energy that have brought this work into being. In Rwanda, I have, from the start, been surrounded by gifted and insightful companions. There were the young people who were part of the original writing-for-healing project, and there are relationships that have come into being or have continued across many years. Glorieuse Uwizeye (Dr. Uwizeye now) has been part of this work from the start; she gave feedback on drafts of early poems and articles, and she has provided valuable perspectives on this book as well; an impressive scholar in her own right, she is also a treasured friend. Louise Mukamwezi is one of the strongest, wisest, most courageous women I know, and I will be forever grateful for her presence in my life. Ernest Mutwarasibo (Dr. Mutwarasibo now) helped shaped my thinking about Rwanda and genocide over many years. Ntaganda Mukuru François-Xavier was the scholar-translator for my poems, but his teaching went far beyond words and my respect for him crosses languages and traditions. Much of this current book was written in Rwanda, where I owe many years of thanks to Janvier Hakizimana—driver, translator, negotiator, cultural mediator, teacher, guide, and friend; and to Immaculée Ingabire—an open-hearted woman, loving mother, and warm spirit who welcomed me into her life and her home. Nicki Hitchcott included me in her scholarly work on post-genocide Rwanda and shared with me her professional connections within and outside Rwanda. She also shared her family—Richard, Jake and Conner; getting to know them was pure delight. It was a lucky day when Nicki and my paths crossed so many years ago. My dear friend and Rwanda traveling partner, Roxanne Klauka, made everything better just by being there. She was terrific company on flights and in airports for hours and days on end; she listened as I tried out ideas, kept me on track to complete my daily list of research and writing tasks, rode busses and walked city

xi

xii

Acknowledgements

streets, and celebrated each milestone of manuscript completion—and in the process grew to love Rwanda, and my Rwandan companions, as much as I do. For the poems that give substance to this book: I gratefully acknowledge the Michigan State University Press, most particularly the director, Gabriel Dotto, who personally guided Requiem, Rwanda from start to finish, and who generously granted permission for me to use in this publication poems that originally appeared there. And I thank Stan Dragland, who a decade ago told me my drafts really were poems (but only after he went through with his red pen). Melanie Morrison, Stephanie Alnot, and Janine Certo each gave feedback in ways that enriched my understandings and that helped ready the poems for publication; I remain grateful for their expertise and counsel. David Wiley and Christine Root started me on this journey to Rwanda such a long time ago and guided my thinking through many trips back; I had no idea it would turn into the work of a lifetime, but I suspect they may have. Michigan State University supported my engagement in Rwanda through many iterations: the early writing-for-healing workshops; the drafting of poems for Requiem, Rwanda; the translation process; and now this poetic inquiry publication. I am more grateful than I can express for the opportunity I have been given, as a scholar, to follow where my passions and commitments lead. In the field of poetic inquiry, I have more mentors than I can properly acknowledge. Greatest gratitude to Carl Leggo, who introduced so many of us to the wonders of living poetically, both in and out of the academy; though his life ended much too soon, his legacy continues. I am indebted to Monica Prendergast, Pauline Sameshima, Ann Sullivan, Kimberly Dark, Sandra Faulkner, Mary Weems, Rich Furman, and a host of other colleagues and friends at the International Symposium for Poetic Inquiry; it is always an honor to learn from and with them. As for this manuscript: thanks to Chelsea Comeau, who read every word, sometimes several times, and gave feedback with a gentle but steady editorial hand; and to Isabella Tirtowalujo who, with her skills with word-processing programs, laid out and formatted in hours what would have taken me weeks or even months. Most especially, I thank Barbara Bickel, series editor for the Springer Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research (SABER), who saw the potential in this project and who had faith in it over many years and life events. Her patient encouragement never faltered; what a gift she has been. My personal thanks to Bruce and Kim Hoeksema, whose hard work and good humor give me space and time to write; to Ron May, Cathy Colando, Twila Konynenbelt, Stephanie Jordan, Scott Harris, and Cynthia Hockett for listening to so many stories; and to Lynn Fendler and Doug Van Epps, who opened their homes when I needed refuge in storms of many sorts. Thanks as well to Carol Mason-Straughan, a great cheerleader and someone who always sees more in me than I see in myself. If the best mirror is an old friend, then she is a best mirror, year after year.

Acknowledgements

xiii

My colleague and friend, David Pimm, deserves more than thanks. His vision for and faith in where I can go and what I can do always exceed my own; he challenges and helps shape my thinking in every conversation, and his sharp editorial skills save me from error, time and again. When a project spans two decades, there also are losses written between the lines. My mother, Gladys, and my daughter, Hanna, each witnessed the start but not the conclusion of this work. I miss them fiercely and see them in eagles and cardinals and foxes and herons and sandhill cranes, and, well, everything. Of course, the most important thanks I have saved for last: my father, Dallas, who for all my life modeled what it means to be a scholar and professor with heart. And, most of all, love and thanks to my son, Jesse, who has walked this road, and so many others, with me. It would be impossible to list all he has done to support and celebrate my work; always, I feel extraordinarily blessed to be his mom. Laura Apol

Contents

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

1 4 14 16 16

2 Turning Research into Art: The Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Writing Poems as a Form of Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Case for Poetic Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Process of Writing the Early Poems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poetry as a Way of Listening, Understanding, Processing, and Responding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poems as a Way to Listen Deeply . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poems as a Way to Better Understand Myself and Others . . . . . . . Poems as a Way to Process What I Was Learning . . . . . . . . . . . . Poems as a Way to More Meaningfully Respond to the Trauma of Survivors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

17 18 19 20

. . . .

. . . .

21 21 22 24

.. .. ..

27 29 30

3 Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision Aesthetics in Poetic Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Shifting Sense of Poetic Craft . . . . . . . . . . . The Role of Aesthetic Awareness in Revision . From Process to Product: Two Poems . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

33 33 34 37 39 47 48

1 Going to Rwanda Ten Visits . . . . . . Poems as Inquiry . Conclusion . . . . . . References . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

xv

xvi

Contents

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

49 50 52 63 64

5 Self, Audience, and Activism: Poetry of Witness . Witness in Poetic Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rwanda Poems as Witness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poems of/about Witness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

65 66 67 69 76 76

6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness . Withness in Poetic Inquiry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Poetry of Withness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Observation Poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Hypothesized Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Third-Person Story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Happening-truth versus Story-truth . . . . . . . . . The Composite Poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Co-habited Poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . . . . .

77 79 80 81 82 83 85 87 89 92 92

7 Public/ation . . . . . . . . . A First Audience . . . . . Return to Rwanda . . . . . Feedback on the Poems The Use of Names . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . .

4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry . Characteristics of Investigative Poetry . . . . . . . Investigative Poetry in Rwanda . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. 93 . 93 . 94 . 96 . 99 . 102 . 102

8 Poetic Respect; Poetic Letting Go . History of “The Poem” . . . . . . . . . . Sharing the Final Version . . . . . . . . Looking Back from a Distance . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

103 104 105 107 108

9 Conclusion: Engaging with the Lives of Others Art as Inquiry; Inquiry as Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Role of the Poem in Poetic Inquiry . . . . . . . . Broader Implications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Finishing Thoughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

111 112 114 115 117 118

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

List of Poems

Chapter 1 Going to Rwanda Poem Poem Poem Poem Poem

1 2 3 4 5

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

1 6 8 10 11

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

22 23 25 26 27 29

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

35 36 40 43 44 46

Language Lessons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Genesis: The Source of the Nile . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Milkfugue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

53 58 62

The Lives of Others . . . . . . . . . . . Amakuru . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Early April in Rwanda . . . . . . . . . Watching a Man Cut the Grass . . . Six Seconds . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

. . . . .

Chapter 2 Turning Research into Art: The Process Poem Poem Poem Poem Poem Poem

6 7 8 9 10 11

Second Language . . . . . . . . . . . . . Why Glori Hates Dogs . . . . . . . . . Genocide—I Begin to Understand. Nyamata Church . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Lesson on Gifts . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inoculation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

Chapter 3 Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision Poem Poem Poem Poem Poem Poem

12 13 14 15 16 17

Eucharist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At the Hotel Bar . . . . . . . . . . Why Glori Hates Dogs Left . Left . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Nyamata Church . . . . . . . . . . Nyamata Church . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

Chapter 4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry Poem 18 Poem 19 Poem 20

xvii

xviii

List of Poems

Chapter 5 Self, Audience, and Activism: Poetry of Witness Poem Poem Poem Poem

21 22 23 24

Rift . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rwanda Stands Up for Haiti: January 2010 . Mother of God . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Witness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

. . . .

70 71 74 75

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

81 82 84 86 88 90

Chapter 6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness Poem Poem Poem Poem Poem Poem

25 26 27 28 29 30

Return to Remera . . . . . . . . . Meeting François in Heaven . Confession . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Samuel and the Boys . . . . . . Pink . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dry Bones . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

. . . . . .

Chapter 8 Poetic Respect; Poetic Letting Go Poem 31

whose poem is it? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

Chapter 9 Conclusion: Engaging with the Lives of Others Poem 32 Poem 33

Twenty Years On . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Bright the Dead. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 118

Chapter 1

Going to Rwanda

The Lives of Others Nothing is only itself: in each brick, a story of mud, grass and sun, in each tree, a story reaching back to its roots. The seed of the avocado carries out to the world what its leaves have taken in, a young girl hides a coin in the oleander, saying aloud her wish, her prayer, her incantation of rage. Note the curved flute of the calla lily— how it rings the flower’s center like the scar around the sightless eye of Jean de Dieu

Sections of this chapter and several poems originally appeared in the essay, “Epilogue: Writer as Witness” in Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015, pp. 71–89). Used with permissions from the Michigan State University Press.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Apol, Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56562-6_1

1

2

1 Going to Rwanda

who each morning brings coffee, milk, and two hard-boiled eggs. Murakoze,1 I say— to the flower, to the man, to the milk and eggs. Murakoze to the brick and tree and buttery fruit. Murakoze to the girl bent over the bush’s begging hands. But I mean to say more. I mean to say this: each story holds a question that is more than itself. And each story is its answer. What, then, can I do but listen? (Apol, 2015, pp. 28–29) Before my first trip in 2006, I knew very little about Rwanda—a small country in East-Central Africa located very near the equator. I could not have found it on a map. I could not have named its capital city nor its national language. The single thing I knew was that it had been the site of a genocide in the mid-1990s. For a brief moment, the events of 1994 had caught the world’s attention, and mine as well. When Rwanda moved out of the U.S. news cycles, it moved out of my awareness too. In 2006, I also knew very little about poetic inquiry. As a published poet, my poetry had been primarily autobiographical. My first two collections, Falling into grace (Apol, 1998) and Crossing the ladder of sun (Apol, 2004), contained poems drawn from my life as a daughter, mother, relationship partner, and friend. I would have said that those poems grew out of the places in my life that “threw sparks”— places where edges rubbed together and I felt the need to turn to words to begin to work things out. I knew that poems could teach me. I also knew that poems could have an effect, could move both a writer and an audience; that poems could build connections between people and events; and that poetry could give shape to parts of my life that defied other ways of knowing and saying. I knew good poems could convey more than the words they contain, that they could explore and express loss and love, confusion and commitment, grief and celebration. I knew poems could ask and sometimes answer, that they could both speak and listen. But I did not know that they could be a form of inquiry. As a tenured professor at a research university, I had become experienced in other forms of inquiry—both qualitative and humanities-based. Yet when I set out for 1 Murakoze:

Thank you.

1 Going to Rwanda

3

Rwanda the first time, the nebulous ideas that sent me did not resemble anything I would have considered to be research. And although the writing-for-healing project that grew out of that first visit and spanned several of the subsequent trips that followed could have been framed as an intervention, I had no desire to hypothesize or to attempt to prove anything. I could not imagine pre- and post-tests to assess the efficacy of the model, and there were no conclusions I could envision putting forward with any certainty. The goal of the work was to create, along with my Rwandan colleagues, a workshop model that would facilitate healing among survivors of the genocide. I believed in the therapeutic value of writing and, together with my colleagues in Rwanda, I hoped to explore those potentials—not in a documented or researchoriented way, but in a way that allowed for story and growth, for self-expression and shared understanding. Throughout the writing-for-healing work in Rwanda, I engaged with (as I expressed in the poem that opens this chapter) “the lives of others,” and in the process I found myself to be what anthropologist Ruth Behar (1996) has termed a “vulnerable observer.” I was meeting people, hearing stories, creating and facilitating workshop sessions, interacting with narratives—and these observations and interactions were, as Behar has put it, breaking my heart. She writes that with this sort of observation: Loss, mourning, the desire to enter into the world around you and having no idea how to do it, the fear of observing too coldly or too distractedly or too raggedly, the rage of cowardice, the insight that is always arriving too late […] a sense of the utter uselessness of writing anything and yet the burning desire to write something, are the stopping places along the way. (p. 3)

Though Behar is writing about anthropology, her description captures my own uncertainties in those early visits to Rwanda. I was involved with, listening to, and observing people—their history, culture, politics, social structures. Yet, like Behar’s vulnerable observer, I was unable to remain detached in my observation. What evolved for me in the trips that followed were a set of writings—my own poems. I was, after all, a poet. So when I found myself engaged in transformative heart-making and heart-breaking experiences, learning about the country and its people, about the causes and the effects of the genocide against the Tutsi, and about the steps toward recovery that were being made by individuals and by the nation as a whole, I put those experiences into poems. The poems were a means of documenting what I was learning and beginning to understand, what I found troubling, confusing, moving, and inspiring. They were a way to make sense of things that were larger than anything I had previously experienced or known. It was only later that I learned of poetic inquiry as a means of doing arts-based research that, among other things, allows for a focus on the personal and the particular, for studying in detail the inquirer’s subjective lived experience. Producing research-poems often involves close examination—a means of exploring, documenting, expressing, and engaging in ways that allow for broader and more nuanced understandings of ideas, events, phenomena, relationships, and selves. Poetic inquiry

4

1 Going to Rwanda

rejects the notion of objectivity; it acknowledges and even invites the perspectives, passions, and biases of the poet-inquirer, and combines the force of scholarship with the emotion-recognizing and emotion-producing power of poetry. Given my background as a poet, and my (separate) background as a researcher, poetic inquiry became, for me, a way to bring those identities together and a means to better examine, make sense of, and convey the transformative power of my experiences in and of Rwanda. At the same time, the doing of that inquiry taught me, as I did it, something about the enterprise of poetic inquiry—its particular affordances and demands; what it offers, what it asks, and what it requires. Laying out the visits to Rwanda that resulted in poems, as well as the visits in which I brought the poems back to Rwanda with me, is a way to begin to tell the story of the work. This, then, is that story.

Ten Visits Visit 1, July 2006. When I made my first visit to Rwanda, it was also my first visit to Africa—a continent that seemed impossibly distant from the world where I had grown up. Raised in a small Dutch Calvinist farming community in the rural United States, I knew only bits and pieces about Africa, primarily from the slideshows of missionaries who came through our town, talking about the work they were doing and generating support. Then, in 2006, a colleague approached me after a poetry reading. He had recently returned from South Africa by way of Rwanda and had met with a woman, Marie,2 who worked with orphans from the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Marie, who had trained as a psychiatric nurse, had explained that while her organization was able to meet the physical, educational, vocational, and spiritual needs of the orphans, no one was attending to the orphans’ psychological needs. My colleague knew I had particular interest in the healing aspects of writing and he asked if I might wish to explore such possibilities in a project there. And so I made my first trip to Kigali, Rwanda to meet with Marie in order to think about whether and how writing might be used for psychological healing of post-traumatic stress among genocide survivors. Together, we developed a plan to co-create and to train Rwandan facilitators in a writing-for-healing process. We decided to work with universityaged survivors who would help shape, then participate in, the writing workshop. We hoped that these participants would eventually facilitate similar workshops in the communities in which they lived, studied, and worked. In our time together, though, we did far more than make preliminary plans for the workshops. It was through Marie that I was introduced to Rwanda. She met my plane and took me to my hotel. She shared her story, revealing details about her history, 2 In

my many year of writing about Rwanda, I have opted to use actual names or pseudonyms according to the wishes of those with whom I interacted (for more about this process, see Chap. 7). In this book, I use the actual names of individuals except in cases where I acknowledge in a note the use of a pseudonym. Here, Marie is a pseudonym.

Ten Visits

5

her experience of the genocide, and her life since 1994. She explained to me some of the colonial history of Rwanda, the years leading up to genocide, the country as it was moving forward in the decade that followed. She invited me for dinner, drove me to view coffee fields, took me to genocide sites, and answered my questions—my over-and-over-again questions—about how this could happen and how a country and its people could possibly begin to recover. She suggested books for me to read, taught me Kinyarwanda3 words, introduced me to traditional stories and proverbs. By the time I left, we were bonded in ways that I found surprising and a bit confusing; after only three weeks, I felt strong attachment to and affection for a woman I had only recently begun to get to know. Throughout my visit, I took notes, trying to find words to capture and convey conversations, experiences, and ideas. And on the way home, flooded by a multitude of conflicting and conflicted emotions, I wrote. I wrote because I was overwhelmed by the scope and cruelty of a well-planned and well-executed genocide that deliberately pitted co-workers, neighbors, and family members against one another in nearly incomprehensible ways. I wrote because I needed to acknowledge my own white privilege and to recognize the enormous advantages that went along with the circumstances of my life. In writing, I grappled with my own comfort in Rwanda— hot water, transportation, restaurant meals, and linguistic accommodation. I put into words the guilt I felt as I left—the ease of getting on a plane to return home to the life I had left behind. I wrote my confusion over colonial history and my rage about the ways white Europeans created and fed the hostilities that eventually led to the genocide. I wrote my anger toward my own country—a country that had known a genocide was being prepared for, had known a genocide was taking place, and still had left Rwandans to fend for themselves when it could have stepped into help stop the killing. I chronicled what I understood (and mostly what I did not understand) about the role of the church in genocide, and the ways priests were complicit in supporting—and even perpetuating—the killings. And I described the fierce attachment I felt toward the individuals I had met who had survived—who had lived through incomprehensible violence and loss, who were working to rebuild their lives, and who shared their stories with me. Through this tangle, and from the strength of these emotions, I wrote—on the plane for hours and hours. And afterward, when I got home, I moved the words from the notebook to my computer and laid them out as poems. They told a bit of the story that way; they helped me create a certain sense of things and allowed me to return to ideas, emotions, experiences that I was worried I would forget. I shared them with a few close friends. Later, I took several of them back to Rwanda to share with my colleagues there as well. The poem “Amakuru” uses the Kinyarwanda word for “How are you?” to explain the complexities of what I experienced, daily, on this first trip. 3 Kinyarwanda,

along with French (and now English), is a national language of Rwanda.

6

1 Going to Rwanda

Amakuru Each morning, Marie greets me how was your dinner how is your room how did you sleep How can each night have been good smooth sheets mist of dreamless sleep when each day I am split open by what I see-hear-feel I can never contain this— horror and beauty the ache and the grace Is it a curse or a gift a curse and a gift By day’s end my throat has closed itself to words, to breath, to anything but tears Amakuru: How are you One answer in the morning Ni meza—I am fine One answer at the close of day In October, Marie came to Michigan and stayed in my home. We met with Africanists, psychiatrists, medical personnel, and scholars of genocide, and together we laid out a rationale and tentative format for the first round of workshops using writing to facilitate healing, which would be offered in November, 2007. Visit 2, July 2007. In July, 2007, I returned to Rwanda to attend a wedding (though of course during this time some planning for the workshop also took place). The visit held days of ceremonies, all of which were rich with significance and powerful in their emotional impact. The bride was an orphan of genocide, participating without parents in long-standing rituals that were originally intended to form alliances between clans and family lines. The guests at the wedding were people whose histories were known to those around them, but that were completely unknown to me. As representatives from the families played out their various roles, I could not help but wonder about their scars—those I could see and those hidden beneath the colorful wedding finery,

Ten Visits

7

the stories behind the toasts and gift-giving and smiles. Standing in a present that was overshadowed by a genocidal past, they played out traditions with roots in history. I wore an umukenyero—a traditional wrap—that belonged to the mother of the groom. When she wound the bright cloth around me for the wedding, she said, “You are family now,” and I was: Tante Rouge—the fair-skinned “auntie” placed in the shade as the Rwandan sun burned through the days. The morning after the wedding, I found myself in the bedroom of the couple, with the other aunties, gathered to watch the bride and groom exchange milk as a symbol of fertility and health. When all the guests left after days of celebrating, I, along with the rest of the family, remained. A close friend of the family stayed beside me through the many events, explaining in English the cultural, religious, and historical significance of the activities. I was too busy taking notes to write any poems; the symbols, the ceremonies, the stories, and histories—I wanted to commit it all to memory, jotting page after page of questions and observations, impressions, and fragmented lines. Visit 3, November 2007. A few months later, I returned to Rwanda to co-facilitate the writing-for-healing workshop—a workshop that would employ narrative therapeutic writing techniques in the interest of diminishing the effects of PTSD and improving the mental health of genocide survivors.4 As a writer and teacher of writing, I had had years of experience creating and facilitating workshops, though never under this particular set of circumstances. As a result, the workshop design and structure depended heavily on input from U.S. and Rwandan mental health professionals and relied on participants to give feedback throughout. The overall design for the workshop combined a process writing approach (the format) with a therapeutic writing model (the content).5 The workshop meetings were held at the Kigali Genocide Memorial Centre, located in the heart of Kigali, the capitol of Rwanda, on a hill overlooking the city. Constructed ten years after the genocide, the Centre marks a site where over 250,000 victims of genocide are buried in mass graves. The building is surrounded by gardens, burial vaults, and walls containing the names of victims who have been identified and are buried there. It was a powerful site for our writing and conversations to take place; we met in a room of the on-site conference facility and took our meals together in the canteen. The six young people who took part in the workshop ranged in age from twentyfive to thirty-two, meaning they had been between twelve and nineteen years old at the time of genocide. All had lost extended and/or immediate family members in the genocide, and several had been made orphans from it. Some (but not all) of the participants were fluent in written and spoken English; these individuals served as translators for the others in the group when needed. The participants’ writing was done in Kinyarwanda; because it was their first language, and because it was the 4 For

a more detailed account of the writing-for-healing workshop (the rationale, the format, and the participants’ responses), please see Apol (2019). 5 In a process approach, writing occurs in multiple steps: brainstorming/freewriting, narrative writing, and revision. The therapeutic model breaks the writing content into three discrete stages: life before the trauma, the trauma itself, and life after the trauma, including hopes for the future. We combined these into a three-step writing process across three stages of participant life-experiences.

8

1 Going to Rwanda

language of the genocide, the participants believed Kinyarwanda was the language that allowed them the best access to memory, and thus to trauma and to therapeutic value. There was no time for me to write my own poetry on this visit; the participants’ stories (shared, written) awakened me to the specificity of their experiences. While before I had been shocked by the sheer numbers of the atrocities, in the workshop setting I was coming to know individual survivor stories through sharing, talking, reading, and writing. Though I did not draft any poems, I still did a great deal of writing that was not poetry in the time we were together—notes, flip charts, and memos about future versions of workshops that might take place. I collected words and ideas; I recorded in writing the responses of the participants as they went through the workshop process and contributed their thoughts; I found ways to save and to savor the language, the stories, the histories that were shared. Visit 4, April 2009. I returned to Rwanda in April, 2009. The return was timed to coincide with the fifteenth-year commemoration of the genocide, and several members of our group (facilitators and participants) presented an early version of the writing-for-healing project at the International Symposium on the Genocide Against Tutsi. Before we prepared a conclusion for our talk, we all met to discuss the results of the writing-for-healing workshop from the vantage of eighteen months and to learn what the participants had done with their narratives and with the writing-for-healing model. At the Symposium, we presented the work to a large audience of Rwandans and international scholars working on or in Rwanda. It was not until this trip that I first wrote a poem while on the ground in Rwanda. Being in Kigali in early April (the time of remembrance—a yearly commemoration) proved powerful for me as an outsider and stirred my desire to translate emotions into words. I was highly aware that I was standing in a place that, fifteen years earlier, had been the scene of some of the most horrific events of the late-twentieth century, but that now was beautiful and tranquil, full of tropical flowers and seasonal rains. I imagined how it might have been for Rwandans before the genocide began, how the first days of April, 1994, might have unfolded in ordinary ways—the rains, the sun, the muddy roads much the same as they were now, fifteen years later.

Early April in Rwanda Somewhere a woman is cooking beans. Her yard is quiet, the baby asleep on her back. She hums as she moves about the fire, breathing the familiar comfort of wood smoke, watching color bleed

Ten Visits

9

from clouds above the hills— the last moment between daylight and dark. Her legs fold beneath her as she crouches, milk-filled breasts shifting as she leans to stir the pot. This red dirt is what she knows, these hibiscus and nightshades in bloom. Next week the baby will be baptized: Charles, Claude, or Jean-Pierre. Time will tell his name, and she is listening. Somewhere a man is making a machete so sharp it can split pineapple, hack cane or sever the limb of the acacia. He loves the last light on the road, on the blade, on the plot of hard earth that will always be his. Somewhere a flower falls from a flowering tree. Each takes it as a sign: the days of rain are about to begin. (Apol, 2015, pp. 9–10) This was a multi-layered visit, important on many fronts. It was good to see the young people again; their lives had moved forward, and they were entering a period characterized by graduations, new jobs, weddings, and babies. The Symposium provided a rich backdrop of politics and history that once more transformed my view of the genocide and shifted my thinking about the poems. Through my experiences and relationships in Rwanda, I was learning the human aspect of the genocide, as well as beginning to understand certain effects of Rwanda’s colonial history, the role of the West in the years and months and weeks leading up to genocide, and the failure of powerful nations to intervene even though they knew a genocide was taking place. I was moving from being a naïve observer, filled with a turbulent and complex mix of emotions, into being a more informed witness to the outcome of my own country’s policies. My writing was less a way to process new information; I started to see my writing as a way to do something—a form of social action. The more I learned, the more I wanted to share. And poetry was my platform. I started taking the poems more seriously then, and began reading widely about the genocide—testimonies of survivors; accounts written about the roles of the church, the media, the U.N.; works that focused on the planners, perpetrators, and victims;

10

1 Going to Rwanda

reports about the gacaca6 process and the Arusha International Tribunal Courts. I needed a more solid sense of the past and present, a wider backdrop against which to write. Visit 5, January 2010. In 2009, I received university support to return to Rwanda exclusively to work on poetry for what I by then intended would be a book-length collection of poems. In early 2010, I spent three weeks in Rwanda, staying at a small guesthouse in Kigali. Occasionally I saw some of my Rwandan friends, but for the most part I worked on my own. My days developed a rhythm of reading, walking, drafting, and revising. I began to describe what I observed of everyday life around me in Kigali—sometimes against the backdrop of history, sometimes as an end in itself. Many of my poems tried to capture this sense of dailiness—of life in and around the city. I combed through the notes I had taken in the past, visit after visit, filling in gaps, finding the poems that waited between the lines. I felt more like a resident poet, less like a visitor. I drafted nineteen poems during my stay, recasting and revising nine of them after I returned home. “Watching a Man Cut the Grass” is a poem about daily life in post-genocide Rwanda, and about my own sense of how I, as an observer, was affected. In the writing, I worked specifically with the uses of line breaks for effect.

Watching a Man Cut the Grass My first sight of a machete at work: blue-black blade, honed silver edge, it slices even and clean, catches red dirt, flings it sharp against my thigh. (Apol, 2015, p. 40) Visit 6, May 2010. I stretched my university funding to cover an additional trip in May, 2010, and went back to Rwanda to write what I expected would be the final poems for the book. As my flight landed in Kigali, I wondered about the need for the work I was doing and my own role in the doing of it. These persistent and unresolved questions proved to be the start of what emerged as a theme of the trip: a sense of my 6 The

gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha) court was part of a Rwandan community justice system responsible for bringing to trial those accused of genocide.

Ten Visits

11

role and responsibility as an outsider, taking in stories, sights, historical moments, and present-day events. I had come a long way from the early jottings I had used to sort my feelings in a notebook on the plane. When I revisited a genocide site that I had viewed on my first trip, I brought to the experience and the writing that followed not only the horror I had experienced on the early visit, but also greater knowledge of the country’s complex history, the role of the Church in genocide, and the lasting questions that had been growing in me in the intervening years. I recognized, on an experiential level, that it was not enough to say “Never Again;” I was beginning to imagine my poems as a call to action. I believed my words had work to do in the world. I drafted nine poems on this trip, all of which later appeared in the collection, with two additional poems written after I returned home. “Six Seconds” is a poem that articulates my sense of the magnitude of the genocide, and my ongoing sense of shock when I learned how killers viewed killing as a “job” to be done during “work” hours. The poem is one of several I wrote to try to communicate the kind of psychological and spiritual disconnect and manipulation that was necessary for genocide to take place.

Six Seconds One hundred days, one million people: ten thousand deaths per day. The killers consider it a job: Gukora akazi,7 they say to each other; Kujya ku kazi,8 to their wives. They work by day, sleep at night. The job requires speed, so they press on. Ten thousand a day, fifteen-hour days— that’s 666 per hour: the mark of the beast. Round down. Six hundred per hour, ten per minute, six seconds to chop a limb, slice an artery, start the graveward journey with rape, 7 Gukora 8 Kujya

akazi: Do the work. ku kazi: Going to work.

12

1 Going to Rwanda

to pile stones on the living, force a husband to kill a wife, or a woman her child, to pour gasoline, strike the match. Breathe in, breathe out—one is dead; breathe in, breathe out—another. Every six seconds for one hundred interminable days. (Apol, 2015, p. 11–12) Visit 7, January 2013. In early 2013, I again traveled to Rwanda. My purposes were many; I wanted to visit the young people once more. I wanted to hear about the continuing results of the writing-for-healing project. And as a poet, I had one additional poem I wanted to research before finalizing the manuscript—a complicated poem about milk that would conclude the collection, drawing on images that appeared throughout the other poems, and describing how categories of race and ethnicity were constructed in Rwanda. The milk poem required that I learn more about the cultural past of Rwanda, and so, accompanied by a Rwandan friend, I visited museums in Kigali and elsewhere in the country, listening to stories, reading about the mwami (Rwandan kings), and gathering information about colonial history and the role of milk, both in historic and in present-day Rwanda. As it took shape, the milk poem came to represent the full-circle route I had traveled over the years: from a writing-for-healing project for others, to writing for understanding for myself, to writing as a means of prompting readers to action; from poems that focused on my learning and coming to terms with the recent genocidal past of Rwanda, to a poem that was deliberately researched and constructed to convey what I had learned and how I made sense of the complex pre-colonial and colonial history as I now understood it. The main reason for my 2013 trip, though, was that I was ready to share the almostcompleted poetry manuscript with my Rwandan colleagues and friends. In part, I wanted to show them that this was one more “result” of the writing-for-healing work we had done together—that their stories and the experiences of the Tutsi in Rwanda would go forward to an English-speaking readership, not as verbatim narratives but framed by my own observations, mixed in with my reading and the many stories I had gathered and heard. I also needed to know if things were “factually” correct from a Rwandan standpoint and to determine whether there were any poems or parts of poems that my colleagues, as Rwandans, found problematic. As well, I wanted to know whether they wished to be identified in the book (and occasionally in the poems) by their own names, or if I should provide pseudonyms. They could really

Ten Visits

13

only answer that question after they had read the entire manuscript and we had had an opportunity to talk through what was involved. Above all, I wanted my Rwandan colleagues to be included in what was to be the final stage of the poetic process. They had accompanied me in this work for years, both in person and as the voices that called me to write; I wanted them to accompany me in this last stage as well. Visit 8, April 2014. Just over a year later, I returned to Rwanda. I did not go to write, nor did I go to research. The purpose of my visit was to be in Rwanda for the twenty-year commemoration of the genocide, termed Kwibuka 20: Remember, Renew, Unite. There were events to mark the genocide of twenty years past—memorial events that reminded Rwandans and the world of what had taken place along with gatherings (national and local) to honor the dead and to reiterate the need for confession, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Representatives came from around the world to observe the occasion; I was part of a group of journalists, filmmakers, scholars, writers, and humanitarians who attended the commemorative events at the Amahoro stadium—the site where thousands of Tutsi had gathered for safety during the genocide. A theatrical event titled “Shadows of Memory,” testimony both by survivors and by perpetrators, and keynotes by the then-U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and by Rwandan President Paul Kagame were part of the day-long activities, with gatherings and speakers extending for days before and after the main Kwibuka event. Visit 9, February 2015. Requiem, Rwanda, the collection of poetry based on my experiences in Rwanda, was completed in 2014. At that time, I also received a grant for translating a subset of the poems into Kinyarwanda. It was important to me that my Rwanda poems not only be about Rwanda and Rwandans, but also be for them. I corresponded with colleagues to identify a translator; although the young people I had worked with were native Kinyarwanda speakers and many were highly skilled in written and spoken English, they maintained that I needed to work with someone who would understand the literary nuances of poetry as well. Eventually, I was introduced to and worked with Ntaganda Mukuru François-Xavier, a retired professor of English from the University of Rwanda in Butare. François and I began our work together from a distance, but it soon became evident that we needed to meet face-to-face to get a sense of one another both as persons and as writers. The translation process was new to each of us, and it was important for us to develop a trust relationship that extended beyond words. In February, I traveled to Rwanda to work directly with François. The translation process was rich, interesting, and occasionally fraught. I learned a great deal about language, about differences in poetic sensibilities across cultures, and about the layers of negotiation that take place as poems move between languages and contexts. François and I had differing ideas about which poems to include. There were parts of several poems that did not translate easily into Kinyarwanda, and there were interpretations that François offered that did not match my intentions. One of my colleagues from the project, a very bright and fluent young woman, met with us on several occasions to help mediate some of the cultural differences around the poems. Eventually we arrived at a subset of fourteen poems entitled Emwe N’imvura Irabyibuka [Even the Rain Remembers] (Apol, 2016). When the

14

1 Going to Rwanda

collection was published in Rwanda in early 2016, François and I felt a shared sense of ownership in the final product; we had forged a strong and lasting respect for one another in the process of our work together. Visit 10, February 2016. Requiem, Rwanda had come out in 2015, and I returned in 2016 with copies to share with my colleagues and to bring to bookstores and genocide memorial sites. As usual, I spent time with the participants from the original project, with the translator François, and with a range of individuals I had come to know over the years. The visit marked the end of this part of my work in Rwanda; it brought closure to the writing of the poems that described and explored my experiences, and as such, the trip proved bittersweet—a celebration and a culmination of work that had engaged me for nearly a decade. Although I have continued to return to Rwanda, and although I continue to stay in touch with my friends and colleagues there, the publication of the poems (and of the translated versions of some of the poems) represented a moment of transition. It had been almost ten years since my first visit, and my interactions, expectations and understandings had evolved enormously in that time. The relationships that had begun in the early years had continued, taking various forms as our respective opportunities, life circumstances, and attachments changed over time. The country had changed as well; the recovery that was beginning in 2006 had continued, making Rwanda at the time the books were published a place that boasted ever-increasing economic progress and stability. And I had changed—as a poet, as an academic, and as a citizen of the world. In particular, I had seen first-hand how poems could raise awareness and bring about the possibility of action; I had also learned that poems could create, document, and represent my own changing understanding and growth.

Poems as Inquiry By the time Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015) was published, I had made almost yearly visits to Rwanda for close to a decade, resulting in a cumulative time on the ground of roughly nine months. Between my visits, I hosted Rwandans in Michigan; I presented the Rwanda work-in-progress at conferences, workshops, and poetry readings; I wrote regular notes and emails to my colleagues and friends in Rwanda; I continued to read books, journal articles, news accounts, blogs, novels, poems, and legal documents from the times before, during, and after the genocide. Rwanda was the focus of my professional, my poetic, and often my personal interest. I completed a total of fifty poems, thirty-two of which appear in Requiem, Rwanda; of those, fourteen are translated into Kinyarwanda in Emwe N’imvura Irabyibuka (Apol, 2016). In Requiem, Rwanda, I included a preface to serve as an overview of the book (pp. xiii–xiv); a narrative prologue that functions as a brief history of Rwanda (pp. xv– xx); a lengthy essay entitled “Epilogue: Writer as Witness” (pp. 71–89) that provides

Poems as Inquiry

15

insight into the workshop, the writing of the poems, and my own view of myself as a poet in Rwanda; extensive notes on the poems (pp. 63–70); and a list of additional sources and resources (pp. 95–98). My point is this: it was not a project that happened quickly. It unfolded in slow stages, with the writing-for-healing workshop growing from and providing experiences that opened onto further experiences, that opened onto poems that were revisited, revised, and eventually published. Undergirding it all were the relationships that developed, and many aspects of the time spent interacting, reading, listening, and personally engaging were recorded in a preliminary way in volumes of notebooks, on scraps of paper, and in electronic folders of files. Yet it was only in the doing of it that I began to see this work as poetic inquiry—a way to examine, deepen, broaden, shape, and bring forward my interactions, my responses, and my poetic ruminations. Viewing the poems as instances of poetic inquiry gave me an opportunity to return to the poems in order to engage them not only as poetry, but also as a way of expanding my understanding of my time, thoughts, encounters, and relationships in Rwanda. The poems taught me about my own lived experience; at the same time, they documented what I was learning about poetry, Rwanda, myself, and others. The writing-for-healing workshop that initially led me to Rwanda fostered relationships, questions, and commitments that took me back, again and again, and poetic inquiry allowed me to see those patterns—both from a distance and from close up. As a poet, my way of working through, understanding, asking, examining, and expressing is through poems. And as a medium that allows for, and even demands, close attention to the personal and the particular, poetry is a vehicle for inquiries that can be directed and redirected, revisited, revised, and reimagined. The process I am inquiring into is my own experience, and what poetic inquiry makes possible is an intense and nuanced look at that experience in all its complexity and messiness. The poems themselves give words to those experiences; as inquiry, they record, examine, and make sense of my shifting commitment to poetic craft, my evolving understandings and investigations, my changing view of myself and my responsibility, and the relationships with others that developed across time. As a way of conducting research, poetic inquiry provides an orientation that determines what is attended to, what the poet-inquirer brings to and takes from the task at hand. It has particular affordances—aesthetic, investigative, ethical, and relational—and these affordances allow for great richness and insight. Of course, it is not the case that no other versions of poetry or inquiry attend to these things; many do. But poetic inquiry is singular in that it brings these aspects together in a way that merges the power of poetic artistry, of scholarship, of political activism and self-awareness, and of relational accountability. These are the great potentials—and also the great tensions—that are at work.

16

1 Going to Rwanda

Conclusion This book explores aspects of poetic inquiry that both give it strength and make it complicated. Because it is difficult to talk about these aspects in the abstract, I use my work in Rwanda as an example.9 Just as poetic inquiry taught me about my poems, spending time with my poems taught me about poetic inquiry. Over and over, I have looked closely at the poems and the processes, then have stood back from them, only to move close in again. In so doing, four aspects have emerged as recurring features of the poems themselves and of poetic inquiry more broadly, appearing both as affordances and as demands: the artistic aspect (attending to aesthetics), the scholarly aspect (attending to investigation), the ethical aspect (poetry of witness), and the relational aspect (poetry of withness). In the chapters that follow, each one will be explored and then demonstrated, using examples from my Rwanda poems. This, the first chapter, opened with “The Lives of Others,” a poem I wrote on one of my later visits to Rwanda. The poem is, for me, a microcosm of the work of poetic inquiry. Through the doing of it, I have come to believe that ultimately writing poems as inquiry provides a means of attending to the lives of others in their multi-layered richness and complexity, recognizing at all times that nothing is only itself. Poetic inquiry is a way of seeing, up close, the brick, the tree, the seed; of noticing the girl, the flower, the man. It is a way of hearing, with gratitude, the question in the story, as well as that question’s answer. Most of all, it is a way to listen.

References Apol, L. (1998). Falling into grace. Dordt College Press. Apol, L. (2004). Crossing the ladder of sun. Michigan State University Press. Apol, L. (2015). Requiem, Rwanda. Michigan State University Press. Apol, L. (2016). Emwe N’imvura Irabyibuka [Even the rain remembers]. (M. F.-X. Ntaganda, Trans.). Mudacumura Publishing House. Apol, L. (2019). Stories as change: Using writing to facilitate healing among genocide survivors in Rwanda. In H. Grayson & N. Hitchcott (Eds.), Rwanda since 1994: Stories of change (pp. 232– 252). Liverpool University Press. Behar, R. (1996). The vulnerable observer: Anthropology that breaks your heart. Beacon Press. Hartnett, S. J. (2003). Incarceration nation: Investigative prison poems of hope and terror. AltaMira Press. Sameshima, P., Vandermause, R., Chalmers, S., & Gabriel. (2009). Climbing the ladder with Gabriel: Poetic inquiry of a methamphetamine addict in recovery. Sense Publishers.

9 My use of the writing I did in Rwanda as an example to discover and illustrate various elements of

poetic inquiry is similar to Climbing the ladder with Gabriel: Poetic inquiry of a methamphetamine addict in recovery by Sameshima et al. (2009) and Incarceration nation: Investigative prison poems of hope and terror by Hartnett (2003). Though all three projects are alike in their desire to weave together a theory and an example of poetic inquiry, the approaches are quite different, offering an interesting counterpoint to one another.

Chapter 2

Turning Research into Art: The Process

The writing-for-healing project was itself filled with challenges—some of the expected sort, others unexpected. There were questions about writing, trauma, and healing that ran beside and beneath every phase of the work; there were decisions about possible publication of the participants’ writings that needed to be talked over. There were language barriers, cultural gaps, and difficulties in finding time for the entire group to meet. But one of the biggest challenges for me as the facilitator was my struggle with how to tell the story of our work together to the world outside our small community. Though the project was both encouraged and partially funded by my academic institution, the writing-for-healing work was never intended to be “research” in a traditional form. It is true that we were designing an intervention: to have individuals write as a means of facilitating post-genocide healing and reducing post-traumatic stress. However, we did not attempt to formalize the study through assessments, nor did we wish to report the results in any conventional way. Along with being challenged professionally, I was also challenged personally. I had not anticipated the way the work would affect me. I had facilitated formal and informal writing classes and workshops for years; in each setting, there would be participants who used writing and the workshop environment to process weighty issues of loss, grief, shame, anger, and fear. I was no stranger to writers using words to come to terms with painful emotions and experiences: death, betrayal, illness— trauma of many sorts. As a result, I was convinced that the path through writing toward healing was to focus on the narrative structure and the words themselves—to allow the writer to craft the experience on the page, moving closer, moving away,

This chapter originally appeared, in a slightly altered form, as “Writing poetry in Rwanda: A means for better listening, understanding, processing, and responding” in Journal of Poetry Therapy: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Practice, Theory, Research and Education, 30(2), pp. 71–83. Used with permissions from the publisher.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Apol, Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56562-6_2

17

18

2 Turning Research into Art: The Process

pacing, shaping, negotiating, owning, and, in this way, being more able to control rather than be controlled by the feelings the trauma invoked.1 But Rwanda was different. I spent extended and intensive time with the workshop participants. I was not prepared for the personal attachment I felt toward these young people whose lives were so distant and so different from my own. I had not anticipated the level of personal commitment I would feel working alongside these survivors as they translated emotion and experience into words. And I had not imagined the ways their personal traumas—and the trauma of genocide itself—would affect me in a profound and ongoing way. These personal challenges were not inconsequential; they reverberated through the project and through my life after the project. They haunted my speaking about the work, and they resounded through my silence. Every informal conversation and formal presentation held within it the untold and the unsayable; eventually, as a writer and scholar, I did what I had facilitated as a workshop leader: I wrote. I wrote in my room at the guesthouse in Kigali; I wrote on the streets of Butare; I wrote in the backs of taxis, in the garden of the genocide memorial, over breakfast, lunch, and dinner; I wrote at the churches; and I wrote on the flight home. I carried a notebook wherever I went and—moment by moment—I recorded what I saw, heard, read, and felt. Without intending to, through poetry I found a way to manage my own emotional responses, as well as a means to examine my lived experience through poetic inquiry.

Writing Poems as a Form of Inquiry Growing out of the project as it did, the writing of poetry became central in my own attempt to express and convey aspects of my work in Rwanda. I wanted readers to understand what I was learning about Rwanda—the history, the people; I wanted words for the complexities that were part of it all. In their finished form, my poems had work to do in the world. They became, for me, a way of “bearing witness”—both to the stories of others, but also to the story of learning that was my own. However, it was actually the process of writing poetry that allowed me to engage more openly and productively with the challenges of the project in the moment, as well as with the ongoing echoes that persisted after the project was done. Through writing my own poems, I was afforded opportunities for listening, understanding, processing, and responding to others. The poems as I wrote them allowed me to be more fully present to the emotions and the experiences (my own and those of others) that were at the center of the work in Rwanda.

1 For examples of the structure and effects of therapeutic writing, see the work of James Pennebaker

(1997).

Writing Poems as a Form of Inquiry

19

The Case for Poetic Inquiry Writing poems as a way to negotiate the complicated work I was doing draws on several aspects of poetic inquiry—that is, the use of poetry as a means of investigation, a strategy used by researchers “to seek to enter lived experiences with creative openness to people and experiences and understandings” (Leggo, 2008, p. 7). It “combines the wide creative possibilities of poetry and the far-reaching scope of qualitative research” (Stewart, 2012, p. 46). The number of researchers who use poetry as/in research has grown significantly in the past several decades. They opt for poetic inquiry rather than for more traditional research methods and forms for a range of reasons. Poetry offers a different way of knowing; it is a means to enlarge understanding, to resist clear and undemanding interpretations and move closer to what it means to be human (Faulkner, 2009, p. 16). The way language is used in poetry demonstrates and discloses the human mystery, allowing readers to “find [themselves] in poems” (Richardson, 1998, p. 459). Poetry allows researchers to create data and present findings in a more powerful and emotionally poignant form than they would be able to in prose research reports; through poetry, the researcher can attend more fully to ethical considerations—to honor relationships that develop in a project, to acknowledge the complexities of the human experience and resist single and singular interpretations of phenomena, to write with engagement and connection, and to provide material in a moving and evocative manner that “appeals to our senses and opens up our hearts and ears to different ways of seeing and knowing” (Butler-Kisber, 2012, p. 143). As a means of research, poetic inquiry attends to the aesthetics of poetry; it has integrity as an investigative practice and product; it is ethical in that it brings a heightened awareness of the power dynamics of self with others; and it encourages, acknowledges, and honors the relationships that develop in the inquiry process and beyond. For all of these reasons, the use of poetic inquiry to enter and describe the Rwanda project was important both to my understanding and to my telling of that work. Writing poems to explore and explain permitted a widened range of opportunities “to discover new aspects of [my] topic and [my] relationship to it” (Richardson, 2000, p. 923). It made it possible for me to convey complex interactions with data, with sources, and within myself as a researcher (Richardson, 1992, 1997; MacNeil, 2000). It allowed me to engage in ongoing “poetic rumination” (Leggo, 1999, 2005). And it became a way of “coming to know what is on the edge of knowing” (Stewart, 2012, p. 46). My poems put forward and reflected on my own lived experience of the project, “sorting it into expression and communication through language” (Prendergast, 2009, p. xxii). In this way, the poems became a means to say what otherwise might not be said (Eisner, 1997; Richardson, 2000; Cahnmann-Taylor, 2009)—to give shape to the unthinkable and to provide language for the unsayable. The process was reflexive and recursive; the writing of the poems included multiple aspects of my own experiences, reflections, written responses, and revisions. In its messy complexity, it undid the divide between my personal reaction and my professional response. While eventually I focused more on the product (the “finished” and publishable/published poems that

20

2 Turning Research into Art: The Process

served, among other things, to present the work), it was the writing process itself that expanded my emotional range, permitting me to explore, through words, the many layers that were part of my lived experience.

The Process of Writing the Early Poems While the duration of the original writing-for-healing project as conducted in Rwanda was relatively short (contained within a three-year period: one visit in 2006 for coplanning with Rwandan colleagues; one visit in 2007 to conduct the workshop and train facilitators; one visit in 2009 to interview participants), my own writing, which began in those interactions, continued for a number of years following and a number of subsequent visits. The early process of writing was fairly straightforward: on my first trip, I recorded most of my ideas and observations in a notebook I carried with me everywhere I went. The notes were sketched into rough drafts of poems on a yellow legal pad during the flight that brought me home. Back in the U.S., I typed up those scribblings and shared them with a few close friends—a shorthand for where I had been and what I had learned. These were what Cahnmann calls “fieldnote poems” (2003, p. 34); as such, they were a way to let lines and stanzas and words do their work in helping me sort through my early understandings and reflect on the beginnings of the project on which we had embarked. Throughout each of the subsequent project visits, the process expanded to include other kinds of note-taking: I continued to jot personal notes; during discussions I would write up memos to capture conversations; and during the writing workshop itself I wrote down group ideas on chart paper that could be widely viewed. At the end of the workshop, I collected participant writings to the extent the participants had decided to share. Later, interviews and narratives were transcribed and translated from Kinyarwanda and French (then the national languages of Rwanda) to English, and I wrote my own commentaries on what these transcripts contained. The sources for my poems also expanded with time. I listened to stories told by survivors, both socially as well as in the workshop setting, and to interviews before, during, and after versions of poems were created. I visited museums and memorials. I read novels, first-person accounts, historical documents, newspapers, magazines, and online resources as a means to gather stories, understand systems, and fill in gaps in my understanding. And through it all, I wrote—sometimes as a way to capture what was taking place; sometimes as a way to comment on aspects of the work, using poetry as a vehicle to more thoughtfully engage the complexities of the project.

Poetry as a Way of Listening, Understanding, Processing, and Responding

21

Poetry as a Way of Listening, Understanding, Processing, and Responding In the poems that follow, I explore the ways a set of early poems—all taken from my first trip—served multiple functions and provided expanded opportunities for me to listen, understand, process, and respond. It is not the case that without poems I would have been unable to do these things; it is simply that the writing of poems allowed me to do these things more deliberately, more completely, with more consciousness, and better. As a form of research, this approach made it possible to discover more significant aspects of the work and my relationship to it, and to sort, grapple with, express, and reflect on my experience in words. What follows are the first typed drafts of these poems. Of the fourteen poems written on that first trip, only four were eventually—after major revision—included in the published collection, Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015). Two of those—“Why Glori Hates Dogs” (eventually retitled, “Left”) and “Nyamata Church”—are included here in their original forms. Using examples from early in-progress poems is, for me as a poet, a non-trivial risk in that they represent writing that I did not deem strong enough for inclusion in the finished collection, and/or in the writing I revised extensively before I was ready to put it forward in the world. These were not poems written with a public readership in mind. Consequently, for me they represent a stage in a process rather than a product.2 Yet I am choosing to include these original poems because at the time they were written they were meant to serve a different goal, and I believe that examining the impulses and the processes that produced these unpolished versions is as interesting and important as a later examination of the more finished and more public work.

Poems as a Way to Listen Deeply In their creation, the poems allowed me to attend in a different way to the voices and words around me. As an outsider in Rwanda, I was having conversations and hearing stories in translation, told first in a language that was not mine. While I could not understand the words in Kinyarwanda, when they were turned into English, they had a lyricism born from unfamiliarity, from the newness of image and phrase, as well as from the words themselves. Poetry let me explore this Otherness of language—and through the exploration of language, to hear the ways I was both separated from and connected to the individuals who spoke, and whose stories I heard and held. In the poem “Second Language,” I condense moments from several conversations I had with Fleur,3 a woman with whom I spent a great deal of time on early visits. In the first eleven lines of the poem, I use my own language to set up and frame Fleur’s 2 To demonstrate the revision process that took place before the poems were made public, the revision

of two of these poems is included in Chap. 3. pseudonym.

3A

22

2 Turning Research into Art: The Process

words (as they were translated for me); however, in the final quotation, I turn directly to Fleur herself, as she speaks familiar words to me in my own (English) language. The poem explores the connection I felt and found as I listened to her.

Second Language Fleur offers friendship in a language we do not share. In Kinyarwanda she says: Friendship is a foot rather than a hoe preparing the ground for planting. She gives presents she wants me to open: A gift is a bird and you must let it out. If it flies away, I will help you catch it. Over time, her hello shifts from formal to closeness: Mwiriwe is for strangers; Wiriwe is for friends. When I leave, this woman whose parents and siblings have all been killed offers in my own language these familiar words: Good-bye. Sister. Presenting Fleur’s voice in the poem demonstrates the ways listening—to words and phrases that were unfamiliar, as well as to those that were familiar—became a way to engage and relate.

Poems as a Way to Better Understand Myself and Others When I listened deeply through poetry, I heard the ways stories came together, came apart, came to me. I heard ways the events in 1994, half a world away, connected to me, implicated me—both in the past and in the present. The poem “Why Glori Hates Dogs” is the result of a conversation I had with one young survivor, Glorieuse. Working in public health, Glori was one of the coplanners of the writing workshops; therefore, I spent many hours with her during my first Rwanda visit. She provided collaboration, transportation, translation, and my first direct window into the 1994 genocide.

Poetry as a Way of Listening, Understanding, Processing, and Responding

23

At one point, she told me she was surprised by my interest in Rwanda. The genocide, and the Western (lack of) response to it, had led her to believe that white people did not care about Rwanda. As she put it, “During and after genocide, I couldn’t understand why white people hated us so much, why they would leave and let us be killed, why they didn’t do something.” I had no response—it was my question as well. In our weeks together, Glori and I became friends. As we shared parts of our respective lives, I mentioned that I missed my dog, who was waiting for me at home in the U.S. Glori told me she feared and hated dogs, as did most Rwandans, since dogs had been used in the genocide to locate Tutsis in hiding and had run wild, feeding on the bodies of the dead. Then, Glori told me the story of what had taken place at one site of the killings—L’Ecole Technique Officielle, a local technical school—and the role of the U.N. Peacekeepers (and the dogs) in that place. The story was powerful and devastating. Overwhelmed by my own responses to Glori’s earlier question and to her story, I needed to write. In the writing, I tried to find the meeting place of these elements, and in the process to explore the broader and more horrific meaning of whiteness in Rwanda. In this early poem, I wrote my way into an ending that conveyed my “felt” experience hearing Glori’s story and that expresses in a single stanza more than I could ever say in a format that is not a poem.

Why Glori Hates Dogs4 Glori tells one story with two sets of dogs: Rwandan dogs, and the dogs of the Europeans. Two sets of dogs, U.N. soldiers, Tutsi children and trucks. At the start of the story, the school became a shelter for whites and Rwandans, Europeans and Tutsis taking refuge together. Outside the school walls there were bodies and killing, bloodied machetes in plain view; inside the walls there were guns and U.N. soldiers: peacekeepers, the soldiers were called. As if terror and peace were the same. Glori tells how the soldiers would not kill the killers, would not interrupt their mission, would not shoot to protect the living or the soon-to-be dead. 4 The

poem “Why Glori Hates Dogs” (later titled, “Left”) was originally published in Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015). Used with permissions from the Michigan State University Press.

24

2 Turning Research into Art: The Process

Fearing disease, the soldiers instead shot the Rwandan dogs that fed in plain view on the Tutsi corpses at the gate. The smug, patient killers looked on in peace. That’s one reason Glori hates dogs. As the story continues, the other dogs enter. Trucks came for the waiting whites —the ex-pats, soldiers and priests. Trucks left behind the black Rwandans. Twenty-five hundred Tutsis died in that place when the trucks pulled away. No room on the trucks for babies with black skin. Glori falls silent, then adds: They didn’t want their dogs to be killed. So they took them along. The Europeans left the children and saved their dogs instead. The rage in her face is so pure it is like looking into the face of God. “Why Glori Hates Dogs” is not only an expression of understanding something about Glori—that is, that she hates dogs, and why; it is also an understanding of myself— of white privilege, my privilege, and the harm that that privilege has brought about. There is judgment at the end of the poem—Glori telling me, a white woman, about the power and the inhumanity of whiteness, speaking in the voice and with the face of the Divine.

Poems as a Way to Process What I Was Learning The writing of poems helped me to listen deeply and to better understand myself and others. As well, the writing of poems helped me to make sense of information that was new, or that was troubling, or both. Like many people, before I left for Rwanda, I believed I had a fairly good grasp of what constituted genocide. I had done some reading and I had watched some documentaries and some Hollywood films (e.g. Hotel Rwanda). I knew about the horrors of mass killings in Rwanda and the role ethnicity and ethnic conflict had played. But having a basic understanding of genocide is not the same as looking into people’s eyes, hearing their stories, reading their testimonies, and seeing the myriad

Poetry as a Way of Listening, Understanding, Processing, and Responding

25

human bones arranged in neat rows, memorial site after memorial site. It is not the same as visiting a church or school where thousands of people died. The numbers were staggering. It was too much to take in, and I had to write in order to try to understand. How could this happen? And to women? And to children? Where was God? No one could give me answers, but my poems served to help me articulate the questions and begin to put into words some of what I was learning and how that learning made me feel.

Genocide—I Begin to Understand It began when they called us cockroaches.

Genocide is not war. Genocide has no goal but to destroy, now and forever, a population: a national, racial, ethnic or religious line. Genocide wants people to hate themselves; separation and demonization are the weapons. Genocide wants to keep children from being born; sexual brutality and AIDS spread through rape are the weapons. Genocide wants to keep children from growing up; murder of infants and slaughter of families are the weapons. Genocide shows no mercy, takes no pity, hears no stories, has no heart. To commit genocide, you have to forget that your victims are human. To commit genocide, you have to forget that you are human as well. More than understanding genocide in broad terms, I also found that I needed to process the role of the church in the genocide. Historically, churches had been safe places to flee to when violence broke out in the country. However, in 1994, churches

26

2 Turning Research into Art: The Process

became the sites of some of the greatest atrocities. There are many shocking examples where the Church and church personnel (priests, nuns, pastors) failed to prevent—and often were complicit in—the genocide itself. Having been raised in a church, I found these stories of betrayal and violence to be some of the most distressing I encountered on that first trip; they were impossible for me to understand. At each genocide memorial I visited, I needed to write as a way to give voice to my confusion and grief; in particular, I needed to write after my visit to Nyamata, a Catholic church where it is believed that 10,000 people were killed in the church itself and another 35,000 were killed in the areas around the church compound. The church currently serves as a memorial site (with bullet holes and grenade damage still visible); it has on display rooms filled with clothes, weapons and human remains, including the shocking skeletons of a young woman and her infant who were killed together.5 I needed to write to describe the scene; in the writing, I found words for the anger I felt toward organized religion and toward God, and my religious background allowed me to include phrases that resonated with Biblical overtones: land of milk and horror; body and blood of a Savior; and Golgotha, which means “place of the skull”—a site where Jesus was forsaken by God.

Nyamata Church6 Nyamata means place of milk. In this room are the stinking piles of clothes. Here bullet holes riddle the ceiling and walls. There is blood on the altar, a glass box of useless rosaries, as safely preserved as those priests who chose comfort and fled. The hinged niche for the Host is open, is empty. God is nowhere to be found. In the back, a brick wall bears the stains of smashed infants, the agony of mothers’ cries. A skeleton tells the unspeakable brutality of rape—a broken child bound to a broken mother’s bones. 5 This

mother–child skeleton is discussed in a poem that appears in Chap. 5. poem “Nymata Church” (later titled “Genocide Site 1: Nyamata Church”) was originally published in Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015). Used with permissions from the Michigan State University Press.

6 The

Poetry as a Way of Listening, Understanding, Processing, and Responding

27

The catholic air quivers in the heat. Rows of fractured bodies, split skulls, form a silent congregation in this land of milk and horror. The bodies and blood here are not those of a Savior— not in this Golgotha, this God-forsaken place of the skull. Writing into and of my own growing understanding was not merely a way to convey what I was learning; it was integral to that learning process. The creating of poems was a means to make sense of, to find words for what was unfathomable and impossible to comprehend.

Poems as a Way to More Meaningfully Respond to the Trauma of Survivors Writing poetry provided a means to express what to me felt inexpressible: shock, horror, grief. But it also allowed me to respond to the people I met and the stories I heard with compassion, love, and greater understanding. Creating and sharing the poems became a way to honor the stories I was told, the connections that were made, and the feeling I had that through these relationships I was forever changed—required to act in response to what I had learned and felt. In this poem, I give words to how powerfully connected I felt to Marie,7 a woman with whom I worked. The poem draws on the gifts that I gave to Marie as a symbol of all I was leaving behind when I left; it describes the transformation I felt even after such a short time, and the sense of loss I experienced as I readied to return home.

A Lesson on Gifts I did not expect to fall in love— not with a country I had never seen not with people I hardly knew. But I did. It is the last morning and my bags are packed. 7A

pseudonym.

28

2 Turning Research into Art: The Process

In the hotel bar, we say our goodbyes over coffee and milk. Marie speaks first about the work we will do. Marie speaks next about the plans we have made. I breathe into the space around my overfull heart, as if I can make more room, more room with each rise and fall of my chest. I do not talk about our work. I do not talk about our plans. I tell the story of silver: two silver bracelets on my arm. Five years and I never take them off: not to swim, not to shower, not to sleep. I slide the bracelets from my arm— the one that was a gift from a friend the one that was a gift from myself. They are silver on the wood table, and then silver on the arms of a woman I have grown to love in one short week. I think of all that history of me staying on wrists in Rwanda— all that heart of me in Kigali, staying behind. I am leaving my history, I am leaving my heart, but I am leaving more: naïveté and ignorance, complacency my ability to ignore are also being left behind. My arm feels bare, vulnerable; on the way to the plane, I feel unutterably alone with all I have lost.

Poetry as a Way of Listening, Understanding, Processing, and Responding

29

Nothing could have prepared me for the things I would experience and learn on that first trip to Rwanda. Getting ready to fly home, I was aware that, although others had been trapped while the genocide went on around them, I had the power of choice; I could leave when I wanted, return when I chose. I could go back to my life of relative safety and ease. But, in another sense, it was clear to me that the life to which I was returning no longer existed. I had changed, irrevocably, and I needed to put that transformation into words. I needed to write about what I saw as the real risk that the trip to Rwanda contained for me—risk to my thinking and my heart—and about my complicated re-entry into my (no longer) existing life in the U.S.

Inoculation I came to Rwanda ready for typhoid, yellow fever, malaria, and rabies, meningitis, tetanus and hepatitis B. If I drink the water, or am bitten by a dog, if I’m stuck by an unclean needle or cut by a rusty knife, if a mosquito pierces my white skin I am prepared. Who told me this would make me ready? Why did I think I could be kept safe by the sterile sting of vaccines under my skin, by swallowing white pills for twenty-eight mornings once I return to the amnesia I call home? Reflecting on my time in Rwanda, I felt acutely the privilege of skin and nationality that kept me safe—from accident, from disease. But through the writing of the poem, I also recognized I was not safe at all. I knew that my life had turned over, and that although I might be allowed—even encouraged—to leave my new knowledge behind, the truth was, I could never forget.

Conclusion In speaking about my work in Rwanda, there is a tendency to focus on the scholarly product: the poetry collection that was a result of years of writing and returns. But these early poems, drafted on my first visit—rough, overwritten, simplistic, naïve,

30

2 Turning Research into Art: The Process

and sometimes off-putting in what they grapple with and do not fully understand— demonstrate in their unfinished state the importance of the process itself, the need for a range of means that could account for emotion, and the emotional complexity of the project, as well as the transformative power inherent in the act of writing. I decided not to try to publish most of these poems, primarily because they were too raw and too centered on my own distress in the face of the incomprehensible pain of those who were survivors of the genocide. As poems, they fell short; most did not have a future and were not intended for a public readership. Instead, they were poems for my learning on and through. They were teaching me—about Rwanda, about myself, and about ways to work with and on difficult and complicated undertakings that resist traditional means of documenting processes and/or reporting outcomes. Working in Rwanda, creating and facilitating a survivor project, pushed me (personally and professionally) far outside the world I knew or expected. It required that I find an alternative way to articulate my experiences—not only through a public and publishable scholarly record of the work, but also through engaging with and learning through the doing itself. Intuitively, and then more deliberately, I used the writing of poems as a means to explore and explain, in a thoughtful and nuanced way, the complications inherent in the task. The process of writing poems of my own allowed me to engage with and make sense of what proved to be expectedly and unexpectedly difficult knowledge. Through poetic inquiry I was able to imagine poetry both as a result and as a method that could contain, hold, and honor the challenge and the complexities of the work.

References Apol, L. (2015). Requiem, Rwanda. Michigan State University Press. Apol, L. (2017). Writing poetry in Rwanda: A means for better listening, understanding, processing, and responding. Journal of Poetry Therapy: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Practice, Theory, Research and Education, 30(2), 71–83. Butler-Kisber, L. (2012). Poetic inquiry. In S. Thomas, A. L. Cole, & S. Stewart (Eds.), The art of poetic inquiry (pp. 142–176). Backalong Books. Cahnmann, M. (2003). The craft, practice, and possibility of poetry in educational research. Educational Researcher, 32(3), 29–36. Cahnmann-Taylor, M. (2009). The craft, practice and possibility of poetry in education research. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, & P. Sameshima (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences (pp. 13–30). Sense Publishers. Eisner, E. W. (1997). The promise and perils of alternative forms of data representation. Educational Researcher, 26(6), 4–10. Faulkner, S. L. (2009). Poetry as method: Reporting research through verse. Routledge. Leggo, C. (1999). Research as poetic rumination: Twenty-six ways of listening to light. In L. Neilsen, A. L Cole, & J. G. Knowles (Eds.), The art of writing inquiry (pp. 173–195). Backalong Books. Leggo, C. (2005). Pedagogy of the heart: Ruminations on living poetically. The Journal of Educational Thought, 39(2), 175–195. Leggo, C. (2008). Autobiography: Researching our lives and living our research. In S. Springgay, R. Irwin, C. Leggo, & P. Gouzouasis (Eds.), Being with a/r/tography (pp. 3–23). Sense Publishers.

References

31

MacNeil, C. (2000). The pros and cons of poetic representation in evaluation reporting. American Journal of Evaluation, 21(3), 359–368. Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Opening up: The healing power of expressing emotions. Guilford Press. Prendergast, M. (2009). Introduction: The phenomena of poetry in research. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, & P. Sameshima (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences (pp. xix–xlii). Sense Publishers. Richardson, L. (1992). The poetic representation of lives: Writing a postmodern sociology. Studies in Symbolic Interaction, 13, 19–29. Richardson, L. (1997). Fields of play: Constructing an academic life. Rutgers University Press. Richardson, L. (1998). Poetics in the field and on the page. Qualitative Inquiry, 4(4), 451–462. Richardson, L. (2000). Writing: A method of inquiry. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (2nd ed., pp. 923–948). SAGE Publications. Stewart, S. (2012). Writing to the edge of what we know. In S. Thomas, A. L. Cole, & S. Stewart (Eds.), The art of poetic inquiry (pp. 43–55). Backalong Books.

Chapter 3

Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision

Poetic inquiry—that is, lived experience presented in the form of research-poems— was powerful for me as a process, as I explored my changing understandings of Rwanda, post-genocide; it allowed me to listen deeply, better understand myself and others, work through what I was learning, and meaningfully respond to the trauma of survivors. These were, however, private, internal goals. As I lived more fully with and into the writings, and as I returned to Rwanda several times over several years, adding to the number and range of poems and going further into topics I had started to explore, I began to believe that the poems could go into the world more widely and could reach an expanded readership. In short, I wanted to move this work into a more public arena.

Aesthetics in Poetic Inquiry At times, poetic inquiry as a means of research struggles with the “poetic” part of the term. Various scholars have addressed this shortcoming (Faulkner, 2007; Piirto, 2002; Sullivan, 2004; Prendergast, 2009), encouraging poetic-inquirers to learn and practice the craft of poetry in their work. They admonish that research-poets should not sacrifice the aesthetics of poetry for the sake of inquiry. And yet, keeping the emphasis on the poetic is often extraordinarily challenging; the traditional forms of inquiry that power the poetry often work against the elements of a good poem— elements that Sullivan (2009) term “poetic occasions”—particularly the nuanced, evocative language that makes a poem open to interpretation and a multiplicity of meanings. The poems that appear in this chapter were originally published in Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015). Used with permissions from the Michigan State University Press.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Apol, Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56562-6_3

33

34

3 Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision

This sense of the poetic proved especially complicated for me in my work in Rwanda. The early poems were written for private, not public, readership and while they were effective in capturing, working through, and conveying my impressions— my shock, my confusion, and my sense of connection—as a poet I knew these writings were not, really, what I consider to be poems. And if they were poems, they were not, in their existing form, the poems I wanted to write. To my mind, they lacked poetic skill; they were at times clunky, obvious, overwritten, or prosaic. They used few poetic devices and exhibited little awareness of poetic craft. They had accomplished their initial purpose—to help me make sense of my experiences in Rwanda—and they existed primarily for me and/or close others (my Rwandan colleagues, as well as my family and friends at home). But I was clear they were not yet poems that I felt able to bring to a more public reading audience. Still, I wanted them to find their way; I knew that the poems, and the stories they told, had work to do in the world. I believed “the goal of the poem is to change the way we write and think and feel about events” (Faulkner, 2019, p. 50). If, for the reader, poetry creates and “makes the world” through words (Leggo, 2008, p. 166), then I wanted those words to create for others what I had felt and learned and known in Rwanda. To do so, those words had to be, as Coleridge famously put it long ago, “the best words in the best order” (1835, p. 84). They had to attend to the conventions of poetry and speak with full attention, allowing the reader to live the poem rather than merely read it. I wanted the poems to go further—to reach an audience that might not already know Rwanda—and I wanted the details of the poem to be microcosms of larger understandings, to allow my own construction and the conveyance of my personal experience to become more widely relevant. It is not through broad strokes that poets communicate universality; it is through attention to the particular, and I felt that by giving close and careful attention to the particulars of my own experience, to the nuances of my own observations and wonderings, I could allow others to find themselves in poems and “come away with the resonance of another’s world” (Nielsen, 2008, p. 96).

A Shifting Sense of Poetic Craft To accomplish my goals, the poems had to be crafted with care and attention to detail. So, I revisited the poems as a poet, with a focus on poetic craft. In an often-quoted maxim, poet Richard Tillinghast (2005) wrote, “The willingness, the ardent desire even, to revise, separates the poet from the person who sees poetry as therapy or selfexpression” (p. 245). Therefore, I began the intensive process of revision. Revision was, for me, re-vision—not merely editing or making changes (though editing was certainly involved), but stepping away from the poems, then going back in and reseeing (re-[en]visioning). Some of the poems were written and rewritten a dozen, even two dozen times. One particular poem required several months of revision before I felt the ending was “right.” Some longer poems were edited down to only a few lines; others were subsumed into larger poems; others, abandoned altogether.

A Shifting Sense of Poetic Craft

35

The more I could read as an outsider, as a poet accustomed to engaging with poetic craft in other contexts, the more I could bring that set of skills to this task, which was (both in content and in process) so markedly different from my usual writing experience. While in previous collections I had revised poems in order to include fresher metaphors, more memorable phrases, more interesting and surprising word choices, alliteration, clever turns, and other deliberately “poetic” devices, it became clear to me early on that the aesthetics and the craft I should most attend to within this particular set of poems was different. Rather than lyrical flourish, I relied much more on condensing an event, a story, a perception, an interaction into something that might produce a visceral response in a reader or listener. The poems themselves are primarily plain-spoken; the poetic craft lies in its invisibility—a reliance on juxtapositions, line breaks, plain and straightforward word choices, and pacing to place the reader inside the poem. My intent was that, with as few words as possible, and sometimes in a deceptively simple way, my poetic decisions allowed those readers to participate to some degree in whatever had led to my creating of the poem. To demonstrate this shift in my sense of aesthetics and poetic craft—a reliance on extreme condensation, plainspoken language, and the power of startling juxtapositions or unexpected endings—I offer two poems: “Eucharist” and “At the Hotel Bar.” “Eucharist” is a poem based on a story I was told and that I then researched. It is now common knowledge that during the genocide, many priests deliberately allowed (and sometimes encouraged) killers to come into their churches to kill the congregants seeking shelter there. Part of the horror surrounding the particular priest in this story is that before he turned his congregants over to the killers, he first administered last rites to those gathered, acknowledging in this act his full awareness that they would soon die. Initially, the poem that was based on this story was significantly longer, describing the event in greater detail and in a much more self-consciously “poetic” way. Eventually, through the process of ongoing and repeated revision, the poem shrunk to only ten lines, with the title serving as the first word of the first line, in this way pushing the reader immediately and insistently into the poem itself. The poem relies on brevity, understatement, and juxtapositions for its effect. The final couplet is intended to startle readers, who hear—directly and unexpectedly—the actual voice of the priest in all its irony and atrocity.

Eucharist has always been about betrayal— the Judas kiss before death. Some priests were complicit, they say, offering shelter then opening doors for the killers to come in.

36

3 Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision

One blessed the bread, then unlocked the gate: I have other Christians. You can have these. (Apol, 2015, p. 18) “Eucharist” contains just over forty words. It relates a story I heard and then read (“they say” makes it clear I am receiving and passing something along) rather than recounting my own experience. In order to bring the reader “into” the poem and to allow the reader to experience the story with me, I opted for condensation, simplicity, straightforward language, and a startling concluding couplet in the priest’s own voice. “At the Hotel Bar” is another example of a poem that demonstrates my shifting sense of what constitutes aesthetics and poetic craft; this one is even shorter and more straightforward than “Eucharist,” once more pushing the reader immediately into the poem through the use of a title that leads directly into the poem’s opening lines, and again relying on plain-spoken language and an unexpected conclusion for its poetic effect. The poem (which initially had two parts, with several stanzas in each part) recounts a personal experience from an early visit I made to Rwanda. In the poem, the journalist drinking Primus beer at the bar is the American Stephen Kinzer, former New York Times foreign correspondent, who was transcribing Rwandan survivor testimonies for his 2008 book, A thousand hills: Rwanda’s rebirth and the man who dreamed it—a book about the rebuilding of post-genocide Rwanda as told through the life and words of Rwandan President Paul Kagame. In this book, Kinzer includes first-person testimonies of a number of survivors. As a journalist and foreign correspondent, he previously had heard and written about difficult things from all around the world, yet the transcriptions he was working on at the hotel bar in Rwanda made him—a seasoned professional—weep, publicly and unexpectedly. In early versions of the poem, I wrote myself and my surroundings more deliberately and descriptively into the poem. I realized in the revision, though, that readers did not need to see me nor picture where we were sitting; they did not need a description of the woman who went to comfort Kinzer, nor of the bartender who sought to intervene, nor of the reactions of others around who watched openly or quickly turned away. The focus of the poem needed to be on the man, entirely, and the moments that led up to his breaking down.

At the Hotel Bar the journalist in flip-flops is typing up his notes. Now he eats fried chips, now he drinks draft Primus1 as he works. 1A

brand of Rwandan beer.

A Shifting Sense of Poetic Craft

37

Now he turns from the keyboard, his hands over his face. His sobs wrack the room. (Apol, 2015, p. 39) Once again, brevity, the use of straightforward language, innocuous details followed by the unexpected “turn” at the end all give force to this seven-line poem. Both “Eucharist” and “At the Hotel Bar” originated as a way for me to understand something that had completely overwhelmed me—the story of a priest who enacted his priestly duties at the same time that he knowingly offered his congregants to killers; a stranger who collapsed into loud and public weeping and who (I only learned later) was an esteemed journalist accustomed to reporting on atrocities around the world. In their early forms, each of these was a long poem that devoted many stanzas to my own need to work through—and put into words—my personal responses to confusing and horrifying events. Yet later, when it came time for the poems to become public, it became necessary to remove my own responses and to focus solely on these two characters and these two events in an aesthetic and poetic style that was very different from the styles I had used in previous collections of poems.

The Role of Aesthetic Awareness in Revision As I revised, moving away from poetic flourish and toward condensation of language and juxtapositions, I had to learn what was for me a new aesthetic and to hold in mind additional aspects of poetic effectiveness, including accuracy, audience, and relational responsibility (each of these will be more fully discussed in subsequent chapters). Overall, as I thought about revision, I asked, Does this piece exhibit sufficient poetic craft and care? What would make this better, poetically? This attention to aesthetics required that I draw on my own experiences as a reader, writer, and teacher of poetry, and my own awareness of poetic elements and poetic craft. It also required that I get feedback on the poems from other poets and poetry mentors. Early in the process, when I had completed about a dozen poems, I brought them to a mentor and said, “I’m not sure what these are; perhaps they are not poems, but merely personal workings-out.” He assured me they were poems, but then explained what was problematic about them poetically: “You wish so much for readers to get what you’re saying—it’s so important to you—that you’re writing the ‘message’ into the poems. Here and here and here.” One by one, he picked up poems scattered on the table, saying, “You have written beyond the end of the poem.” He took a pen and marked out the final lines of several poems, then handed them back. It was an early example not only of attending to poetics, but also of imagining readers who would actively engage the poems—readers I could trust to understand the work. When it came to issues of accuracy, I held in mind these questions: What do I know, not know, need to know for this poem? How will I find out? How will I be certain

38

3 Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision

I’ve gotten it right? How will I communicate this learning in a poem? In a poetry collection? I completed additional research, read first-person accounts, conducted interviews, and, eventually, brought every poem back to colleagues in Rwanda to be confident I had been accurate in my poetic portrayals, my explanations, and my notes. I wanted to be sufficiently certain of the facts, because if the facts were in error, the rest of the writing would be suspect as well. (The topic of accuracy and investigation is explored more fully in Chap. 4.) In further considering audience, it was necessary for me to step back from the poem to ask, To whom am I speaking in this poem? What do I wish them to understand? As well, I asked in very practical terms, What do they already know? What do they need to know? I also asked questions about myself and my own positionality, Why am I writing this poem? How can I (can I?) as a white woman from the U.S. speak (to) this? Sometimes, this double awareness of myself and my audience led me to revise the poem; sometimes, it made it clear I would need footnotes or other materials to help readers navigate the poem’s unfamiliar content; sometimes, it meant I was not the right person to create the poem, and I would let it go altogether. To better address issues of audience and my own position in writing about Rwanda, I consulted Rwandan academics, U.S. university colleagues in African Studies, colleagues who work across cultures, colleagues who study white privilege and racial justice, and colleagues who work with survivor testimony and poetry of witness. (The themes of audience, positionality and witness are explored more fully in Chap. 5.) Finally, I needed to consider the relational aspects of my poetry. Though I was primarily writing about my own lived experience, my engagements in Rwanda always took place in a context, within a community. Therefore, the questions that guided me here were, What obligation do I have to the people connected to this poem? Am I telling this story, presenting this situation, in a way that has integrity, both as research and as an aspect or reflection of a human relationship? I was clear that I would never have intended harm to the subject or subjects,2 but I needed to be certain I had not unwittingly violated cultural, historical, personal, ethical norms. My Rwandan colleagues served as guides to me in this regard, and I brought all the writing back to them for their feedback, taking their suggestions into account before making the work public. (This awareness of interpersonal and relational accountability is more fully explored in Chaps. 6–8.) When the pieces moved from individual poems into a larger collection—eventually published as Requiem, Rwanda—each of these aspects again came into play. Rather than asking the poems to stand alone (the way of most poetry collections), I believed (with the help of mentors and colleagues) that this publication would benefit from some framing to help readers more fully appreciate the history and background 2 Here, I use the word “subjects” to refer to the individuals with whom I worked. The terminology for

these relationships—at once research-based and highly personal—has been one that I have struggled with fiercely, both on my own and with others (see Chap. 7). While eventually I have elected to call these individuals my “companions” as a way to honor the personal nature of our connections, at times I have chosen other terms (“subjects,” “participants,” “colleagues,” “co-planners” and the like), depending on the aspect of our time together that I most wish to bring to the fore.

From Process to Product: Two Poems

39

of Rwanda as well as the project that led me there, the facts related to various poems, and my own sense of obligation as a white woman, a researcher, a witness, and a writer in Rwanda. I chose to include in the publication a number of supporting documents: a foreword written by a colleague with extensive experience in Holocaust testimony that described the need for work such as this; a preface that outlined my own introduction to Rwanda; a prologue that provided a brief history of Rwanda (from earliest times to the present); notes on the poems to help a reader understand unfamiliar terms or references and to provide further information about places, persons, and events; an epilogue in which I discussed my sense of myself as writer and witness; and, finally, a list of additional resources to direct readers toward further understanding. While the poems themselves attended to the demands of poetic craft and aesthetics, each of these framing sections represented an added attempt to think through issues of accuracy, to attend to the needs of the reading audiences that I had in mind for the poems, to acknowledge my own identities and positionality, and to honor the responsibility I felt toward the relationships that had developed across time. The title, Requiem, Rwanda, was also frequently revised. Early titles for the collection that I used as “place holders” were not viable; in retrospect, many proved to have overtones that worked against what I was trying to do. Eventually, I chose a requiem format for the organization of the book,3 and then opted for a title to match. I had struggled with how to arrange the poems so that it was clear I was telling my own experience of Rwanda, rather than speaking for the people with whom I had worked or about whom I had read. The requiem form allowed me to use a recognized and recognizable framework to scaffold my personal account of being an outsider learning about the complicated history and the tenuous beginnings of recovery of the country and its people. Literally, the Latin word “requiem” means “rest”—and that is what I wanted the book to offer. Most people think of a requiem as a funeral mass, and it is often that. But I wanted to imagine that after the incomprehensible grief of the genocide there could be rest—not only for the dead, but for the living as well. Again, the revision of the title was made for the sake of aesthetics, as well as for the audience I wished to address and the ethical concerns I had as an outsider writing for others about my own experiences and observations.

From Process to Product: Two Poems There are two poems, “Why Glori Hates Dogs” and “Nyamata Church,” that were written on my first visit and that helped me, early on, work out on paper what was moving and complicated about my early interactions and learning. They now serve to demonstrate the sorts of revisions I made to the poems. These are the only poems 3I

am grateful to my colleague and friend, David Pimm, for suggesting the format of a requiem as a way to structure and frame the collection.

40

3 Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision

from the first visit that later showed up in a more finished form in the published collection, and both of them were used here in Chap. 2 to demonstrate the process of poetic inquiry. Although, at the start, each of these was written in the format of a poem, I knew that initially they (like so much of the early work) lacked poetic and artistic integrity. They were clearly drafts; I did not know when I wrote them whether they would ever become something more. They can now serve as examples of the process my work underwent as it moved from what was essentially private writing to writing that could be read by a wider audience in a more public context. For clarity of process and purposes of comparison, I include here a marked copy of the revisions that ultimately took place in each poem (though usually the revisions occurred across numerous drafts),4 followed by an explanation of what I hoped for the revisions to accomplish, particularly in terms of aesthetics, accuracy, awareness of self and audience, and relational responsibility. Then, because the marked copy is difficult to read and cannot include format changes such as line breaks, stanzas arrangements, and so on, I include the finished poem as it appears in print. The unmarked original versions of each of the poems may be found in Chap. 2.

1 Why Glori Hates Dogs Left 2

He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left…

3

He will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are

4

cursed …for I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat,

5

I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.’

6

7 8 9

Matthew 25:41–42

Glori tells one story with In Glori’s story, there are two sets of dogs:→ Rwandan dogs, and the dogs of the Europeans. Two sets of dogs, U.N. soldiers, Tutsi children and trucks.

10 11 12 13

At the start of the story killing,→ the school became L’Ecole Technique Officielle was a shelter haven ←for | | whites and Rwandans, a refuge for Europeans and Tutsis taking refuge ← together.

14 15

Outside the school walls there were bodies and killing,→ bloodied machetes in plain view and corpses;.→

16 17

inside the walls there were guns and UN | | soldiers:—→ peacekeepers, the soldiers were called—with guns.

4 Deletions are noted by strike-throughs; additions are noted by underline; new line breaks are noted

by “||”; text that joins the line below is indicated by “→”, while text that joins the line above is indicated by “←”. Changes in layout (stanza spacing, line breaks) are discussed narratively.

From Process to Product: Two Poems

41

18

As if terror and peace were the same.

19 20 21

Glori tells how the soldiers would not kill the killers refused to stop the killing,→ would not interrupt their mission, would not refused to shoot→ to protect | | the living, or the soon-to-be dead.→

22 23 24

Fearing disease, the soldiers they shot instead shot the Rwandan dogs that fed in plain view→ on the Tutsi corpses at feeding on the bodies outside the gates.

25

The smug, patient killers looked on, in peace.

26 27

That’s This is one reason Glori hates dogs. As the story continues, the other dogs enter.

28 29 30

Then trucks came for the waiting whites→ —the ex-pats, soldiers and business owners, | | priests.;→ Trucks left behind the black Rwandans—women, children, men.

31 32

Twenty-five hundred Tutsis died in that place when the trucks pulled away.

33

No room on the trucks for babies with black skin, Glori concludes.

34

Glori falls silent, then adds:

35 36 37

They The whites didn’t want their dogs to be killed.,→ So they took them along. | | The Europeans They left the Tutsi children.→ and they saved their dogs instead.

38 39

The She says this with a rage in her face is so pure→ it is like I know I am looking into the face of God.

The biggest changes to this poem occur in connection to the stance of the speaker, who is also the teller of Glori’s story; these changes were born from my desire to put the reader into the experience of hearing the story firsthand, as it is being told. In the original, the repeated references to Glori (“Glori tells” in line 7 and line 19;5 “Glori falls silent” in line 34) and the cumbersome, deliberately visible moves through the story (“at the start of the story,” line 10; “as the story continues,” line 27) take the reader out of the direct hearing of the story and serve as reminders that this is a story, told by a teller, to the “I” of the story, rather than something readers are listening to in the moment. There is far more immediacy in “In Glori’s story there are two sets of dogs” than in the more rhetorically distant “Glori tells a story with two sets of dogs.” Removing the repeated “dogs” in the opening stanza (lines 7–9) forces the reader to enter the poem more directly, and the line “At the start of the killing,” followed by a reference to the specific place (line 11), thrusts readers straight into the telling. 5 The line numbers refer to the lines in the marked version of the poem rather than the final version.

42

3 Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision

There is a lot in the original poem that, in retrospect, feels gratuitous, pedantic, and overstated. As a result, whole lines were removed (line 9, line 18, line 27, lines 31–32, and line 34), primarily because they tell what the reader should already know, or they undo some of the discovery and horror that I hope the reader will experience firsthand in the poem. The initial set of dogs is chilling—these dogs feed on Rwandan corpses that are the result of killers who are not stopped by the U.N. “peacekeepers.” The irony is, of course, that the U.N. peacekeeping soldiers (with guns) know there are killers waiting outside the gates of the school, but those killers are the ones who are kept safe and “in peace.” The only threat the peacekeepers will address is the threat of the dogs who might spread disease—disease paradoxically caused by actions of the killers, not the dogs. The second set of dogs in the poem is even more horrifying, and therefore needs to be juxtaposed immediately—without a transition about which sets of dogs are which and how the story is progressing. These dogs are the ones that replace Rwandan children on the trucks taking the privileged and powerful (non-Rwandans) to safety, leaving those who remain (Rwandan children) to be killed. The final version of the poem trusts the reader to recognize what will be the inevitable outcome when the trucks pull away. The numbers can be found later; it is enough to know there are killers at the gates, and there are Tutsi women, children, and men inside with no U.N. presence to keep the killers from coming in. The revised poem relies on shorter sentences, parallel structures, and repetition to move it forward more quickly and with more intensity (“a haven”/“a refuge” in lines 11 and 12; “outside”/“inside” in lines 14 and 16; “soldiers refused”/“refused” in 19 and 20; “waiting whites—ex-pats, business owners, priests”/“black Rwandans— women, children, men” (lines 28–30); and the horrifying “They left” and “They saved” in lines 36 and 37). As well, there are subtle changes of punctuation, word order, and line breaks that call attention to words and ideas. The phrase “with guns” is set directly next to “peacekeepers” in line 17; the word “or” is removed from line 21 to present the reality that all those Tutsi who are alive in the compound are soon to be dead; creating parallel full-stopped sentences in the back-to-back “They left the Tutsi children. They saved their dogs instead” emphasizes each of these with more power than a conjunction would permit. A comma in the sentence “The patient killers looked on, in peace” (line 25) creates a slight pause intended to remind readers that it is the killers who are the recipients of the peace-keeping efforts of the U.N. soldiers, and to allow those readers to contemplate, even briefly, what that means. Replacing “shelter” with “haven” in line 11 has an echo of “heaven” (particularly in connection with the headnote) and serves to foreshadow what is to come—the “heaven” of a transport to safety for the whites and their pets; the “heaven” of an afterlife for the soon-to-be-dead Tutsi. In terms of layout, the final version of the poem (included below) expands the lines to nearly reach across the page to enhance the poem’s narrative quality and carry the story forward with fewer line-break interruptions. The title and headnote do much of the interpretive work of the poem. The title, “Left,” has multiple meanings, particularly given the headnote, which is taken from the Christian Gospel of Matthew. In this passage, Jesus is speaking to the privileged and powerful leaders, warning them of the final outcome for those who do not care for “the least” among them. In the heaven Jesus is describing, those who are blessed will

From Process to Product: Two Poems

43

be placed at God’s right hand; those who are cursed will be on God’s left, eventually being cast away from the presence of God because they could not see in those who are hungry and thirsty evidence of the Divine, and therefore did nothing to provide them with aid. The title “Left,” then, refers to the side of God on which the cursed find themselves, but it also refers—throughout the poem—to the action of leaving (on the part of those with power) and the state of being left (on the part of the Rwandans). In short, the whites left; the Tutsi were left. Here, then, is the final version of the poem as it appears in print.

Left He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left… He will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you who are cursed …for I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.’ Matthew 25:41–42.

In Glori’s story, there are two sets of dogs: Rwandan and European. At the start of the killing, L’Ecole Technique Officielle was a haven for whites and Rwandans, a refuge for Europeans and Tutsi together. Outside the walls were machetes and corpses. Inside were U.N. soldiers—peacekeepers—with guns. The soldiers refused to stop the killing, refused to shoot to protect the living, the soon-to-be-dead. Fearing disease, they shot instead the Rwandan dogs feeding on the bodies outside the gates. The patient killers looked on, in peace. This is one reason Glori hates dogs. Then trucks came for the waiting whites—ex-pats, business owners, priests; left behind the black Rwandans—women, children, men. No room on those trucks for babies with black skin, Glori concludes. The whites didn’t want their dogs to be killed, so they took them along. They left the Tutsi children. They saved their dogs instead. She says this with a rage so pure I know I am looking into the face of God. (Apol, 2015, p. 30)

44

3 Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision

The changes made to “Why Glori Hates Dogs” were the result of my attending to each level of revision: aesthetics, accuracy, audience, and relational responsibility. Mostly, I made changes based on aesthetics—the craft of poetry and the ways poems work in the world. I revised with attention to line lengths, the layered meanings of words, the ways juxtaposing and repeating words and ideas gave immediacy, energy, and power to the telling. The specificity of including the actual name of school (L’Ecole Technique Officielle) was a nod toward veracity, indicating that this was a literally “true” event and allowing the reader to find the facts of the event in the notes to the poem or in further research. My changed sense of audience (no longer merely myself and those close to me) led me to trust that readers could and would enter the experience of the poem and do the work to better understand the content; as a result, I did not need to hand over understandings and interpretations that would be more effective as discoveries and evocations. And, finally, in the revised poem, my colleague, Glori, becomes more directly and more powerfully the teller of the unmediated story; in the end, she is the one who embodies my own (unstated) conclusion about what has taken place— along with what I imagine is the conclusion of the God-image who shows up in the headnote, and who I, as an implicated white person, encounter in the final line of the poem. This final line not only sees in Glori’s judgement the judgement of the Divine; it also positions me (the speaker, the re-teller of the story, and a white person aligned by privilege, race, and skin with the other privileged white people in the poem) as one who is judged—a fundamentally relational stance that is intended to honor the event, the individual, and the telling. A second poem from the early set of process-poems that did eventually appear in print in the published collection is “Nyamata Church,” in which I describe the first of several genocide sites that I visited in Rwanda. At these sites, located across the country, there are often remains of the dead on display—not gratuitously, but as a way to provide incontrovertible evidence of the violence, horror, and magnitude of the genocide. Many of these memorials are located in churches, since churches were often the sites of the worst genocidal atrocities. As someone raised in the Christian faith, I found the stories that accompanied these memorials to be particularly troubling, given the role of the Church in genocide. The memorial at the Church at Nyamata is—and is intended to be—highly disturbing, and that was certainly my experience. Again, in moving from private processing to a more public version, the poem had to undergo significant revision, as demonstrated below.

1 Nyamata Church 2

Nyamata | | means place of milk.

3 4

In this room, are the stinking piles of clothes. Here Bullet holes riddle in the ceiling and walls.

From Process to Product: Two Poems

5 6 7

There is Blood on the altar, a glass box of useless rosaries, | | as safely preserved→ as those like the priests | | who chose comfort safety and fled.

8 9

The hinged niche for the Host | | is open, is empty.; → God, | | is nowhere to be found.

10 11 12

In the back, a brick wall bears the stains of smashed infants, the agony of mothers’ cries.

13 14 15

A skeleton tells the unspeakable brutality of rape—a broken child bound to a broken mother’s bones.

16

The catholic air quivers in the heat.

17 18 19

Rows of fractured bodies, split skulls, bones form a silent mute congregation | | in this land place→ of milk | | and horror.

20 21

The Broken bodies, and shed blood, | | here are but not those→ of a Savior—

22 23

not in this Golgotha, this God- | | forsaken place of the skull.

45

Even from a glance it is clear that the revisions to this poem are primarily deletions; the poem begins with 142 words and in its final form contains only 87. Much of what has been deleted is prosaic—words that indicate relationships between clauses and ideas, that provide transitions, that “pad” the telling; passive verbs, adjectives, articles, and conjunctions. By removing these words, the phrases bump against one another; the transitions are sudden; the poem itself is more direct and compelling. As well, there is the deletion of the entire center section of the poem (lines 10–16), where the remains of the dead are described in some detail. For this poem, these lines seemed excessive and got in the way of the more direct impact of the poem—that is, there are bodies and blood to be found in this church, but they are of the victims, not, as one might expect, of a Christian Savior (or of any savior at all). The deletions and line breaks are also intended to give the poem a fragmented, disjointed, “broken” feel—a way to have the form match the content of the poem. Opening with “Nyamata” on a line by itself emphasizes the particularity of the place; “Blood on the altar” as a stand-alone stanza (line 5) draws attention to the history of blood-sacrifice in the Judeo-Christian religion. The lines that end with “Host” and “God” (new line breaks in lines 8 and 9) draw attention to those aspects of Catholic Mass, while a comma after “God” (line 9) allows the word to serve both as a form of address and as a parallel to the missing Host. “Nowhere to be found” (line 9) is eventually revised into a stand-alone stanza, speaking to the absence of God and of

46

3 Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision

the priests—both of whom have abandoned the people who gathered and who are now dead. “Place of milk” (lines 18–19) evokes the Old Testament “land of milk and honey,” but breaking the line after “milk” makes the conclusion of the phrase not the expected “and honey,” denoting richness and blessing, but rather the sound-alike “and horror”—communicating the terrible truth of what has taken place. Placing the “broken bodies, shed blood” on a line of their own (line 20) more strongly echoes the words of the Christian sacrament of communion, ending with a reference to the dying place of Jesus the Savior—Golgotha, “place of the skull.” This, then, is the final version.

Nyamata Church Nyamata means place of milk. In this room, piles of clothes. Bullet holes in the ceiling and walls. Blood on the altar, a glass box of rosaries, preserved like the priests who chose safety and fled. The niche for the Host is open, empty; God, nowhere to be found. Rows of fractured bones form a mute congregation in this place of milk and horror. Broken bodies, shed blood, but not those of a Savior— not in this Golgotha, this Godforsaken place of the skull. (Apol, 2015, p. 15) The changes to this poem were primarily based on my sense of aesthetics—that is, the best ways to get the effect I was seeking, which was to replicate for readers some of the horror I felt on learning how complicit many churches were in the genocide

From Process to Product: Two Poems

47

and on witnessing firsthand the results of genocide as demonstrated at this memorial site. As well, I presumed an audience that would have some familiarity with the Judeo-Christian (Catholic) faith, and I relied on that knowledge (and a corresponding recognition of the religious allusions) to carry the bulk of the poem. The revisions that I made as a result of “accuracy” had been mostly about language: it seemed that the priests were seeking safety and that a rosary would be protected and “safe” rather than “comfortable” (line 7) and that skulls are “mute”—unable to speak—rather than “silent,” which might imply some agency (line 18). I replaced “land” of milk and horror with “place” (lines 18–19), for although “land” would have better echoed the Old Testament, “land” also seems to connote that the term “milk and horror” applies to the entire country of Rwanda rather than specifically to the Nyamata Church. When it comes to my own positionality and sense of responsibility, I stepped back from the specifics of what I had found so shocking about the memorial site, knowing that without proper context, those details risked being perceived as voyeuristic. Instead, I relied on understatement and allusion to carry the poem in a more restrained and respectful, yet still powerful, way.

Conclusion The shift from poetic inquiry as process to poetic inquiry as product was, for me, a significant one, asking me to revisit the poems with an awareness of aesthetics, particularly in the form of poetic craft and literary devices. The original poems were not intended for a wider audience and many were never made public. Those that were published underwent extensive revision, identifying gaps, stepping away from overstatement, choosing language that could better convey to a reader what I had experienced and what I understood. The revision—the re-[en]visioning—of the poems pushed against most of what I, to date, had valued in my own poetry and asked me to think of aesthetics and craft in a different way, to rely less on poetic elements and more on plain language, juxtapositions, line breaks, and unexpected endings to carry the power of the poem. This revising took many drafts across several years; as my perceptions shaped the poems, the poems likewise shaped my perceptions. In the doing of it, I learned not only about the process of putting the writing-for-healing project (and the ongoing learning that occurred as a result of it) into words, but also about the ways that turning research into art brought a different and more complex set of aesthetic demands and expectations to the product—an aesthetic based on audience, accuracy, the ethics of positionality, and relational accountability.

48

3 Attending to Aesthetics: The Art of Revision

References Apol, L. (2015). Requiem, Rwanda. Michigan State University Press. Coleridge, S. T., & Coleridge, H. N. (1835). Specimens of the table talk of the late Samuel Taylor Coleridge. J. Murray. Faulkner, S. L. (2007). Concern with craft: Using ars poetica as criteria for reading research poetry. Qualitative Inquiry, 13(2), 218–234. Faulkner, S. L. (2019). Poetic inquiry: Craft, method and practice. Routledge. Kinzer, S. (2008). A thousand hills: Rwanda’s rebirth and the man who dreamed it. Wiley. Leggo, C. (2008). Astonishing silence: Knowing in poetry. In J. G. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues (pp. 166–175). SAGE Publications. Neilsen, L. (2008). Lyric inquiry. In J. G. Knowles & A. L. Cole (Eds.), Handbook of the arts in qualitative research: Perspectives, methodologies, examples, and issues (pp. 93–103). SAGE Publications. Piirto, J. (2002). The question of quality and qualifications: Writing inferior poems as qualitative research. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 15(4), 431–445. Sullivan, A. (2004). Poetry as research: Development of poetic craft and the relations of craft and utility. Journal of Critical Inquiry into Curriculum and Instruction, 5(2), 34–36. Sullivan, A. (2009). On poetic occasion in inquiry: Concreteness, voice, ambiguity, tension, and associative logic. In M. Prendergast, C. Leggo, & P. Sameshima (Eds.), Poetic inquiry: Vibrant voices in the social sciences (pp. 111–126). Sense Publishers. Tillinghast, R. (2005). Poetry and what is real. University of Michigan Press.

Chapter 4

Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry

The products of poetic inquiry—that is, the poems—are the results of many impulses and many processes, and they take many forms. Sometimes the poems are lyrical, narrative, or interpretive, relying on the interactions between the knower and the known, the poet and the poet’s subject. Sometimes, though, the poems that are the result of poetic inquiry require more than the impetus and the discoveries that were part of the original impulse. As such, they may play a different role in the research project or grow out of desires that move the writing in different directions, requiring additional investigation. Poems that, to be written, require extensive historical, political, and/or ethnographic research have been termed “investigative poetry” (Hartnett, 2003). These poems merge “the evidence-gathering force of scholarship with the emotionproducing force of poetry” (Faulkner, 2009, p. 22). Poets’ reasons for engaging in investigative research as the basis for their poetry may include desiring to use and create a voice beyond the individual; wishing to explore intersections between the personal and the historical; wanting to consider the role of poet as that of archivist or activist; intending to use the poetry as resistance; and/or to write what is missing or “unlanguaged” (p. 36) in dominant discourses. In my work in Rwanda, many of these rationales for engaging in investigative poetic research were in play. Initially, most of my poetry came from field notes, site visits, lived experience, personal discoveries, and first-person conversations. The early poems were largely autobiographical. They represented my reactions to events, relationships, and stories as I heard them; as such, they were attempts to capture and convey my personal responses. Born out of my own learning, they documented new understandings and shifts in my worldview. In these instances, I would term them interpretive research-poems—that is, poems that utilize poetic devices to create an evocative and moving document that expresses the subjective responses of the The poems that appear in this chapter were originally published in Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015). Used with permissions from the Michigan State University Press. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Apol, Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56562-6_4

49

50

4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry

researcher (Langer & Furman, 2004). For the most part, these poems were grounded in concerns that are primarily aesthetic (see Chap. 3). However, as the work progressed, and as I thought more about issues of audience and activism, I recognized that there were, at times, poems that needed to communicate not only personally and aesthetically, but also politically and historically. I had learned a great deal in my time in Rwanda. When the poems went out to a wider readership—an audience of readers who did not already know much about Rwanda—I felt an obligation to bring some of my learning to those readers as well. I anticipated that these readers might not know, as I had not known, the history of Rwanda, the magnitude of the genocide, the human aspect of the trauma, and the beginnings of individual and social recovery. I also believed that these aspects were a necessary background for the inquiry as manifested in the poems. This required additional information, some of which I already possessed, some of which I still needed to learn—all put forward in the form of poetry. These particular “educative” poems needed to be microcosms of the wider understandings I wished to convey. As such, although the poems still needed to be crafted with care and attention to poetic detail, they also needed to communicate historical and cultural information and to bring to the writing (process and product) elements outside of the personal alone. To meet these widening goals, I needed to conduct more research; I needed to enter the realm of “investigative poetry” in which I studied, read, and researched topics in a more intentional and specific way, focusing on aspects of the poems that required additional historical, cultural, or socio-political understanding. If, in the early poems, I was writing to convey what I was doing and living, in the later poems I was also conducting research to fill out and enrich that writing, both to increase my own understanding and to better inform and transform an audience.

Characteristics of Investigative Poetry In its broadest and most general sense, investigative poetry explores the relationships among poetry, politics, and social justice. In the case of my work in Rwanda, investigative poetry represented the meeting place of the personal, the cultural, and the historical. It required close observation of the phenomena around me, but it also required that I learn more as a writer and provide more to a reader if, in fact, I wished for the poems both to inform and to inspire. If ultimately the goals of my poetic inquiry were not only to report out the writing-for-healing project and my own experience of Rwanda, but also to engage readers as a means of bringing about change, then I needed the poems to offer a depth of understanding grounded in cultural and historic perspectives, conveyed in a language adequate to the nuanced and often highly-charged information that the poetry carried.

Characteristics of Investigative Poetry

51

In their chapter on investigative poetry in the Handbook to qualitative research, Stephen Hartnett and Jeremy Engels (2005) provide an extended list of the characteristics for investigative research, which include: • An attempt to supplement poetic imagery with evidence won through scholarly research, with the hope that merging art and archive makes our poetry more worldly and our politics more personal • An attempt to use reference matter not only to support political arguments but also as a tool to provide readers with additional information and empowerment • An attempt to problematize the self by studying the complex interactions among individuals and their political contexts… • An attempt to problematize politics by witnessing the ways that social structures are embodied as lived experiences… • An attempt to situate these questions about self and society within larger historical narratives… • An attempt to produce poems that take a multi-perspectival approach […] by building a constellation of multiple voices in conversation • A deep faith in the power of commitment, meaning that to write an investigative poetry of witness the poet must […] function not only as an observer of political crises but also as a participant in them. (p. 1044)

The ways and the extents to which poets and poet-researchers conduct and use research in their poetic work varies. Poets using historical archival work or contemporary and cultural primary documents in their poetry do so to respond to concerns such as accuracy, representation, ethics, and voice. To address these issues, poetresearchers writing investigative poetry conduct research not unlike historians and ethnographers, and, as part of their poetic renderings, may include footnotes and endnotes; use layered text; offer headnotes, quotations, fragments of sources, archival materials, and/or primary materials. The challenge of investigative poetry is the weaving of historical, political, and personal materials into a product that meets the aesthetic demands of poetry, the trustworthiness and accuracy of research, and the informational needs of an audience, at once addressing and exploiting the tension between the idea that what is produced is poetry and the idea that what is presented is material that usually is not treated poetically. The goal of investigative poetry, then, is to change the way researchers and readers of research write and think and feel about events, based on historical and cultural documentation. It juxtaposes personal and political, self and other, past and present, insider and outsider, in ways that are evocative, aesthetic, and emotionally and factually viable, asking readers to see what they have otherwise (intentionally or otherwise) failed to see, to recognize what has been to that point at the margins of awareness. It must do these things with integrity, veracity, and a commitment to accuracy.

52

4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry

Investigative Poetry in Rwanda While all the poems in my Rwanda collection eventually were fact-checked for historical and cultural accuracy, for many of the poems this confirmation came long after they were written and represented a last step on the way to publication. For a few poems, though, the early impulses toward a poem were only realized through extensive research as part of the initial writing process. These are the poems I am terming “investigative” in that they only came into being as a result of explicit historical and cultural learning, and had as their goal the meeting of the personal, the aesthetic, the historical, the cultural, and the ethno-political. My hope for these poems was that the power and evocation of poetry would enrich my scholarly commitment to historical and cultural accuracy, and that my scholarly commitment to historical and cultural accuracy would likewise lend power to the aesthetic and poetic. It is important to note here that the format for some of my researched writing was intentionally not poetic; it took the form of prose and appeared in the preface, the introduction, and the epilogue to the collection.1 But as I neared the end of the writing, I felt there remained “gaps” within the collection that needed to be addressed poetically within rather than in a prose form outside the collected poems. In these cases, the investigations did show up directly in poems that were intentionally researched and written specifically to fill those gaps. Often in these poems I struggled to balance the requirements of research with the aesthetics of poetry; I wrestled with how to maintain a sense of poetic craft while at the same time conveying necessary information. The poems I term “investigative” often began as an early idea that was then, across time, expanded and more fully realized—sometimes through collecting more stories, sometimes through doing additional reading of and research into published sources or primary documents. I made trips to the museums of Rwanda; I spent time in the archives at the Genocide Memorial Centre; I sifted through online reports of court cases and tribunals. I became a magnet for information that addressed my own lingering questions or incomplete ideas, and found myself jotting notes even when I was asking about, writing about, or researching something unrelated. Those notes were often the bases for poems that slowly, painstakingly, took shape. The poems that were deliberately created to fill gaps were among the final ones I wrote, with full awareness of what was missing and what needed to be included in the collection, and they are examined here as examples of investigative poetry. By its very nature, “investigative poetry” required that I supplement my own experiences and growing awarenesses with elements outside the personal. This sort of blend can be seen in the poem “Language Lessons.” It is singular among examples of my own investigative poetry; as one of the earliest investigative poems I created, it combines early and late writings. Although the poem was one of the last ones I completed, it had its beginnings in the first trip I made. I was highly attuned on that trip to linguistic “otherness”—the words that did and did not translate across geographic contexts, and how they conveyed not only linguistic difference, but cultural difference as well. It was clear that my lack of understanding of Kinyarwanda meant that there 1 For

more on the “framing” structure I used for the poetry collection, please see Chap. 3.

Investigative Poetry in Rwanda

53

were gaps in what I was able to comprehend; that I was dependent on others to translate for me; that out of kindness those around me supplied me with a few navigational words; and that, in this regard, I was the embodiment of a stance I abhorred—that is, an assumption that others would meet me linguistically, in my language: English. From these earliest linguistic awarenesses, I found myself (trip after trip) bumping into the role of language in genocide. I recognized the role of French (French was, along with Kinyarwanda, a “national” language of Rwanda, but it was also a colonial language and the language of a European country complicit in the genocide): I heard about the way words were a form of safety or betrayal or grief. I acknowledged my own country’s linguistic duplicity in regard to Rwanda. And, through it all, I came to more fully understand the enduring power language possesses, for better or worse. Through many visits, I jotted down moments that centered on language. Eventually I wove them together in a single poem about my own learning and titled it “Language Lessons.” The poem explores what I learned about language in my lived experience and in my ongoing investigations. Many of these fragments were collected as I went along, but some I intentionally sought out, conducting research at museums and memorials, taking notes, looking up information online and in written accounts. “Language Lessons” is positioned as the penultimate poem in the main body of the requiem collection. It is a layered poem, with fragments arranged thematically rather than chronologically. The headnote is taken from a 1958 speech by Paul Celan, a Romanian-born Jew whose parents died in Nazi labor camps and who is regarded as one of the most important poets to emerge from post-World War II Europe—a poetwitness to the Holocaust and its aftermath. The Celan quotation introduces the poem and echoes in the final stanza; in between, there are personal, cultural, political, and historical fragments that create a montage of language-related lessons on a variety of fronts.

Language Lessons Only one thing remained reachable, close and secure amid all losses: language. —Paul Celan

Language is power, forming clouds over each speaker’s head— rain blessing, the mother-tongue eloquence we are born into, our first inheritance and gift. *

*

*

54

4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry

The colonizers brought their own words, worn smooth: cushioned consonants, languorous vowels, seduction shaping the sounds— the language of love. *

*

*

I don’t like to hear how the French armed the génocidaires, trained them to fight, lured out those in hiding, promising safe now as killers approached. These roots of black bloodshed are white, polished blades hidden among the words. *

*

*

Abel’s brother is bleeding to death with a thousand others in a church. He takes Abel’s hand, places it on his open wound. Rub the blood on yourself, he says. Lie down. They will think you are dead. Abel listens and lives. *

*

*

Emery says the names of those who died are a song; the names of those who saved others are a poem. Remember the names, he says. *

*

*

On display in Kigali— a piece of the moon, taken from the Sea of Tranquility which is no sea at all. The fragment, a gift from the U.S., bears this note: One World—One Peace.

Investigative Poetry in Rwanda

*

*

*

The guard at the hotel door teaches me words in his world, a map drawn with his own hand to help me find my way: hello, good-bye, good morning, good evening, thank you, tomorrow, how are you, I am fine, and umbrella; offers no words for genocide, machete, or death. *

*

*

Mukundwa, whose name means Beloved, marries Hakizimana, God saves. They are survivors. But who will speak for the fathers now? How can their clans unite, form ties across family lines? They have never kissed. In a church of witnesses his fingertips roll up her veil, revealing to all the face of love. At night, she cannot stop her tears. Over and over her heart recites the names of her dead. *

*

*

Behind rows of microphones, the American on stage cannot say genocide. We have every reason to believe, she says instead, that acts of genocide have occurred. How many ‘acts of genocide’ does it take to make genocide? There are formulations that we are using that we are trying to be consistent in our use of… I don’t have an absolute categorical description against something, but I have the definitions,

55

56

4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry

I have a phraseology which… In the time it takes to speak these non-words— throw a grenade into a church, set a school on fire, toss a toddler down a latrine.

*

*

*

During the hundred days there was only the sound of death. What else could be said? Every breath was a prayer. Even the birds were silent. Even the stars, mute.

*

*

*

Ernest tells of one who murdered children and ever after could not escape the voices of children in his head. Ernest tells of another who murdered his own friend, buried him in a pit. The victim’s voice would not be stilled. The killer dug up the body, walked around with the skull, talking back.

*

*

*

Language is the last thing that we have. Bitter on our tongues, it remains. (Apol, 2015, pp. 55–58) Throughout, “Language Lessons” represents my attempt to convey the many aspects of language—narrative, researched, experienced—that were part of my expanding linguistic awareness in Rwanda. The format of a poetic collage allowed me to move back and forth between the personal, the cultural, the historical, and the political. The fragments could weave past and present, insider and outsider. Some of the fragments had originated as the starts of or parts of longer poems; some existed as small scraps, jottings, and notes; some were researched intentionally to be included in this poem after I had decided that fragments were the best way to convey the multiple aspects of language that I wanted to explore. The earliest fragment in the poem was the telling of the hotel guard who wrote in my notebook the navigational words I needed—words that could create even the most tenuous of bridges between us. Later, I attended a wedding and was struck by

Investigative Poetry in Rwanda

57

the appropriateness of the names of the bride and groom, the role of familial lines even in contemporary marriage ceremonies, and the ongoing reverberations of the genocide throughout the life events of the survivors. Emery and Ernest told their stories during the writing workshops. Across the years, I came to understand with dismay the colonial history of the French and France’s role in the genocide. At one point, I visited a museum and found the U.S. gift to Rwanda celebrating world peace, and still later I researched U.S. foreign policy in regard to Rwanda and genocide to better understand U.S. unwillingness to intervene. The notes that accompany this poem explain that the American on stage behind the microphones is U.S. State Department press spokesperson Christine Shelley. In a now-infamous press conference on June 10, 1994, she held firm to the official U.S. position of avoiding the use of the word “genocide” to describe events in Rwanda—a lesson in linguistic duplicity that implicated my country (and my own self as a U.S. citizen), and that represents in the poem a way language is used to deceive, to cover, and to protect those in power while betraying those in need. It felt important not merely to refer to the event, but also to locate and document the details—person, date, context—in the form of a footnote. These, then, were facts I looked up, filled in, and referenced for readers of the poem. To organize the poem, I elected to scramble the pieces, beginning with the centrality of language as a source of power and moving on to acknowledge its role as an intimate aspect of life, as an (un)ethical stance, as a survival tactic, and, finally, as a haunting residue that lingers long after violence and damage has occurred. Ultimately, the poem concludes that language is, as Celan says, the last thing that remains—the thing that endures when all else is lost. If “Language Lessons” grew from my desire to learn about, study, and convey a range of aspects about the role of language in genocide, the poem “Genesis: The Source of the Nile” was even more explicitly born from research and investigation. Early in my reading, I found references to European “explorers” searching in Rwanda for the source of the Nile. Through additional reading, I learned that the early Europeans who searched in Rwanda for the Nile’s source created the Hamitic myth as a means of separating Hutu and Tutsi into what the Europeans then determined to be fixed ethnic identities. The Hamitic myth maintained that Tutsi were actually “outsiders” from Ethiopia, descendants of Noah’s son, Ham, and thus ethnically different from “real” Rwandans.2 The construction of these ethnic identities allowed Rwandans to be manipulated into invented “ethnic” conflicts—pitted against one another to the advantage of colonial powers. Later, as a lead-in to the genocide, the Hamitic myth allowed Tutsi to be cast as interlopers, “foreigners” intent on taking the country from its rightful Rwandan inhabitants. Such Othering was one way, then, that the genocide could be justified and that neighbors and colleagues could be convinced

2 Before

Europeans arrived in Rwanda, the designations of Hutu and Tutsi were markers of class and occupation rather than ethnicity and, as such, could change over time and/or could be moved between. With colonialism came the notion that Hutu and Tutsi were permanent designations of ethnic identities, and thus they were immutable—noted on identity cards, fixed and unchanging.

58

4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry

to kill those who had once been classmates, churchmates, business partners, and friends. I kept reading, kept researching, and kept following the trail of the colonizers and their conclusions about the people they encountered in Rwanda. It became increasingly clear to me that for the colonial powers to succeed, they needed not only to create, but also to exploit divisions among Rwandans. Therefore, the Europeans fed animosity and fear around manufactured differences, around an invented history of origins, and around myths and “evidence” they created for their own purposes. These became the strands I needed to weave into the poem. As these ideas came together, I realized that this would need to be a long poem, a poem in several parts, and that it should be the opening poem in the poetry collection—an “Introit” that set the stage for all that followed, so that readers would understand the genocide against the larger backdrop of colonial interference and manipulation. I struggled with how much history to include in the poem and what information to put in the accompanying notes. It was hard for me, as a poet-inquirer, to determine the boundary between aesthetics and history, between poetry and politics—artificial splits, to be sure, but boundaries that need to be navigated with awareness in investigative poetry. Eventually, I divided the poem into sections corresponding to periods of history, using questions of the origin of the Nile as a vehicle for talking about constructed ethnic difference—the “origin” of the Tutsi—that led, eventually, to genocide, and that both confirmed and disconfirmed what the colonial powers had created and maintained as “truth.” The poem, with its foreshadowing, its back-referencing, its parallel structures, and its dependence on the symbolic value of the Nile assigns the genocide—its justification, its execution, and its outcomes—to the highly motivated (and erroneous) beliefs and actions of the colonizers. In laying out this history, it calls into question the sources of truth and the means of “proof” that fueled the genocide. I titled the poem “Genesis” to allude to the first book of the Old Testament which explains the origins of the universe and all forms of life, and which also contains the story of Noah and his sons. As well all, I hoped that readers would hear in the word “genesis” an echo of the word “genocide”—an accident of language, but one that served my purposes well.

Genesis: The Source of the Nile 1. Twin tributaries, the Blue Nile and White Nile flow north, merge to birth the sacred river. Its floods are the key to life: even seasons follow the river’s flow. The Nile separates East and West; each day, the sun lives, dies— traverses the underworld to be resurrected

Investigative Poetry in Rwanda

in dawn. And so the river is passage: in each tomb, a boat to ferry the soul beyond. But what is the great Nile’s source, farthest point from which the river arrives? No one can locate the river’s head; no maps contain the womb from which the mighty waters are born. The Blue Nile’s birth site is the first to be discovered: topsoil from Tana, rich silt flowing downstream from that Ethiopian lake. The White Nile, longer branch, maintains mystery — headwaters breaking in a deep, unknowable core. 2. John Hanning Speke, British explorer, sought the White Nile’s source. He found in East Africa a vast expanse of open water, answered the question with a lake, named it for his queen. The Nile is settled, he telegraphed home. So many ways to be wrong. John Hanning Speke, British explorer, sought the black Africans’ source, turned to Genesis, claimed those with dark skin were children of Ham, Noah’s sinful son, cursed by the Father and destined to be slaves. Then in Rwanda, Speke encountered Tutsi—light-skinned, thin-lipped, a cause for revision. Ethiopian, he declared; descendants of milk-white Shem darkened through coupling with descendants of Ham— interlopers to Rwanda’s fertile hills. 3. Richard Kandt, German explorer, founded Kigali, though it had already been founded for five hundred years—umurwa mukuru,3 the ruling mwami’s seat.4 History, measured in imperial years, marks origins from the arrival of colonial skin. Of much Kandt was sure. Of this he was not: Caput Nili—the Head of the Nile. Is Lake Victoria the true source of the Nile, he asked, or merely a rest in its flow? Kandt’s answer: a spring 3 umurwa 4 mwami:

mukuru: capital city. king.

59

60

4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry

rising beneath his feet in the forests of Rwanda. (A royal nurse puts a seed in a new infant’s hand, and the next king has been born.) Kandt’s spring becomes a stream, becomes the Nyabarongo— flows north into the pregnant pause of Lake Victoria. Genesis of the Nile: Kandt rewrote the river’s beginning, and it was good. 4. Within Rwanda, these things become Truth: Speke’s origin of the people, Kandt’s origin of the Nile. Hutu are ordered to fill the Nyabarongo with corpses, float them back to the country from which they came. Ethiopia can welcome those interlopers home. The Nyabarongo feeds the Lake, the Lake feeds the Nile, and the Kenyan government bans fishing on Lake Victoria. Fish, they say, are feeding on human flesh. Cut open a fish: Tutsi fingers, toes. 5. Thus it was proved: Lake Victoria was not the source of the Nile. Thus it was proved: Tutsi bodies could be returned to their mythic home. The widening river would carry them along. One unnamed stream leads to another, to Nyabarongo and the great flooding Nile. No boat to the afterlife; no resurrection with the sun. This is genesis—origin, source. So many ways to be wrong. (Apol, 2015, pp. 3–5) The notes that accompany the published poem identify the actors in the exploration of the Nile, of East Africa, and of Rwanda. As well, they identify the Rwandan speakers who encouraged genocide by drawing on these colonial constructs. The notes state that John Hanning Speke was a British explorer in East Africa; from 1858 to 1863, he searched for the source of the White Nile and believed he had located the river’s origin in the great lake he named “Victoria.” The notes go on to say that in 1898, the German explorer Richard Kandt concluded that a stream feeding into Rwanda’s Nyambarongo River was the true source of the Nile and that he went on to become the first European resident of Rwanda, establishing his administrative center in Kigali. Finally, the notes explain that in an inflammatory anti-Tutsi speech in November, 1992, Leon Mugesera made the claim that “Tutsi’s home is in Ethiopia, but we are going to find them a shortcut, namely the Nyambarongo River,” thus

Investigative Poetry in Rwanda

61

encouraging Rwandan Hutu to kill Tutsi and send them back “home” to Ethiopia via the Nyambarongo. When Tutsi corpses and body parts were discovered in Lake Victoria, it was finally proved that the Nyambarongo did indeed feed Lake Victoria and therefore Rwanda must be the source of the Nile. The poem attempts to merge aesthetics with necessary references to history, creating an investigative poem that juxtaposes ideas, cultures, and ideologies, and that creates a backdrop for the rest of the poems in the collection. If the information contained in “Genesis: The Source of the Nile” was needed to open the collection, I believed a similar sort of informative poem was required at the conclusion. As a result, the last poem in the collection represents my most challenging interweaving of investigative research and poetic craft. The poem, “Milkfugue,” is based on a poem by Paul Celan entitled “Death Fugue” (“Todesfugue”). Written in the form of a baroque fugue, “Milkfugue” puts forward an initial series of phrases that are repeated with slight variations as new phrases are introduced. The poem is constructed around the importance of milk in Rwandan culture. Early on in my visits, I noticed that my Rwandan colleagues always had milk when we ate together, even when we met over coffee or tea. At the wedding I attended, I was invited into the morning-after bedchamber of the bride and groom, where the couple, along with young children in attendance, were all given milk to symbolize the couple’s fertility. Years later, at a museum, I was told a story of Tutsi kings and the role of milk in their rule. Along with learning about the history and cultural importance of milk, I learned as well about blood—the (perhaps more mythical than factual) notion that Tutsi royalty lived on nothing but milk and blood; the ways blood pacts were made between Tutsi and Hutu professing their loyalty to one another; the religious overtones of the priests who entered Rwanda and introduced the Catholic mass—a covenant of blood; the ways milk and blood eventually converged around imagined physical differences between Hutu and Tutsi (the Tutsi being perceived as physically tall and lean as a result of drinking milk and blood—a perception used to identify Tutsi in the genocide). Underlying all of this was the fact that the onset of the genocide was early in April—the month which, in Kinyarwanda, is Amata, the word for milk. Each of these layers involved extensive research into Rwandan history and culture. I read books, visited museums, asked questions and more questions. A greeting in Rwanda is “may God make milk for you.” Tutsi royals did not kill their cattle. A cow is given as dowry; a bride’s virginity is proved to the family of the groom by bloodstains on the bedsheets; milk is a promise of fertility. The White Fathers5 brought a Christian covenant that depended on drinking from a cup of (symbolic) blood—and thus, in all of this, milk and blood become interchangeable: what is exchanged, what is drunk, and what flows.

5 Roman

Catholic missionary priests who evangelized and colonized in Africa in the 1900s.

62

4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry

Milkfugue Milk is the gift of life. May God make milk for you. Living on milk from cattle they do not kill, Tutsi are lean and long of limb. There is milk in their mouths, milk in their veins, the land flowing with milk—may God make milk for you. May God make blood for you: a pact cut under the navel— covenant consumed, a belly of blood. Blood in their mouths and veins; milk in their veins and mouths—they are lean and long of limb. Blood is the gift of life. May God make milk and blood: past and future wed, from dowry cow to milk shared over bloody morning-after sheets. Milk for the children, blood for the elders—covenant consummated, a belly of milk. May God make milk for you. Milk is the gift of death. When Tutsi royals must be killed, no blood, only milk—and they drink to their death. May God make death for you. There is milk in the cup; there is death in the cup. They are lean and they drink; milk is death and they drink. The White Fathers bring their own cup and promise—on altars, doorposts—a land flowing with milk and a cup of blood. Drink ye all of it. Covenant completed, a belly of blood: blood is the gift of death, and they drink. In Mata—the month of milk—long limbs are cut until death is all there is to drink, every stream–river–well running red. Tutsi cattle are bled, Tutsi elders are bled, Tutsi children are dead, every red river running—and they drink and they drink. Blood in the water, blood in the cup, the promised land flowing and they drink and they drink. May God make milk for you, may God make blood for you. Milk is life is death is blood in the cup. Every stream–river–well running red and they drink. This is blood and they drink; milk is death and they drink. They drink and they drink—all of it. (Apol, 2015, p. 61–62) To write the poem, I made a list of cultural uses of and ideas about milk, along with historic references to milk; I made as well a list of the cultural uses of and ideas about blood, along with historic references to blood, culminating in the blood of genocide that flowed through the rivers and across the fields. I cut apart the phrases and arranged, rearranged, repeated, removed, inverted, and reverted. I built bridges between fragments and ideas, layered lines, and revised word order and word choice. Eventually, milk, blood, and death rotated through each repeated phrase, each

Investigative Poetry in Rwanda

63

sentence, and each stanza—fugue-like—as the poem crescendos into the culminating “they drink. They drink and they drink” and then, exhausted, rests. I included extensive notes for this poem; while aesthetically, as a poem, it could survive without the explanations, as an instance of poetic inquiry and investigative poetry, it felt important to me that readers have the potential to recognize the roots of each of the phrases and how they interweave, transpose, transform, and lead to the genocide that is at the center of the inquiry project. In the notes, I direct readers back to Celan’s “Death Fugue,” the poem on which my poem depends,6 which was written in response to the Holocaust and which has as a set of repeated phrases “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening/we drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night/we drink and we drink” (as cited in Forché, 1993, pp. 380–382). Hearing the echoes that occur between the Holocaust and the genocide of the Tutsi is central to an understanding of my poem, and I wanted to make that allusion available to readers. I go on in the notes to trace the origins of the importance of milk in Rwandan history and culture, acknowledging that the ideas contained in the poem may or may not be factually true, but indicating that, true or not, they give rise to genocidal ideologies which lead to genocidal actions. “Milkfugue” was a great distance from my early writings on my first visit where— overwhelmed—I wrote with little sense of artistry or audience, primarily to express my own inability to comprehend the magnitude of the genocide and to come to terms with the disparities I viewed between myself and others. In contrast, “Milkfugue” excavated and included those early experiences—milk at the wedding, the role of church fathers, the use of religious imagery, my awareness of white culpability in genocidal history—but examined them within an aesthetic frame. This poem was, indeed, a deliberate investigative exploration of what I had learned and what I had come to know.

Conclusion To be credible, poetic inquiry relies not only on the transformative power of personal and interpretive poetry: it relies as well on historical and cultural accuracy. These aspects are not automatically part of what a poet-researcher already knows, and for the sake of trustworthiness, inquiry must rely on investigation to address the unknown. At times, the investigations provided information for already-written poems, but at others, they led me to new poems that set the stage, created a backdrop, or otherwise revealed and conveyed necessary information in an aesthetically defensible way. Investigative poetry—poetry that brings cultural and/or historical aspects to bear in poems that extend beyond the individual—relies on explicit, deliberate research to fill existing gaps, lending reliability and veracity to poems that are also interpretive 6 For

this, I acknowledge my colleague and friend, David Pimm, who directed me to this Celan poem when he heard me speak about the many ways milk is valued—culturally, historically, symbolically—in Rwanda.

64

4 Attending to Accuracy: Investigative Poetry

and aesthetically aware. In this way, poetic inquiry lives into and from its claim as a legitimate and rigorous research method, taking seriously a commitment to accuracy along with a desire for impact. With each of these examples of investigative poems—“Language Lessons,” “Genesis: The Source of the Nile,” and “Milkfugue”—the research I conducted allows the poem to say more than it seems to say on the surface, to go beyond the personal in order to engage historically, culturally, and politically. Each of the poems creates a voice—or a multiplicity of voices—beyond the individual, drawing on information gained only through study. In the final versions of these poems, the echoes are deliberate; the gaps that remain are intentional. In foregrounding the investigative aspect of poetic inquiry, I wanted readers themselves to listen, to wonder, to grapple, to search, and to re-search. But I also chose, through published notes accompanying the poems, to make clear the underpinnings of the poems as they were written. The research required in the writing of these poems is recreated in the notes as a way to support each poem as an instance of significant inquiry, but also to direct readers to their own future investigation. In this way, the learning that was part of my creation of the poems becomes learning that is entrusted to the reader, and poetic inquiry becomes an impetus for continued learning—an emotional engagement and a prompt for understanding, activism, and change.

References Apol, L. (2015). Requiem, Rwanda. Michigan State University Press. Celan, P. (1993). Death fugue. In C. Forché (Ed.), Against forgetting: Twentieth-century poetry of witness (pp. 380–382). W.W. Norton. Celan, P. (2001). Speech on the occasion of receiving the Literature Prize of the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. In Selected Poems and Prose (J. Felstiner, Trans., pp. 395–396). W.W. Norton. Faulkner, S. L. (2009). Poetry as method: Reporting research through verse. Routledge. Hartnett, S. J. (2003). Incarceration nation: Investigative prison poems of hope and terror. AltaMira Press. Hartnett, S. J., & Engels, J. D. (2005). “Aria in time of war”: Investigative poetry and the politics of witnessing. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of qualitative research (3rd ed., pp. 1043–1067). SAGE Publications. Langer, C. L., & Furman, R. (2004). Exploring identity and assimilation: Research and interpretive poems. Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 5(2). https://doi.org/10.17169/fqs-5.2.609.

Chapter 5

Self, Audience, and Activism: Poetry of Witness

One of the goals of investigative poetry is to provide witness—historical witness, cultural witness, political witness—as a means to attest to what is being researched and conveyed through poetic inquiry in scholarly and aesthetic ways. Monica Prendergast maintains that witness is “part of the social work of poetry” (2012, p. 459). And in her poem, “Notes towards a Poem that Will Never Be Written,” Margaret Atwood (1981) composes fragments to communicate the witnessing role of the poet when faced with historical political horror, writing: The facts of this world seen clearly are seen through tears; why tell me then there is something wrong with my eyes? To see clearly and without flinching, without turning away, this is agony… Witness is what you must bear. (p. 69) This unflinching honesty on the part of the poet, this ethical engagement with “the facts of this world” as something to be expressed, as well as something to be endured, undergirds the notion of “poetry of witness”—a term created by poet Carolyn Forché (1993). Forché’s notion of poetry of witness invokes a meeting of the political and the personal; in her ground-breaking anthology, Against forgetting: Twentieth-century poetry of witness, she writes: The poems that appear in this chapter were originally published in Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015). Used with permissions from the Michigan State University Press.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Apol, Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56562-6_5

65

66

5 Self, Audience, and Activism: Poetry of Witness We are accustomed to rather easy categories: we distinguish between ‘personal’ and ‘political’ poems […] The distinction […] gives the political realm too much and too little scope; at the same time, it renders the personal too important and not important enough. If we give up the dimension of the personal, we risk relinquishing one of the most powerful sites of resistance. The celebration of the personal, however, can indicate a myopia, an inability to see how larger structures of the economy and the state circumscribe, if not determine, the fragile realm of individuality. (p. 31)

Forché goes on to propose the “social” (p. 31) as an alternative to the binary of personal/political—and within the realm of the social, a poetry of witness.

Witness in Poetic Inquiry While Forché (1993) uses the term “poetry of witness” to describe the writings of poets who have endured violence firsthand, Nobel novelist Nadine Gordimer (2002) speaks of “witness literature” more broadly, born out of a writer’s attunement to others. She writes, “Witness literature finds its place in the depths of revealed meaning, in the tensions of sensibility, the intense awareness and the antennae of receptivity to the lives among which writers experience their own as a source of their art” (para. 6; emphasis added). Thus, in Gordimer’s notion of witness, the poet does not necessarily need to have experienced the violence firsthand; it may be the case that the poet lives among and witnesses others. There is great power inherent in literary witness. It moves the site of witness from the speaker/writer to the listener/reader. As Gordimer puts it, writers of witness literature provide “continuing witness to the state of existence of those who suffered, so that it becomes part of [the reader’s] consciousness for all time” (para. 6). Forché reiterates the impact that witness can have on the listener or the reader; in later work, she writes that in the poetry of witness “the poems make present to us the experience [….] When we read the poem as witness, we are marked by it and become ourselves witnesses to what it has made present before us [….] [T]he reader is marked by encounter with that presence. Witness begets witness” (2014, p. 26). Viewed in this way, witness is both a noun and a verb—it is something the poet/the poem is and something the poet/the poem does. As witness, and in witnessing, the poet and the poem are deliberately aware of issues larger than the individual, but, paradoxically, are at the same time thoroughly and intensely personal. By deconstructing the boundary between personal and political, poetry of witness speaks with excruciating emotional resonance and, in the process, makes the reader or listener a witness as well. I see in the work of poetic inquiry an impulse that grows from a source similar to the impulse toward “poetry of witness” or “witness literature.” Like poets who experience violence themselves, poets whose research brings them into worlds of trauma, violence, and even atrocity, and who are themselves attuned to the traumas of others, also bear witness through their poems. They do this with a mandate against forgetting and, in bearing witness, with an awareness of the weight of what has occurred.

Witness in Poetic Inquiry

67

As an orientation often employed in the context of what could be termed “difficult” research (i.e. research that is risky, transgressive, traumatic, and/or controversial), poetic inquiry occupies a space and a stance that is both humanizing and humane. Like witness, poetic inquiry invokes an ethical stance, a way of entering and learning the world of another with honor and respect. And, like witness literature, poetic inquiry moves from catastrophe to creativity, with integrity to the word as well as to the worlds that the words create and examine. At the center of poetic inquiry is the poet-inquirer, bearing witness. In a commitment to ethical and relational treatment both of the subject and of the subjects they engage, poetic inquirers seek to be trustworthy and trusted. By revealing their own personal stakes and stances as researchers and as witness-bearing humans, they are engaged observers who admit to—and even celebrate—the shaping force of their own beliefs, values, and interests rather than burying or denying these aspects in the name of “objectivity.” As a result, the goal of poetic inquiry, like the goal of poetry of witness, is active rather than passive. Ultimately, poetic inquirers, as witnesses, reveal and revel in their personal and political commitments as they, ultimately, seek to create change. Poetic inquiry that is also poetry of witness often takes the form of testimony. In my own work, I see a melding of several aspects of testimony. At times, the poems distill the stories I was told in an attempt to capture what I heard and sensed in the tellings. At times, the poems are a composite of things I have heard and/or have read. At times, the poems convey my own investigation into a range of topics. At times, the poems communicate my experience of the country and my interactions with the people I encountered. In each of these ways, then, my poetry serves as testimony—a way of bearing witness, of producing a literature of social justice and social responsibility (Benaron, 2012) that was, for me, an ethical stance and a form of activism intended to move readers first to empathy and subsequently to action.

Rwanda Poems as Witness I did not initially view my own writing in Rwanda as poetry of witness. I was clear that the participants in the writing-for-healing workshop were writing testimony and providing witness. Each was a survivor of the genocide and each had experienced and/or witnessed genocidal violence firsthand. But, for me as a poet, the purpose of my initial writing about Rwanda was explorative; its only goals were discovery and understanding. It was not until my purpose shifted and I returned not as a workshop facilitator but as a poet myself that I rethought my role as a writer in Rwanda. From that point on, my poems were situated at the meeting point of my understandings of Rwanda post-genocide (the political) and my own experience of the land, the culture, and the people (the personal). The goal of these poems, then, was to increase the reader’s awareness, and in so doing to lead to change.

68

5 Self, Audience, and Activism: Poetry of Witness

Working at this intersection as a poet and an inquirer was a challenge, and throughout, I struggled to navigate the political/historical and the personal/relational. As I wrote in the introduction to the collection: Though the poems are inspired by my time in Rwanda, this collection is not about genocide. Genocide is present in the stories, the memorial sites, the land itself as it appears in the poems. However, the poems are much more about my relationships with and understandings of people post-genocide—where their stories go, how they move back into their lives, how a country that is achingly gorgeous and deeply wounded by its history moves on. As well, the poems are about my own struggles in such a context: my personal sense of compassion, privilege, horror, guilt, voyeurism, and love. (Apol, 2015, p. xiv)

I also struggled to articulate the relationship between my stories and the stories of others: It was never my intent to tell the stories of others as ends in themselves; rather, I wish to have them seen as a backdrop against which my own changing understanding took place […] The poems represent my personal discovery; they have taught me much about the world, humankind, and our capacity both for love and for cruelty […] The process of writing the poems also allowed me to learn—in a manageable way—what to me was both unmanageable and unimaginable [….] For me, it was impossible to take in numbers like eight hundred thousand killings in one hundred days, but I could understand one story or two. I could not comprehend large-scale forgiveness and reconciliation in the face of such atrocity, but I could listen to one woman’s account of moving forward. (pp. 86–87)

The poems, then, allowed me to engage on a scale that I (and, later, a reader) could grasp. This blending of political and personal, of historical and relational, is what eventually led me to view both the poetry and myself as witness. In his book That the world may know: Bearing witness to atrocity, James Dawes (2007) asks the following concerning “how we make stories […] out of catastrophic violence, out of events that by their very nature resist coherent representation. What purposes to do they serve, public and private?” (p. 22). Ultimately, Dawes wonders, “When are stories effective in moving their audiences—moving them not only to feel, but to act in response to the moral claims of the narrative?” (p. 22). These were questions I also lived with, and they were questions I wrote my way into as I imagined myself as witness and my poems and inquiry as a source of activism and change. As researcher and writer, I struggled with an awareness of myself as an outsider— a tenured Western academic, privileged by birth, opportunity, nationality, and skin. As such an outsider, I wondered if I had the right to write about genocide; I wondered as well if I had the right not to write about it. Troubled both by the challenge and the responsibility my whiteness gave me as a writer and a witness, I wrote in the epilogue: The poems written in and about my work in Rwanda form a specific record of my experience of a particular time. In a larger sense, though, they also chronicle the ways a white woman raised in the rural United States entered and began to understand a country and a group of people so different from what she knew. Throughout, the poems taught me the power of privilege; I recognize the ways that the happenstance of birthplace, family, status, and opportunity make it possible for me to engage with the experience of another and make it

Rwanda Poems as Witness

69

equally possible for me to stop. I can look, and I can look away. I can listen, and I can stop listening, turning my attention elsewhere. But the poems revealed what my privilege makes impossible as well. I could not avoid being a white woman with all it conferred. I could not spend time in Rwanda without confronting and acknowledging the past—not only my personal past, but also the past of colonialism and of Western neglect and culpability in the more recent history of the country and in the lives of the individuals around me. With this knowledge came uncertainty: Do I, a white woman and academic, have a right in this context to speak? This is something I have asked often, both during my time in Rwanda and during my writing of the poems. No—as I wrote in my journal years ago, I do not have the right to speak. But at the same time, I do not have the right not to speak. I am stranded between “the poles of entitlement and obligation.”1 If I resist entitlement, I shirk obligation. I cannot have one without the other. (p. 88)

This is a challenge that exists at the heart of poetic inquiry and poetry of witness— that many of us who use poetic inquiry as a means of research (because we wish it to be a source of activism and change) do so from outside what we are writing about. And yet we are powerfully affected, profoundly moved—politically and personally— and, as activists, we find that we not only desire, but also feel we are required to put into words the insights we gather, the relationships we form, the transformations we undergo, and the challenges we pose for readers.

Poems of/about Witness While I view the entire collection as poetry of witness, in a number of poems I explicitly grapple with my role. These poems take seriously my sense of being an outsider in Rwanda, and are charged with the tension such outsider-ness contains. How can I look? How can I refuse to look? Is my gaze a mark of privilege, objectification, voyeurism? Is it a necessary first step toward change—in myself and perhaps in others? What does it mean to witness, observe, bear witness, speak of and to the experiences and relationships and learning that were at the center of the work? These questions were present in a number of my poems of Rwanda, but they were particularly explicit in four poems that speak directly of and about my role as witness and the complexities I recognized in such a role: “Rift,” “Rwanda Stands Up for Haiti,” “Mother of God,” and “Witness.” It was not until I first returned to Rwanda with the intent of writing poems that I began to view myself as a witness. It was 2010, and on the flight into Kigali I wondered about the need for the work I was doing; looking out the window of the plane, I saw the curves of the land and the vivid squares of color and texture I had grown to love. In the seats around me were Rwandans flying home, or tourists and businesspeople coming to visit what had become one of the safest and fastest-developing countries in Africa. As we touched down, I recorded in my notebook the sense I had that I, umuzungu,2 was facing backward while the rest of the country was moving on. As 1 Dawes

(2007, p. 24). White person.

2 umuzungu:

70

5 Self, Audience, and Activism: Poetry of Witness

we stood to disembark, I was stunned when a man a couple of rows ahead stood and turned to leave, exposing a deep scar across the back of the neck. I wrote in my journal that night, “I have never been more aware of the difficulty of witness—that is, how awful it is to look, how awful it is to look away; how little I have to say and how important it is that I say it. The book is not about genocide, but genocide is a scar that runs the length of it, the horror I have no right to tell, yet no right to ignore.” In the days that followed, I put the experience into the form of a poem—a poem intended to demonstrate my sense of myself as an outsider navigating the challenge and the responsibility of witness. The title is, of course, a reference to the geography of Rwanda, located on the Great Rift Valley of East Africa. Symbolically it also refers both to what is healed and to what is not yet healed after genocide, and the split between what I feel I have no right to do and what I cannot avoid.

Rift 1. From the sky, this land of a thousand hills is a place of beauty: arteries of red-burnt road, patchwork greens that ring and rise along the hills, the great rift valley and rivers carved through dappled groves of bananas and palms. What is there here for me, umuzungu who watches with words a country once torn, beginning to heal? This is no place for me. 2. The plane touches down, rolls to a stop, and the man two rows ahead rises to face me—tall, sturdy, thick. A giant of a man. He turns to leave: a man with a scar. Six inches across, two inches wide, a full inch deep, it runs the width of his neck

Poems of/about Witness

71

at the base of his skull. The tissue is shiny, stretched, mottled white against dark scalp. Scar is not the word. It is part of his body gouged out, a pound of flesh gone, a visible absence —skin, muscle, bone. He is a man come back from the dead. I cannot look; I cannot look away. (Apol, 2015, pp. 26–27) The poem articulates in poetic form the central questions that permeated both the inquiry and the making public of the poems. As such it marked the start of what emerged as a theme of the trip and of the collection as a whole: my role and my responsibility as an outsider as I took in and found words for stories, sights, historical moments, and present-day events. I had come a long way from the early jottings I had employed to sort my feelings on the yellow legal pad. The notion of witness—the challenges and the responsibilities—stayed in the foreground of my awareness. When, later, I found myself in attendance at an event in which Rwandans raised money for the victims of an earthquake in Haiti, I brought to my observations the knowledge that my own country had done little to meet the needs of those affected by the disaster—much as my country had done little to meet the needs of those who were experiencing the genocide in 1994. I saw parallels between the countries and the (lack of) response of the privileged and powerful. The poem is an instance of poetic inquiry, grounded in my own lived experience in Rwanda. It is also a poem of witness.

Rwanda Stands up for Haiti: January 2010 because they know that black skin makes pain invisible and history mute; because they share the language of the master; because they know the white world hungers for brown babies, and their children are stolen in the name of better lives, and sometimes they have to let them go; because they, too, have posted photos of the missing, begged

72

5 Self, Audience, and Activism: Poetry of Witness

to know who is still alive, whose bodies have been found; because they have collected bones that bear no names; because they know that tragedy brings the world to your door —all amnesia, apology, good will— long after the lights have gone out; because they have had to say thank you for help that was no help, too little, too late; because there is never enough medicine, clean water or food, and the poorest always do without; because they have been shaken; because they are tired of saying yes when they can’t afford to say no; because they have risen from ashes and dust; because they know that song is prayer and prayer is their only hope; because on the rubble of their dreams the moon shines, the earth turns, and the nights and the days go on. (Apol, 2015, pp. 53–54) The poem is a list poem, born from my own attempts to understand why Rwanda, a country still in recovery from one of the most horrific events of the twentieth century, would raise funds for and stand in solidarity with another small country, half a world away, that had experienced disaster in the form of an earthquake. The reasons I give (expressed in the poem) align Rwanda and Haiti, often contrasting them with the power and privilege (and dominant white Otherness) of the West and, in particular, of my own country. The poem opens with an acknowledgment of skin and race being a determining feature when it comes to the responses of powerful countries to the pain and suffering of the poor. It recognizes the shared language (French) that was part of the colonial enterprise in both Rwanda and Haiti, and the ways highly publicized international adoptions (often by American celebrities) called attention to the “rescuing” of children with brown skin from lives of poverty and trauma, resituating them in what are often predominantly white worlds. Throughout, it bears

Poems of/about Witness

73

witness to overlapping and parallel tragedies that must be navigated by poor countries without the assistance, or with paltry and perfunctory aid from, or sometimes in opposition to the disingenuous and self-congratulatory “goodwill” of more powerful nations. The poem is a poem of witness—an indictment of the privileged and powerful and an acknowledgement of the impossible positions in which both Rwanda and Haiti have found themselves. And yet, both Haiti and Rwanda are acknowledged for their strength and resilience—their song, prayer, and hope. As the poem reminds readers, these countries survive and go on. Rwanda is proof; Rwanda standing up for Haiti is proof as well. The weight of witness was especially evident for me in my struggles to write and revise one particular poem. “Mother of God” was first titled “Skeleton at Nyamata Church.” The basis for the poem was an extremely troubling and violent story that accompanied human remains on display at the Nyamata Genocide Memorial.3 The story, told by the guide at the memorial, seemed a microcosm of the worst horrors of the genocide; I first felt the need to write about it simply to find a way to manage it in my own mind. These atrocities had taken place in a church, where priests had fled and where God seemed to have fled as well, while the Virgin Mary, a statue at the front of the church, looked on and survived. Even in draft form, written only for myself, the poem felt voyeuristic and gratuitous. As such, it gave me pause, and eventually caused me to return, again and again, to try to understand why the poem felt important to revise rather than to let go when so many other poems that began as private grapplings were never made public. There was something about the experience of viewing the skeleton at Nyamata that was haunting for me—a discomfort that needed to be worked out in the conclusion of the poem. By the time I revisited Nyamata on a later trip, I had come to see my writing and myself as witness, with a mandate to raise awareness for the sake of change. If the world truly meant “Never Again” in response to genocide, then the worst of genocide needed to be examined—not voyeuristically, but, as Atwood (1981) says, “clearly and without flinching” (p. 69). My commitment to witness meant that I brought to the experience (and the writing that followed) not only a re-experiencing of the horror I had felt on the early visit, but also a greater knowledge of the country’s complex history, of the role of the Church in genocide, and of the troubling questions that had been growing in me in the intervening years. I recognized on an experiential level that it was not enough for me and those around me to respond with horror, to say “Never Again” and then to move on. After dozens of revisions and advice from a number of trusted poet-colleagues and friends, I eventually arrived at this poem. The title is, of course, a reference to the statue of the Virgin Mary in the Nyamata Church—a statue which is “untouched” by the genocide—the “Mother of God” observing from a safe distance while another mother is mutilated, along with her child.4

3 The

genocide memorial at Nyamata is also at the center of the poem “Nyamata Church” which is discussed in Chaps. 2 and 3. 4 Thanks to Michelle Ott for this title, and to Stephanie Alnot and Melanie Morrison for numerous conversations and re-readings during the revision process of this poem.

74

5 Self, Audience, and Activism: Poetry of Witness

Mother of God As if rape were not enough, they did it with a spear. As if a spear were not enough, they thrust so hard the point pierced her skull. As if her ruptured skull were not enough, they did it with her baby tied to her back, then nailed the living baby to her shattered body with a sharpened stick. In the church, the mother-child skeleton, a spear run through, remains; the blessed Virgin, looking on, remains untouched. Mother of God— speak to me of crucifixion and I will tell you about the human body becoming a cross. I will ask what can save or be saved when we choose not to look, hear the story, weep and forget, when we refuse to inhabit these bones. (Apol, 2015, pp. 19–20) As poetry of witness, this poem intends not only to convey, but also to challenge. The witness it “bears” is horrific, inhumane; yet the poem is not only a speaking out about or against the perpetrators of the violence. It speaks as well to larger issues of religion, faith, observation, intervention, and transformation. The conclusion of the poem questions the entire premise of the Christian religion—from virgin birth to crucifixion—in light of a genocide in which such horror can occur. At the same time, it undermines the notion of salvation (given or received) when “we” (the readers, the viewers—including the speaker) choose not to look, or look and then move on.

Poems of/about Witness

75

The unstated conclusion is that for those not affected by genocide (the viewing “us” of the poem), the only hope for redemption (religious or otherwise) is to face this devastation full-on, and then to act; to take a stance against forgetting—witnessing the horror and bearing witness as a result. As the collection took shape, I knew I needed to write about the overwhelming sense I had of myself as witness, of my work as poetry of witness, and of the way whiteness undermined but at the same time made imperative a clear sense of myself and my words. I wrote page after agonized page of prose, wrestling with the relationships among inquiry, poetry, whiteness, and witness, trying to tell the story, with honesty and integrity, of all I had learned. Eventually, my struggle took the form of a poem. Of course, it did.

Witness I write your story on bones. I write your story on bones and skulls. On bones and skulls and teeth. I write your story in tears not my own. If I lift my foot, you will see the sole stained with your blood. Where my words go they leave a scabby trail. No horrors haunt my sleep; no swollen dogs pace my empty rooms. I cannot reach your aching phantom limbs. I tell your story in a voice white as bone—a voice white as bones, skulls, and teeth. (Apol, 2015, p. 25)

76

5 Self, Audience, and Activism: Poetry of Witness

The poem “Witness” uses images, straightforward statements, and repetition to deliver its perspectives. The lines of the first stanza are cumulative—a story written on the bones, skulls, teeth of another. The speaker is free from the reverberating pain of the story; the tears the speaker weeps are borrowed, even stolen; and the horrors the speaker relates are separate, distant, and out of reach. The final lines repeat the opening, the listing of bones, skulls, teeth, but this time with an added word—white—to describe not only the items in the list but also, by implication, the speaker who, as witness, escapes the pain and horror because of the distance and privilege whiteness conveys.

Conclusion Poetic inquiry moves the researcher from the world of detached reporting to lived (and sometimes troubling) engagement. And witness of this sort takes poetic inquiry from a means of conducting or reporting-out research to a form of activism and an ethical stance on the part of the inquirer—a stance dedicated to self-examination, truth-telling, and change. The extensive research that informed my poems, the ongoing revision, and my own commitment to an aesthetic shaped by moral obligation in the service of transformation eventually led me to see my writing as a form of activism. Near the conclusion of the epilogue to the collection of poems—poems of witness—I summed it up in this way: And so I have written because my silence seems to do more harm than my words. I have written because I was encouraged to write by the Rwandans I came to know. I have written because I could not keep myself from writing. Yet I know, as I write, that my whiteness is what simultaneously gives me voice and makes that voice suspect, what both legitimizes and makes illegitimate what I learned and what I wrote. (Apol, 2015, pp. 88–89)

As a central tenet of poetic inquiry, witness is, then, what the writer must bear.

References Apol, L. (2015). Requiem, Rwanda. Michigan State University Press. Atwood, M. (1981). True stories. Simon and Schuster. Benaron, N. (2012). Running the rift. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill. Dawes, J. (2007). That the world may know: Bearing witness to atrocity. Harvard University Press. Forché, C. (1993). Introduction. In C. Forché (Ed.), Against forgetting: Twentieth-century poetry of witness (pp. 29–47). W.W. Norton. Forché, C. (2014). Reading the living archives: The witness of literary art. In C. Forché & D. Wu (Eds.), Poetry of witness: The tradition in English, 1500–2001 (pp. 17–26). W.W. Norton. Gordimer, N. (2002, June 14). Testament of the word. The Guardian. Prendergast, M. (2012). Poetic inquiry and the social poet. In S. Thomas, A. L. Cole, & S. Stewart (Eds.), The art of poetic inquiry (pp. 488–502). Backalong Books.

Chapter 6

Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness

In focusing on aesthetics, investigation, and witness in poetic inquiry, it is easy to fail to attend to the human aspect at the center of this means of research. To be sure, there is the lived experience of the poet; there is the poem and the aesthetic requirements of the poem; there is the research to be completed and conveyed; there is the ethical stance of the poet-inquirer and the work the poem sets out to do. But revision, investigation, and witness all focus on qualities of the poem or actions of the poet-researcher; what is missing is the centrality of the relationships that form and grow in the process—perhaps for a very long time; perhaps long after the project is done and the poetic results of inquiry have been shared. In my exploration of poetic inquiry as witness, I arrived at a sense of myself— white Western academic—as separate, different from those whose lives I observed and those events and encounters to which I attested. But the witness of which I was a part—once removed, a witness to witness, as it were—depends on an Other, a “not-I” to witness or bear witness about. This Other is central, woven into the very act of my witness, yet it is an aspect that exists as separate. And while, as witness, I attempted— to whatever extent I was able and aware—to maintain an ethical engagement with others, there remains a distance between the witness and what is being seen, between the one who acts as witness and the witness that is being borne. I am choosing to use the term withness—that is, the state or fact or quality of being close to or connected with someone or something, or the act of producing such connectedness—to describe this human, relational aspect of poetic inquiry. “Withness” is an idea I first came across in the writings of feminist theorist, visual artist, and psychoanalyst Bracha Ettinger,1 who uses the term “wit(h)ness” to denote a 1 Thanks to Barbara Bickel who, after hearing me speak on my project in Rwanda, directed me to Ettinger’s work.

The poems that appear in this chapter were originally published in Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015). Used with permissions from the Michigan State University Press. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Apol, Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56562-6_6

77

78

6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness

collapsing of boundaries between the “I” and the other.2 Ettinger’s wit(h)ness allows for experience with, and thus enriches and extends the work of witnessing. It is a way of thinking about selfhood and subjectivity as defined by co-existence, connectedness, and compassion—a space where mutually unknown elements encounter each other without merging nor repelling (Kenny & Fotaki, 2015, p. 188). Compassionate and inclusive wit(h)ness is an ethical proposition for rethinking embodied difference and otherness; it includes healthy inter-dependence and makes possible authentic “being with” the unknown. Inherent in wit(h)ness is the risk of being affected, of opening up the self. This “self-fragilization” (Ettinger, 2010, p. 6)—a term which denotes the experience of becoming open and therefore vulnerable—is central to enabling an encounter with the other that does not attempt to dominate or oppress (Kenny & Fotaki, 2015, p. 189). Rather, self-fragilization brings vulnerability of the self that can contact the vulnerability in the other, making possible a transformed ethical relation around difference and reaffirming interdependence in a way that makes care relations of others in their otherness possible (p. 190). Many of these relational aspects of wit(h)nessing are relevant to poetic inquiry.3 Like Ettinger’s wit(h)ness, poetic withness denotes a way of being with, experiencing alongside, finding connectedness through vulnerability (including resistance and responsibility), and allowing for compassion and an authentic ethic of care. In this way, poetic withness is at once a quality, an action, and a description of relationality. And withness is a process; it always is a becoming. By its nature, withness requires someone or something to be with—the object of the withness, as it were. It seems important to note here again that in my own work, I have struggled mightily to find a term that could convey the relational aspect of my experiences with the Others who are part of my poetic inquiry. “Subject” is a research word that is often used, but I resist the distance, the colonial echoes, the power differential implied in this word when it comes to poetic inquiry in Rwanda. I have considered and rejected “colleague” (too academic), “partner” (too business-like or too romantic), “co-researcher” (the individuals I worked with did not sign up to do research), “participant” (too distant and limiting), “collaborator” (too clunky, and not actually true to the scope of the project given that our collaboration occurred in parts rather than in whole). There are times when I do use these terms, when they seem the most appropriate and descriptive (or the least problematic). But particularly when it comes to thinking of withness, I have desired a word that captures the professionalism, but also the intimacy, of the relationships that were created. The Rwandans with whom I worked were, in a certain sense, kin, kindred; we were related not by genetics and family lines but by our investment in the shared telling of a story with many parts. But calling them “kin” seemed to infringe on their existing (or stolen) familial relationships and to imply or impose an intimacy reserved for those related by blood. As 2 Ettinger

emphasizes the corporeal, embodied nature of the matrixial (as related to the womb) denoting that “I” is always inextricably linked to the unknown non-I or the Other/(m)other (in Kenny & Fotaki, 2015, p. 184). 3 I am choosing, in my thinking about its occurrence in my own work, to use the term withness rather than wit(h)ness (the merging of witness and withness), since I am intentionally differentiating withness from my understanding and experience of witness, as put forward in Chap. 5.

6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness

79

well, it presumes that my level of relational attachment was mutually shared, and I have no way of determining whether that was always the case. Eventually, I have settled on the word “companion” (an echo to Ettinger’s compassion) to denote those individuals who engaged with me in the sort of withness I am attempting to convey. The people with whom I spent my time, did my thinking, asked my questions, did my exploring and grappling and testing of ideas and poems were companions in the truest sense of the word. “Companion” means, literally, “bread fellow” and has its roots in sharing bread with—bread being, across many cultures, a most basic and therefore symbolic means of survival. My Rwandan companions and I did, literally, share bread, but we did much more; we shared story, understanding, intense questioning. Eventually—in their generous interactions with me— my companions shared the courage of correcting me when I had things wrong. And so, in a chapter on withness, I have chosen the word companion, sharing bread with, to describe the relationships that were created around this work.

Withness in Poetic Inquiry Withness is a rich way for me to frame my own work in poetic inquiry. It offers an extension to witness that shifts the gaze from the poem and the poet to the interactions with a necessarily different Other that both gives rise to and emerges from the process and product of inquiry. Viewed through the lens of withness, my poems reflect developing relationships and an opening of vulnerabilities, leading to an experience together, beside. If poetic inquiry is a means of collapsing the rigid boundaries between researcher and what-is-researched, then withness is a lens through which to view this process in a way that foregrounds relationality, mutual respect, and care. As a research stance, poetic inquiry not only invites and allows, but even requires that we as researchers step into and work inside the personal, professional, and relational spaces that our inquiries create; in those spaces, we reveal our own inner lives as we journey with and beside the unknown Others with whom we co-exist. The voice that speaks in poetic inquiry, then, becomes inclusive, multivocal, collective, and porous, speaking with rather than speaking for, embedded in a commitment to mutual care and evolving trust. The living-in and living-into process of withness not only reveals, but also ultimately transforms the relational aspect of the work. As a poet-inquirer in Rwanda, it was only in the company of others that my work could take place. The original goal of the writing-for-healing project was to facilitate healing through the telling of stories on the part of the Rwandan young people— my companions in the project (as I was for them). At first, our stories were sharply delineated, and yet there was, from the start, a recognition that we were engaging in a shared enterprise and that our tasks required intimate besidedness, as well as mutual trust. And, eventually the boundaries between our stories blurred as our relationships intensified and our stories interwove.

80

6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness

Poetry of Withness Poetry of withness includes, but goes beyond, revision, investigation, and witness in that it requires negotiation of artistic skill (as does revision), research reliability (as does investigation), self-awareness and responsibility (as does poetry of witness), but adds to it relational accountability. It attends to the aesthetic, the historical, and the political, but it includes as well the interpersonal.4 Thus, aesthetic, historical, and political stances are grounded in connectedness, compassion, and Ettinger’s “co-response-ability” (2005, p. 708). My writing in Rwanda navigated this terrain throughout, eventually resulting in a collection of poems that demonstrated, overall, the sort of withness that developed between myself and my companions across time. The poems I include in this chapter demonstrate a range of these relational stances and varying levels of withness. Each poem has a person and a story at its center, and the poems are arranged in the pages that follow to move from the least to the greatest “knowing engagement” between the poet/speaker5 and the one who appears—or whose story appears—in the poem. In some cases, the characters in the poems are people I knew; in some cases, these were people I came to know; in some cases, the people in the poem will remain forever unknown to me. The intricacies of the stories unfold within each of the poems. It bears pointing out that these examples have been deliberately selected as examples of withness. Yet withness is a part of all the Rwanda writing I did. Even when the poems as they are written seem to have little to do with another individual, nearly all are nonetheless the result of the relationships that developed with my companions. Our collective withness, and my companions’ continuing willingness (and, often, desire) to inform and teach me, always, more than I already knew meant that they (their stories, their lessons, their responses) were at the heart of the majority of the poems that were written. Thus, they shape the collection as a whole even when they do not directly appear in the poems. As companions, they physically accompanied me to genocide sites and museums. They alluded to public stories which I then went to investigate. They took me to their homes, to the places they lived before genocide, and to locations that were part of their survival. They introduced me to cultural events, took me to family gatherings, and over the years sent invitations to weddings and photos of babies. Our shared withness, even unseen, can be felt throughout the poems. 4 Of

course, it is the case that each of these aspects overlaps with the others. Yet it can be helpful to tease them apart to better understand and examine each one, contrived as that enterprise might seem. 5 While most often in poems (and the discussion of poems) we are careful to differentiate between the speaker in the poem and the poet, in my doing of poetic inquiry (or at least in this instantiation of it) I rarely draw that distinction. Rather, I make the deliberate choice to erase the boundary between the speaker in the poem and myself as the poet, acknowledging that I am at once each and both. If poetic inquiry is an examination of and an artistic rendering of my lived experience, then the majority of the experiences of the speaker are my own experiences as poet, and the discoveries of the speaker are my own discoveries as poet, too. When the speaker is addressed or implicated, I as poet am addressed or implicated; when I as poet have a relationship with an individual who appears in the poem, it is a relationship the speaker shares. It seems artificial to parse what knowledge, what response is that of the poet, what is that of the speaker; as a result, in this chapter, I use the terms interchangeably, with little difference of intent.

Poetry of Withness

81

Yet there are some poems that are more explicit examples of poetic withness. To illustrate some of the possibilities inherent in attending to withness in poetic inquiry, I have chosen to arrange the poems in an order of increasing relatedness. In so doing, I, as the poet, move from the least explicitly relational (the observation poem) to the most explicitly relational (the co-habited poem). In this progression, I have attached a term to each poem to describe the relationship between the poet and the individual or story in the poem.

The Observation Poem In the “observation poem,” I, as the poet, am observing a landscape, an event, or an individual, without reflecting on my own role as “see-er.” It is a one-way gaze—my observation—with little that is relational expressed directly in the poem. “Return to Remera” merely describes a woman who goes back to the home she resided in during the genocide, with no speaker introduced or referenced. Still, there is a clear sense that the poem is undergirded by shared and relational knowing.

Return to Remera The house where they hid is seared in her cells: the blue gate, the number of steps from road to door. She can smell the rain in the yard, feel the reach of the cassava she climbed to peer over the wall. Her mother planted the bushes that bloom near the walk —pink, yellow, white— extravagant blossoms fat as a fist. Fifteen years later, with a home of her own, she returns, paces once more road to door, door to garden, garden to wall, leaves with a cutting to start a new plant.

82

6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness

She carries it, cradled, through the gate, this bare stem— all thorns, no rose. (Apol, 2015, p. 34) The backstory to this poem is that, as the writer of the poem, I knew the individual, though in the poem itself I simply present an externalized telling (observation) of that person and her actions, with no authorial exposition or intervention. There is no reference to myself as a viewer; throughout the poem, our relatedness is off stage, yet there is nevertheless a sense of withness on the part of the speaker in the poem, implied but not articulated. The personal details in the poem (the house, the mother, the echoes of the past, the new life of the woman) indicate shared knowledge and connectedness between the speaker and the woman in the poem, but the poem itself is limited to observation in describing the “she” of the poem—a “she” who is observed as she returns, remembers, then leaves.

The Hypothesized Story In what I have come to call the “hypothesized story,” I, as writer, do not know the subject of the poem personally, but I use contextual cues and cultural/historical understandings to write, as the poet, an imagined or hypothesized story. This poem about François,6 a young man who waits tables at the restaurant Heaven,7 reveals at once a superficial but also a close relational connection between the speaking “I” and the young man who appears in the poem.

Meeting François in Heaven Do you want to start with soup? François asks, though he already knows. Here in Heaven, I always eat the same thing, so of course I will have the peanut squash soup. We have rehearsed this not-knowing, our talk limited to soup, pumpkin curry, a cup of black coffee and No thank you to dessert. 6A

pseudonym. is a Western-style restaurant in Kigali that employs local orphans and vulnerable youth, providing them with salaries and health care in line with international standards.

7 Heaven

Poetry of Withness

83

François is a survivor: a dark dent above his ear, where no hair grows— the place where death was printed on his skull and then erased. I want to trace it with my finger: smooth it— like a sculptor. Caress it like a healer. Ease it, like a mother. (Apol, 2015, p. 46) Despite communication between the speaker in the poem and François being limited to the mundane and proceduralized dinner order (an exchange which also has inside it the implication that it has occurred often: “Here in Heaven, I always eat/the same thing”), the feel of the poem is that the speaker has some more significant knowledge of the person who is being described. While the knowledge that François is a survivor is based solely on a set of clues (his being employed at Heaven, along with the scar on François’s skull that indicates that he has survived trauma), this knowledge brings with it a story—in this case, a hypothesized story, but one rich with pathos and care. The last lines reveal the speaker in an increasingly intimate and nurturing imagined relationship with the young man, based solely on what can be surmised by the scar and his position as waitstaff at the restaurant. In the progression from sculptor, to healer, to mother, the poem develops an intensifying withness, an increasing sense of relational responsibility. In creating a story for François, I also create a story for myself as speaker. Such is the nature of withness: in imagining the vulnerability of a young man with a scar, I, as speaker and writer, expose my own vulnerability and fragility as well.

The Third-Person Story In the “third-person story,” I, as the poet, report and reflect on a story I have read or been told. I do not know personally the characters in the story, but I connect with them on an emotional, feeling level. The poem “Confession” represents this sort of engagement. The story as I was told it was fairly straightforward: there was a Hutu house-helper who had stayed with a Tutsi family (his employers) through the duration of the genocide, though the risk was very high that he would be discovered and killed along with them. Still, this young man (to whom I give the name “Alphonse”8 in the poem) remains faithful, risking his life to help the family survive. In the telling of the story that I received, Alphonse fled when the RPF9 soldiers arrived to stop 8A

pseudonym. Patriotic Front.

9 Rwandan

84

6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness

the genocide, fearing he would be mistaken for a killer and treated as such. After months of wandering, unable to locate his own biological family after the genocide concluded, he eventually finds himself in a problematic situation: sleeping on the street, he wakes next to someone who has died (or been killed) during the night. Alphonse is arrested, but because the jails are filled with genocidaires (who can eventually confess to genocidal crimes through the gacaca courts10 and then can be released and restored to community), Alphonse’s case does not come up for a decade and a half. Through all this time, Alphonse languishes in prison, waiting to be tried for a crime he did not commit. I recognized that the story was filled with irony, and I wanted to foreground that aspect in the poem. I also recognized that for a reader to recognize the irony, many details would need explanation. As a result, when the poem was published, it was accompanied by a set of lengthy and fairly detailed notes for the reader. At its heart, though, is a simple story that moved me with its injustice, and I was pulled into re-telling that story—the story of someone I had never met—in the form of a poem. Writing in the third person allows me as writer to take a voice or a “stance” that is more distanced and nuanced and that draws from wider sources. At the same time, my inclusion of italicized interruptions that eventually include the pronoun “I” and that come together into a full statement in the imagined voice of Alphonse acknowledges his awareness of the irony and allows the human aspect of the injustice to emerge.

Confession Alphonse, the Hutu house-help who saved the family, delivering water and news each day for one hundred days, risking his life to keep a dozen people from death, fled when the RPF arrived. —better to have killed the family in their beds— He walked for days from Butare to Kigali, back to the parents he was born to, but they had left the city with no trace. —better to have slaughtered the cattle— Homeless, Alphonse slept in the slums, awoke one morning beside a dead man—not genocide, simply killed in the night. Alphonse was there when the police arrived. —better to have burned the house to the ground— In the years that followed, those who murdered neighbors, tortured and terrorized, maimed and robbed, faced gacaca. One by one, they confessed and were freed. —better to have taken all that could be carried when I left—

10 The gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha) court was part of a Rwandan community justice system responsible for trying those accused of genocide.

Poetry of Withness

85

Ten years, fifteen, Alphonse waited in prison with no trial. His only crime: sleeping and waking in the wrong place. Better for me, he says, to have killed the family in their beds. Better to have slaughtered the cattle. Better to have burned the house to the ground. Better to have taken all that could be carried when I left. To that, he says, I could have confessed. For that, I could have gone free. (Apol, 2015, p. 33) In this poem, I go further into the relational aspect of the writing by creating a fictionalized Alphonse and imagining words and emotions for him. But although in the poem it is Alphonse who speaks the italicized lines, in reality these are my words, not his. The title refers both to a confession Alphonse is making about his current thoughts as well as to a confession he could have made to the courts in order to go free had he actually committed genocidal violence. Yet this confession is not his; the “confession” of the poem is my own. These observations are mine, the writer’s; they are made on behalf of and in communion with the Alphonse of the story—a person I have never met, but for whom I have great compassion and concern. This is the poetic withness of the poem. Each of these examples—“Return to Remera,” “Meeting François in Heaven” and “Confession”—demonstrates withness and a careful negotiation around what I as the poet know and do not know, what I can say with certainty and what I can say based on what I have learned through reading and listening. The poems attend to the aesthetic dimension of poetic inquiry; they attend as well to a broader “knowing” that is the result of research, time, witness, and withness. As inquiry, they replace facts and data with hypotheses, engagement, co-existence, and compassion. In each of these cases, the individuals in the poems are based on real people, but are, in varying ways, stand-ins that allow me as writer—and sometimes as speaker—to encounter and report on, poetically, larger patterns in what I saw, heard, and was told.

Happening-truth versus Story-truth The terms “happening-truth” and “story-truth” were created by Tim O’Brien (1990) in his book, The things they carried—a series of linked short stories reflecting on O’Brien’s own experiences in the Vietnam War. By “happening-truth” (p. 179), O’Brien means things as they factually, actually, literally took place; by “story-truth,” he refers to the larger meanings, beyond facts, that a story contains or conveys. Of story-truth, O’Brien writes, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth” (p. 179). O’Brien’s sense that sometimes a writer must opt for story-truth to tell a truer story than actual facts can convey is something I also found in thinking about poetic inquiry and poems of withness. In my writing, at times I found that for the sake of artistic integrity in the poem and for the larger “truth” (as I call it, “Truth”) that I was trying to communicate, I needed to reshape the story I convey. In the poem “Samuel and the Boys,” I make changes to the “happening-truth” that allow the poem to be

86

6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness

more effective poetically, more streamlined and therefore more powerful, opting for “story-truth,” even when it means the (non-essential) details as I include them may not necessarily have been factually true.11

Samuel and the Boys Eight street boys appeared at Samuel’s door. They chose names for themselves, asked for food, a place to sleep, and money for school. Three times they were sent away before Samuel took them in. Now they tell me their lives as Samuel looks on: turns of family fortune, cruel relatives, beatings, sickness, hunger, and brushes with death. Samuel, they say, has given them food, clothes, shelter— haircuts and school. They tell me how things have changed: milk and maize, mattresses on the floor, tea for breakfast, and books. They are happy, they say, to have such a normal life. But it is not their happiness, or their stories I love; it is the way the boys tell them, practiced edges worn smooth,

11 To

know about Samuel’s response to this poem, see Chap. 7.

Poetry of Withness

87

and the way Samuel watches them as they speak— proud as any of the fathers they no longer have. (Apol, 2015, pp. 47–48) The substitution of story-truth for happening-truth occurs primarily at the start of this poem. It was not actually Samuel who sent the street boys away when they appeared with their requests; it was his mother. For the sake of the poem, though, I wanted the focus to be exclusively on Samuel. Therefore, in the poem, it is Samuel who sends the boys away three times—an action intended to echo the trope of traditional literature (i.e. folktales and fairytales), where the hero’s task is to be completed three times before he has proved himself worthy. In this poem, the street boys need to succeed at the three tasks before they are allowed to come in. The withness of the poem, then, lies in the story-truth it conveys; aesthetically and ethically, the focus on Samuel allows him to become, as he did, a fully-functioning and fully-embraced surrogate father to the boys. The love he shows as a father-figure at the end of the poem is love the boys have worked for from the start, and the happiness they experience in the security of Samuel’s parental affection is mirrored by the father-love he exhibits as they tell well-rehearsed stories of their own. In this poem, the larger goal of inquiry and the larger demands of aesthetics require a story-truth that does not exactly match the happening-truth. In the end, though, that story-truth matters more for the reader, for the poem, and for the overall message the poem contains.

The Composite Poem “Composite poem” is a term I have given for a poem that is made up of several stories—heard, read—that are stitched together to increase the poetic effect. Each of the stories, in itself, is factually accurate, but the final product derives its strength as inquiry from its aesthetic power and from the intensified sense of withness that creates and is created by the sum of the parts. In the poem “Pink,” I draw from one survivor’s story, but I pull in details from multiple stories to create a more poetically compelling work. The “facts” that led to the poem are these: Sabine,12 the young woman who appears in the poem, was part of the original writing-for-healing project. At the start of the workshop, she told us the outline of her story—her parents and three younger brothers were killed in the genocide; from her family, she alone survived. In one stage of the writing workshop, we asked participants to focus on life before genocide; in a later discussion about that writing, Sabine recounted that her father had been the one in her family who did the cooking—a fact that had been a secret she as a daughter was part of keeping. She 12 A

pseudonym.

88

6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness

shared that both of her parents were teachers and that although she wished some day to be a nurse, when she was asked by others what she wanted to be when she grew up, her parents would step in to say “Sabine will be a teacher.” (As it turned out, at the time of the workshop, Sabine was working with children orphaned by genocide—a teacher, indeed.) In interviews that were conducted with workshop participants six months after the project, Sabine read through and talked about her writing. I was present at the time, but the interview was conducted in French, by a French-speaking member of our team, and therefore I had no access to what was being said. At one point in the interview, Sabine began, quite unexpectedly, to cry. When I later asked the translator what had been the cause of Sabine’s tears, he said it was not clear to him—only that she was saying something about “pink” when she began to cry. This became the occasion for a poem, but it is a poem in which I imagine what, attached to “pink,” might have led to Sabine’s tears. In the poem, I put together elements of Sabine’s story, along with other stories that are not Sabine’s, to create an imagined set of reasons for Sabine’s reaction. I have no idea about roses, pillows, blouses, but they seem likely items in a Rwandan home that might be pink. I chose for Sabine to have sisters in the poem rather than her real-life brothers because I wanted to offer pink sandals as a symbol that speaks, directly and concretely, to the heart-felt enormity of her loss, and pink sandals would be more likely to be worn by sisters than brothers.

Pink Whole family killed by Hutu, buried God knows where, and she writes the story, dry-eyed, until she comes to a detail—pink. Roses in their yard, pillow on her bed, sandals on her little sisters’ feet, her favorite blouse—pink— a gift from her grandmother the day she turned twelve. On that day, her mother made sweets. Her father gave her a notebook and pen. They wanted her to be a teacher; she wanted to be a nurse. They have never seen her teach. And she has never had another pink blouse.

Poetry of Withness

89

In the palette of her life there is no pink now. Except each April, when the blossoms burst along the schoolyard walls, petals littering the ground. She has never seen a pink so fierce, but for the convicts’ coveralls13 that blaze the hillsides of Butare. (Apol, 2015, pp. 31–32) In this poem, the color pink becomes a stand-in for all that has been lost in Sabine’s life, and how that loss has been replaced by seeing its representation—that is, a reminder of genocide—in the uniforms of the genocide prisoners who work the fields outside her town. The color pink, its absence and its presence, is a constant reminder to her of what has been taken and what has taken its place. The lists that I invent, the relationships I create by blending stories, and the introduction of prisoners at the end of the poem are all aesthetic decisions, but they are also true to what I learned through reading and listening, and therefore faithful to the inquiry that led to and is conveyed in the poem. Creating a composite of stories to better tell the reallife story of Sabine deepens and acknowledges the relational qualities of the work, allowing me figuratively to “stand beside” Sabine in withness, holding her story gently and working it into a poem that uses my own experience-based knowledge to fill in something of what I do not know. This poetic enrichment and extension, when attached to authentic knowing and listening, creates artistic interdependence. In this case, the poem is far enough removed from the real testimony of Sabine to no longer be exclusively “her story;’” it is rather a composite blend of her story and my own interweaving of the stories of others.

The Co-habited Poem Finally, from among these examples, the poem I have termed the “co-habited poem” is the clearest and most compelling example of poetic withness. “Dry Bones” is the most co-constructed of the poems I wrote in Rwanda, recounting the story of one of my companions, Louise, but including my own imagined emotion, my personal feelingness which is written into it. In this co-habited poem, I, as poet, have taken the shape of the story from Louise, but I “inhabit” the poem with her through the inclusion of details, perceptions, and sentiments I myself imagine, based on the 13 Prisoners accused of genocide are held in prison, where they wear bright pink coveralls. They are

often seen on the Rwandan hillsides, working in the prison fields.

90

6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness

things she has shared with me across time. Co-habitation, then, is the term I am using for this sort of shared lived-encounter between the storyteller (in this case, Louise) and the poet, characterized by interdependence and mutual vulnerability (Ettinger’s self-fragilization) that makes possible authentic connection to and care for another. Louise is a young woman who was orphaned in genocide and who had been part of the original writing-for-healing workshop; she is a young woman I spent time with on each return to Rwanda. At the time of the poem, I had known her for nearly four years, during which time she had finished her undergraduate studies and enrolled in a graduate program in public health. She was living on her own, proud to be successful and independent. On this occasion, our meeting took place over dinner; as always, we conversed in English, a language that was new to Louise. This particular dinner was the first time she and I did not have a translator present when we met. As a result, our conversation was stumbling and uncertain, sometimes frustrating, frequently humorous, and often mutually-constructed. Over dinner, Louise told me about the upcoming reburial of her parents. During and immediately after genocide, many people were buried hurriedly in mass graves. In the years and decades that followed, many of those remains were transferred to memorial sites where they could be identified and honored. This was the case for Louise, and she invited me to attend the reburial of her parents later that month, describing a bit about how it would take place. I was unable to extend my stay in Rwanda; however, the invitation indicated to me that Louise and I were profoundly connected, and I wished to acknowledge that connection—and the complicated nature of the reburial event—in a poem.14

Dry Bones This is what the Sovereign Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel. Ezekiel 37:12

For sixteen years Louise has carried her family in her heart. Without warning a memory will intrude: a piece of cloth, a turn of head, a bit of song. This is a fire she must feed to keep from going out.15

14 To 15 In

know about Louise’s response to this poem, see Chap. 7. Rwanda, a period of mourning follows the funeral, during which time a fire is kept burning.

Poetry of Withness

91

Now, her parents will have a proper burial; their bones will be moved from mass grave to memorial site. There will be a service: remembrance, stories, prayers. Louise says she will accompany her parents’ bones on the move— as if anyone could know which are the remains of her family; as if, at the new site, anyone could keep track. But Louise has great faith: God and her parents will know. The reburial will take three days. As she walks with her parents across the valley of dry bones, will flesh and blood once more take shape in her mind? She does not remember her mother’s hands, her father’s voice, their smiles, their eyes. She cannot forgive them for dying. She does not want to know who the murderers were, has no wish for restitution. Who can restore what was taken? She does not know how to say that her once-hollow self has grown strong, that her only wish now is for memory to rest, for ash to be ash, so at last she can let burn down the fire she has tended all these years. (Apol, 2015, pp. 35–36) At one point in our work together, Louise had revealed that she had no photos of her parents and that she could no longer summon them in memory. She had also

92

6 Relational Responsibility: Poetry of Withness

alluded briefly to her own anger at their deaths, which left her as a young child (and later as a young adult) to fend for herself. These disclosures were the basis for the emotional inhabiting I did in the poem—my own sense that the reburial would be a resting not only for her parents’ remains, but also an important moment in Louise’s grief process. I felt that giving her parents a “proper burial” would allow Louise to move on, to escape some of the weight of her own story. In so doing, I imagined she could both embrace and release the mix of anger, confusion, and responsibility she felt. I could not have written this poem without a knowledge of Louise over time— knowledge that she had offered to me, trusting our mutual regard and the strength of our relationship across time. As a result, in co-habiting the poem with Louise, I extend my own witness to include heartfelt withness, and Louise does as well. In the creation of the poem, we meet as companions—vulnerable sharers of bread and of a continuing journey.

Conclusion Witness and withness have at their centers a commitment to the relational aspect of poetic inquiry that brings awareness and power to what is written and shared. If poetry of witness brings focus to the poet and an ethical self-aware poetic acknowledgement of the poet’s position in regard to events, interactions, and individuals, then withness turns the gaze to the relational responsibility that accompanies that awareness. Poetic withness can take many forms, from compassionate observation to committed cohabitation in a poem. In these forms, the withness of the poet to the person and story of the poem is negotiated based on the needs of the poem, of the poet, and of the relationship itself. When poetic inquirers add to aesthetic sensibilities and the requirements of reliable research a stance of ethical responsibility and an awareness of relational attachment and accountability, they discover and they create a productive area of exploration, in the process cultivating withness—shared vulnerability, openness, and compassion toward and for the companions in their work.

References Apol, L. (2015). Requiem, Rwanda. Michigan State University Press. Ettinger, B. (2005). Copoiesis. ephemera: theory and practice, 5(4), 703–713. Ettinger, B. (2010). (M)other re-spect: Maternal subjectivity, the ready-made mother-monster and the ethics of respecting. Studies in the Maternal, 2(1), 1–24. Kenny, K., & Fotaki, M. (2015). From gendered organizations to compassionate borderspaces: Reading corporeal ethics with Bracha Ettinger. Organization, 22(2), 183–199. O’Brien, T. (1990). The things they carried. Houghton Mifflin.

Chapter 7

Public/ation

Poetic inquiry is characterized by aesthetic, scholarly, ethical, and relational concerns. These concerns are part of the richness of poetic inquiry as research. Yet attention to these aspects of research also creates complexities that are made clearer in the final stages of a project when the work is made public. Whether public/ation1 occurs in print or not, the sharing of the results of poetic inquiry brings these disparate components and competing demands into view, demonstrating both the affordances and the challenges of this way of doing inquiry.

A First Audience As a hybrid mode of research, poetic inquiry works across and among traditional disciplinary limits. In collapsing the distance imposed by claims of “objectivity,” it breaks down the boundaries between the researcher and the subject, whether that “subject” is a topic or a human being. As a result, the relationship between the inquirer and those I have termed the inquirer’s “companions” does not conclude at the end of the project; rather, it extends to include the poetic product of the inquiry as well. Often, then, the companions in the research are the first audience for the poems—part of the ongoing process of inquiry. There are many reasons to return with the early poetic product to those who have been part of the inquiry process. At times, this is a further stage of the research, generating another source of data in the participants’ responses. At times, returning to participants allows for checking of facts or member-checking for validation of the findings and conclusions—a process that can be complicated, rich, and sometimes problematic. A return can be used to verify larger issues (or to cause them to be 1 I present the word “public/ation” with this intentional split to emphasize the impact of going public,

of making public, which may include formal publication, or which may not. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Apol, Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56562-6_7

93

94

7 Public/ation

rethought). Or it may represent another layer of inclusion, inviting participants as collaborators into an additional stage of the research process. In these many iterations, a return with early versions of the poetic product can strengthen the work, can be affirming of the process, and/or can reveal fault lines in aspects of the project.

Return to Rwanda I present my own work in Rwanda once again as an example of the nuances and complications of an early form of public/ation. I use the term in this way to indicate that it is a means of making the results of poetic inquiry public before those results actually appear in print. In my case, once the poems were drafted—including many rounds of feedback from poet-colleagues and many series of revisions—and once the collection was assembled into a form ready for submission to the university press with whom I had a publication agreement, I returned to Rwanda with multiple copies of the nearly-finished manuscript in hand. This was a process particular to my commitment to the project as poetic inquiry. In publishing previous collections of poetry, I did not seek responses from the individuals about whom I had written (including parents, children, and the like). My return with the poems, then, indicated that I believed that although the poems were published as poetry, the work lived at the meeting place of poetry and inquiry, and as such needed to respect aspects of each. For this, my final visit to Rwanda before the book appeared in print, I had several goals. First, I wanted to share the completed manuscript with my Rwandan companions. In part, I wanted to show them that this was one more “result” of the writing-forhealing work we had done. Although my poems were not verbatim narratives from that project, they were (mixed with my own observations, the reading I had done, and the many stories I had gathered) a shared “testimony,” some of which combined elements of their narratives with my own lived experience of the country and the people of Rwanda, post-genocide. As well, I needed to know if things in the poems, the essays, and the notes were factually correct, and whether there were any poems that my companions, as Rwandans, found problematic. I did not want them—or invite them—to edit my work, but I did want to talk with them about places or aspects they might find troubling and how that might be handled. I also needed to know whether my companions wished to be identified in the book (and occasionally in the poems) by their own names or if I should provide pseudonyms; I felt they could really only answer that question after they had read the manuscript in full. Most of all, I wanted my Rwandan companions (who by then were also my friends) to feel included in what was to be the final stage of the process. I did not want them to imagine that I had come in, gathered stories, asked questions, then left to do my own work without looking back. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Whether they knew it or not, these individuals had accompanied me in this work for years, both in person and in the voices that called me to write. I wanted them to accompany me in this last stage as well.

Return to Rwanda

95

It was in this return that some of my greatest learning about poetic inquiry took place. If the process of poetic inquiry put into play a concern for the aesthetic, the investigative, the ethical, and the relational aspects of a project, then this moment of “making public” foregrounded each of those aspects and made visible—as product— my own negotiation of these priorities, as well as my stated and unstated levels of awareness, commitment, compassion, and respect. As my companions saw their stories, their country, and their history through my eyes, as they saw what we had shared and what I had learned through the lens of my own understanding and interpretation, in many ways they saw (my version of) themselves. In these interactions, then, we shifted into a space of increased intimacy and shared vulnerability. They were made visible through my poems, and I was made visible as well. Through my words on a page, we were completely exposed: This is what I have made of this, I was saying. This is what and how I have understood. And these are my choices in the telling. In addition, I was asking for their responses—a risk for all of us, to be sure. It required courage and trust to talk through what did and did not work for them—what I had gotten right, but more importantly what I had not, and how we could navigate those gaps. It made each of us dependent on the good-will and relationships of care we had established across time. As a result, as we moved into this, the final stage of our work together, it became clear to me that when poetic inquiry fully respects the multiple and competing demands of poetry, research, witness, and withness, it has within it profound possibilities. But it has, as I discovered, profound challenges as well. In returning to Rwanda, I brought a copy of the manuscript for each person who had been part of the original writing project, as well as copies for addition individuals who appeared in the poems. Once again, these readers played a range of differing roles in my work; as well, they were widely varied in their English language skills. For some, it was easy to read the entire manuscript (written in English) and to give nuanced and detailed feedback on the poems, the essays, and the notes. For others, the language proved to be a barrier. Although I also gave these individuals the entire manuscript, and invited them to take the time to meet with others who were more confident in reading English, several focused exclusively on the poems in which they themselves appeared. The manuscripts I brought for each were bound in plastic covers to give the feel of a “finished” work. I delivered the copies as soon as I was able after my arrival, so that readers could spend as much time as possible with the collection. I invited readers to share the manuscript with others and/or to confer with one another. It was important to me that even those individuals who were not likely to read from cover to cover could see the work in its entirety and would have an opportunity to talk with those who had read it all. Doing so seemed the best way for them to recognize how I had “placed” the poem(s) in which they appeared, as well as to have a sense of the scope and direction of the work. Many of the readers knew one another from the workshop, and I was deliberate in suggesting they consult each other to get a better sense of the entire work.

96

7 Public/ation

I explained to each that I wanted to hire them as paid consultants in this phase of the work, and that their feedback and contributions were of great value to me and to the publication. At the start, I provided them each with a set of questions, which I talked through when I gave them the manuscript. My visit, I told them, had three purposes: I wanted to know if there were any things in the manuscript (poems, notes, prologue, or epilogue essays) that were factually incorrect; I wanted to know if there were any things in the manuscript that they, as Rwandans, found problematic; I wanted to know if—once they had spent time with the entire manuscript—they wished to have their name be part of the work. I was very deliberate in my questions. While as a researcher I wanted to make certain I had things “right” from the standpoint of my companions, as a poet, I was reluctant to cede my poetic control of the poems. Therefore, I did not ask if they liked or agreed with the poetry as poetry—that is, with my artistic choices of wordings, line breaks, repetitions, structures, voice, and the like. I did not ask for suggestions for or revisions to the poems as poems. I merely asked whether things were or were not correct, were or were not culturally/historically problematic, and whether or not they themselves wished to be named. The question of naming was of particular importance. In research, it is often the case that participants are provided with a pseudonym, yet I was reluctant to do this as a matter of course, given that in genocide, whole families were erased. Consequently, the automatic renaming and the corresponding anonymity of my companions was something I saw as another form of erasure. As well, I had written the poems as a response to our interactions, using my own sense of poetic craft to represent my understandings and experiences. Given that these were individuals who had guided me, explained to me, shared with me, and inspired me, I needed them to see the ways I had (re)presented my experiences in the art, and based on their readings, I wanted them to decide—with full awareness—whether or not they wanted to be identified in the book by their recognized and recognizable name. After they had had an opportunity to spend time with the manuscript, I met with each of them to hear their thoughts, get their feedback, and respond to any questions they might have. The conversations that took place taught me more about poetic inquiry than I could have anticipated, revealing the richness of the methods, the aesthetic and relational possibilities, and, as well, the tensions that occur when research public/ation takes the form of witness, withness, and art. My companions read carefully. They corrected my mistakes. They clarified things they were not sure I understood. They probed poems they found troubling or confusing. They affirmed and interrogated. As they had throughout the project, they spoke with patience and listened with care.

Feedback on the Poems The feedback provided by my companions fell into several areas: the importance of accuracy, the future of the work, ongoing notions of truth, my inclusion of Rwandans in the project, and the continued relevance of the poems. Importance of Accuracy. My Rwandan companions were quick to grasp both my use of poetic inquiry to frame the project and the artistic strategies that reshaped the tellings. They helped me think about which choices might be viewed as acceptable and which were more problematic. For them, blending several accounts into a

Feedback on the Poems

97

composite story was legitimate; alluding in a general and non-specific way to the number of people killed at a site (i.e. “several thousand” rather than, say, “3,100”) was not. As my companions explained to me, it is difficult to determine exact numbers of those killed at genocide sites—in part because it is not always clear what is considered a “site” (does it include the school, the health clinic, the surrounding communities?) and in part because the numbers keep changing as new remains are discovered or remains that were buried in mass graves in other areas are brought home. Yet, it is exceedingly important to do so because representing the dead is not just an act of recognition and acknowledgment; it is also a political act. Using the exact numbers is a counter to genocide negation or revisionism, and thus it is a crucial part of any representation, even if those numbers are accurate only for a time. Given this insight, I changed the numbers accordingly, and also included a mention of the complexity of the issue in the notes that accompany the poems. In addition to these sorts of corrections, my readers also “fixed” several things in the poems that reflected misinformation or my own lack of awareness (for example, that gacaca2 ended in 2012, that health workers still do their jobs during umuganda,3 and the like). Future of the Work. A conversation that took place with several companions concerned the next steps for the work and for our relationships around the work. Did publication indicate a termination of my time in and my connections to Rwanda and my engagement there? Was this a wrapping up, a bringing to a close? What were my intentions for the book, and how could they help it reach a wider audience? As we talked, my companions suggested ways the poems could be more visible in the worlds they knew. Their suggestions included “translate it into Kinyarwanda;” “make copies of the book available in the genocide memorial sites;” “have it ready for the twentieth commemoration of genocide in 2014;” “create a study guide to accompany it so it can be part of the English language curriculum of Rwanda.” In response to these suggestions, I did apply for and receive a grant to translate a subset of the poems into Kinyarwanda, arguing that the poems should not only be about Rwanda, but should also be for Rwandans, even if—especially if—those Rwandans did not read English. A small collection of the poems was translated by Ntaganda Mukuru François-Xavier and published by Mudacumura Publishing in 2016 under the title Emwe N’imvura Irabyibuka [Even the Rain Remembers]. I also brought those copies, along with copies of Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015) to genocide sites, university libraries, and bookstores in Rwanda. Notions of Truth. Bringing together poetry, research, witness, and withness in the form of public/ation—that is, bringing the product to the individuals who knew what was literal truth and what was poetic Truth—foregrounded some of the complexities of poetic inquiry. Which aspects adhere to which sorts of truth? Is trustworthy research guided by what actually happened, or by what has the potential for the greatest effect? Does witness and the relationality that leads to compassion depend 2 The gacaca (pronounced ga-CHA-cha) court was part of a Rwandan community justice system responsible for bringing to trial those accused of genocide. 3 Umuganda, meaning “contribution,” has existed in Rwanda since precolonial times. It is a day each month when people work together, without pay, for the common good.

98

7 Public/ation

on the literal or the aesthetic? What if these aspects cannot be aligned? How, and on what bases, should the inquirer decide? Conversations about two poems—“Samuel and the Boys” and “Confession” (both of which are included in Chap. 6 on Withness)—centered on the issues of Truth and truth. The first companion with whom I was speaking, Samuel, is the main character in “Samuel and the Boys.” He was present when the boys of the poem shared with me their stories of street life and of the tasks they were asked to perform before they were invited to stay with Samuel. It is Samuel then who, in the poem, watches and listens as the boys speak—a stand-in for the fathers the boys no longer have. But it was also Samuel who had lived the literal truth of the story behind the poem and knew that it was his mother, not he, who actually sent the boys away multiple times before they were allowed to stay. He brought this “error” up in our conversation, and he said, “Why have you not included my mother, given that she also had helped the boys? She was the one to send the boys away before they were allowed to come in, and she was the one to whom the boys initially made the requests for a home, food, or school fees.” We talked at some length about the difference between literal, factual “happening-truth” and the kind of “story-truth” (O’Brien, 1990, p. 179) that a writer employs by selecting specific details, focusing on particular aspects and not others, shifting and revising non-essential facts in order to make a point. I explained that in the poem, I wanted to emphasize the father-role that Samuel plays in the lives of the fatherless boys; as a result, I only talk about him and not about any others who also worked with the boys. I explained as well that I chose that the boys be sent away to complete the tasks three times because it was a recognizable literary trope. It made sense to Samuel then that I chose in the poem to focus only on his work with the boys in order to call attention to the relationship that developed there, and that I elected to have a set of three tasks as an allusion to other forms of literature. In a second poem, “Confession,” I did not bring the poem back to Alphonse,4 the main character, because it was a story I was told by a third person, and thus I had never met nor spoken to Alphonse. However, my conversation with Peter,5 the individual who told me the story of Alphonse, centered on Peter’s uncertainty about how I had written the poem. Reading the poem in a literal way, he insisted that Alphonse really had not wanted to kill the family, and therefore he had helped instead of hurting them. Here again, the gap between literal and artistic truth got in the way of Peter’s understanding of my literary retelling of the story in the poem. I explained that I deliberately put the reader inside Alphonse’s imagined thinking about justice, confession, and choice in order to convey the irony and injustice of the situation. I said that when, in the poem, I wrote “better to have killed the family in their beds,” “better to have slaughtered the cattle,” “better to have burned the house to the ground” and so on, it did not necessarily mean Alphonse wished he had committed acts of genocidal violence against the family; only that he recognized injustice in that not committing those acts led to a far longer time in prison than would have been the case if he had. Our discussion of literary irony and of poetic “story-truth” satisfied Peter’s concerns over the accuracy of the telling. 4A 5A

pseudonym. pseudonym.

Feedback on the Poems

99

Inclusivity. There were other conversations as well that addressed particular aspects of poetry that emerged through the public/ation of the work. One companion in the work, Jacob,6 used our talk about the manuscript as an opportunity to affirm my decision to return to Rwanda to get feedback on the poems. His comments spoke to the collaborative and long-term approach that a commitment to poetic inquiry requires. He said, “Many people have come to Rwanda to gather stories in the wrong way, and have used them for their benefit, especially right after the genocide. It was a very bad experience, and it really affected survivors. Nothing comes back to the survivors, and Rwandan people don’t know what is being done with their stories.” He went on to contrast this with our work together: “I think it’s good that you’re showing your work to genocide survivors. In your approach, the genocide survivors have a say. Sometimes, in Rwanda, someone comes with a notebook, a camera. They talk to two or three people. The next week they go home and publish something without giving it any time or checking with anyone. That’s not the right way to do things. This takes time.” In focusing on the collaborative nature of the project (even the poems themselves) and the commitment to the work across time, Jacob identified two central features of poetic inquiry—features that were not lost on my Rwandan colleagues. Relevance of the Poetry Project. Joseph,7 the last of the workshop participants with whom I shared the manuscript, confirmed my sense that even two decades later, these stories were worth putting into poems. It was a question that had emerged often over the years, and one I had wrestled with across time. After reading the manuscript, Joseph wrote to me, “People who visit Rwanda are stunned and amazed by the beauty of the landscape, the progress, infrastructures, people’s courtesy, and this produces sometimes a distorted picture of the real Genocide survivors’ conditions. In my view as a survivor, the general progress and tremendous strides Rwanda as a nation has made after the Genocide sometimes overshadow the special challenges survivors are still facing.” He went on that bringing this work forward in a public way was important because it tells an honest story that serves as a reminder and that has the potential to bring about understanding and change. His words spoke to my own question about whether I was returning to a part of history that Rwandans wished to leave behind, along with the value of poetic inquiry in bearing witness, even after the fact.

The Use of Names In addition to asking my companions to read and provide feedback on the factual and cultural accuracy of the poems, I had also asked them about my use of their names. To most of the participants, this was not a subject that warranted much conversation.

6A 7A

pseudonym. pseudonym.

100

7 Public/ation

However, there were two instances—one brief, one extended—that foreground the potential issues involved with name use in poetic inquiry. Risk of a Story. Although Charles8 had been an enthusiastic and engaged participant in the workshop, and had shared a good deal about his life before, during, and after the genocide, when it came to the use of his name in the manuscript (including a fairly important reference to him in one particular poem), he was clear that he wished for the use of a pseudonym. He said, “It is good to have a pseudonym. It is never certain, when one works with a writer (even if that writer becomes a friend) what will happen in the future—what the writer may choose to write or say next, how [that writer] might go on to do different sorts of work, what stance they might adopt down the road.” Charles was identifying a key aspect of poetic inquiry—that is, that in its collegial nature, it creates lasting links, for better or worse, between the individuals involved. The close relationship I developed with these companions left them vulnerable to my own decisions about what work to do in the future, what stances to take down the road. Making our shared work public had the potential to someday compromise my companions’ positions or welfare—a risk that occurs any time someone is directly associated, by name, with a piece of published work. Although I attempted to make our work together collaborative, in fact I was—always and forever—an outsider to Rwandan culture; there was, in our work, an asymmetry of power, choice, and safety when it came to disclosure. As a result of our conversation, this participants’ identity was carefully concealed in the poetry collection, and in this publication as well. How One is Seen. A final example of the necessity of a return when it comes to public/ation in poetic inquiry is illustrated by this fairly extensive account of one of the companions in the work, Louise. Louise and her family appear in the poem “Dry Bones,” which is discussed at length in Chap. 6. Though she and I met together many times over the years, our time together and our conversation was particularly important when it came to her reading of “Dry Bones” and her stance toward the use of her name in the publication phase. “Dry Bones,” talks explicitly about the loss of Louise’s parents in the genocide and the reburial of their remains in a memorial site. As with the other companions, I brought the manuscript to Louise near the start of my visit, though given that Louise lived some distance from where I was staying, our time together took place in a few consecutive days rather than over a period of weeks. Louise herself was closely connected to the other companions in the work and she was in contact with them throughout my visit. After I explained to her the reason for this, my final visit to Rwanda prior to publication, and after I laid out for her the point of our meeting, I showed her the manuscript. I talked a bit about it, and about how it included real people that she knew. Then I told her that the poem that I had written about the reburial of her parents was a very important poem in the book, and I shared it with her. 8A

pseudonym.

The Use of Names

101

Because Louise was more confident as a listener and speaker of English than she was as a reader, I read the poem aloud to her. At several points, I stopped to explain what the poem said, what it meant, what I meant by it—making sure, section by section, that she understood what was happening in the poem. I choked up when I read, “But Louise has great faith—God and her parents will know,” but Louise was dry-eyed. When I got to the line “she cannot forgive them for dying” I preceded it by warning, “this next part might be hard,” but as I read it, Louise did not flinch. Then I got to the ending of the poem: She does not know how to say that her once-hollow self has grown strong, that her only wish now is for memory to rest, for ash to be ash, so at last she can let burn down the fire she has tended all these years. (Apol, 2015, p. 36) Reaching this conclusion, I, as a reader, felt a great sense of relief. I said, “This is about Louise now, the one who works full time and goes to school and writes in English.” Even this got no response from Louise—just very careful listening. After a few moments of thought, Louise responded quietly: “It’s okay. I told you all of that.” I said, “Yes, you did. But I made up some of the feelings I imagined for you. And when you told me your story, you didn’t know I was going to make it into a poem that other people would read. So that’s what you need to decide now—do you want other people to read it with your name, or should we choose another name so people don’t know it’s about you? You don’t need to tell me now. You should take it home and read it again and again. If you have questions, [people you know] also have copies of the book and you can ask them. You also can ask me. You don’t have to give me an answer until you’ve looked at it for as long as you need to.” The next day, Louise phoned and asked to meet. When we were together, she repeated that she would like me to include her name with the poem. She said, “When people talk about weak things, sad things in my story—like I have no family, like when I cried and cried in the camps in Congo—and they have pity, then I don’t want to have my name. When it is a good story, when I am strong—like when you say ‘Louise, how do you work and go to school at the same time?’—then I am proud to have my name. Weakness is what you tell your friends, not everyone. In the poem, this is the Louise who has met many problems, but she is strong. That’s why you should use my name.” Louise was experiencing what is perhaps the most powerful aspect of poetic inquiry—that when a poem is aesthetically viable, committed to scholarly accuracy, faithful to witness, and also sensitive to the relational withness of the work, it becomes a meeting-place where the inquirer and the companions in the work are joined in vulnerability, compassion, and mutual admiration. Louise recognized in my poetic rendering the courageous and admirable person I, and she, knew her to be.

102

7 Public/ation

Conclusion Correcting errors and misconceptions, affirming the necessity of the work, negotiating factual and literary truths, and acknowledging both the risk and the value inherent in making public what has to that point been only private—these conversations foregrounded the tensions at the heart of public/ation and were the most informative to my own sense both of the affordances and of the challenges inherent in conducting poetic inquiry. Sharing the work, seeing the poems through the eyes of these highly-regarded companions, and receiving their feedback was an act of trust on all our parts. It made each of us vulnerable and dependent on the good will, honesty, and care we had established across time. It is true that when the results of poetic inquiry are made public, even to the individuals themselves (especially to the individuals themselves), the value of this reporting of research extends well beyond the poet or even the research community, to include a wider audience for the poems. Yet at the same time, when the results are made public, the responsibilities of the writer—to be a credible poet, an accurate researcher, a reliable witness, and a trustworthy companion—increase. To be true to any at the expense of the others jeopardizes academic and poetic credibility, veracity, and relatedness. Once I determined to use poetic inquiry to understand and convey my work, the demands of inquiry, of poetic Truth, of witness and withness and artistry required me to commit to creating poems that were not only accurate but also artistically honest. It also required that I return to share with the people with whom I had worked the direction the poems (and the collection as a whole) had taken. I benefitted greatly from their feedback in the varied forms of correction, affirmation, and caution. For some, the poetic results reflected self-ness they viewed as positive, and they were happy to be represented through these poems. For others, the stakes around public/ation seemed high, the risk of identification was real, and the questions surrounding factual truth and artistic Truth needed to be raised and addressed. Throughout, the shared negotiations around these issues and my own commitment to aesthetic, scholarly, ethical, and relational aspects of the work allowed for mutual engagement with and complex understandings of each other and ourselves.

References Apol, L. (2015). Requiem, Rwanda. Michigan State University Press. Apol, L. (2016). Emwe N’imvura Irabyibuka [Even the rain remembers]. (M. F.-X. Ntaganda, Trans.). Mudacumura Publishing House. O’Brien, T. (1990). The things they carried. Houghton Mifflin.

Chapter 8

Poetic Respect; Poetic Letting Go

If a focus on the aesthetic, scholarly, ethical, and relational aspects of poetic inquiry foregrounds some of the productive tensions and rich possibilities of this form of research, it likewise exposes some of the unresolvable pressures when poetresearchers are required to attend to a set of competing demands. In the previous chapters, Louise provides an instance of the most profound form of poetic withness, seeing herself through my poet-eyes as strong and brave as we co-inhabit a poem based on her story. She makes visible and embodies the enormous potential of inquiry that aims at once to be good poetry and good research—self-aware and relational. However, not all the responses to the poems were as positive and affirming as those of Louise. While at times the tensions inherent in a commitment to aesthetics, inquiry, ethics, and relations are productive—they help to make the work stronger and richer and more complex—at times, these tensions produce conflicts that cannot be resolved and that raise, in the end, questions that foreground competing desires, intentions, and obligations. This is arts-based research at its stickiest best; looking closely at these moments provides a way to tease out and examine what is radical and sometimes irresolvable about poetic inquiry as simultaneously an art form, a form of investigation, an ethical stance, and a relationship. Unpacking these competing engagements and demands can teach the poet-inquirer not only more about the topic but more about the practice as well. To provide a clear poetic inquiry “case”—one where multiple aspects of the challenges inherent in this sort of scholarly and artistic work are demonstrated—I focus on one individual, Agnes,1 and one poem, which, for the sake of this case, I will simply call “The Poem.”2 My recounting of the interactions around “The Poem” begin with 1A

pseudonym. of respect for the wishes of the Rwandan companion with whom this interaction took place, I cannot provide the actual poem or the email correspondence surrounding the poem. I have chosen instead to refer to it simply as “The Poem.” Still, because my own story of the process of negotiating around this poem brings forward aspects of poetic inquiry that bear examination and discussion, I present this abbreviated version of the case, knowing it would undoubtedly be richer with more specificity.

2 Out

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Apol, Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56562-6_8

103

104

8 Poetic Respect; Poetic Letting Go

early drafts, continue through the negotiation of shifting literal and literary truth, include the acknowledging of unequal power relations and the ethics of witness and withness, and finally conclude with the challenge and responsibility of attempting to craft, from lived experience, research with artistic, aesthetic, and relational integrity. My interactions with Agnes demonstrate the ways competing demands in poetic inquiry require hard choices—a weighing of options that center around a response to the question, When research becomes art, whose poem is it? I want to make clear here that the question I am raising recognizes that the story as it is told always belongs to the teller. Yet, once that story is told and a poem is written in response to it, does the poem belong to the teller or to the poet? Or is it an entity to itself, operating at an intersection of relationship and craft? Can the poem be separated from the story? And if it can be, should it? The answers may seem self-evident, but it is my experience that nearly every poet, researcher, and poet-researcher has a different view of “self-evident” in this case, and therefore these are questions I explore in this chapter.

History of “The Poem” “The Poem” started based on notes from an early visit to Rwanda, during which time I got to know a survivor named Agnes. The more time I spent with her, the more I was affected by her insights, her perspectives, her actions, and her commitments. By the end of the visit, I felt intensely connected to Agnes and on the way home I found myself thinking and writing about her at length. “The Poem” grew out of those notes. In early drafting, I wanted to convey my response to Agnes’s choices and to her resilience in the years that followed the genocide. In so doing, I created a series of poems with several parts. On my next visit, I again met with her; during our time together, I shared the poems. As with all the other early poems, I did not consider these truly to be poems (they were mostly my way of capturing moments and making sense of my own responses). Still, I wanted to show Agnes what I had written. She seemed pleased to see herself, her work and her words come back to her in this form. In the years that followed, as I drafted, completed, and edited my Rwanda poems, I made many revisions to the series of “Agnes” poems, eventually pulling some of the disparate parts together into one piece: “The Poem.” I revised this version several times, trying to find ways to communicate my own experience of hearing Agnes’s accounts of life during and after genocide. Though the poem improved with each round of revisions, I was still dissatisfied; even with revisions, it felt too “easy”— there was little that challenged a reader or that moved beyond a straightforward telling of an event and its backstory. If, in fact, this was going to be successful as poetry, I needed to work on poetic craft and aesthetics. I revised once more, this time working with the form of the poem to make it more evocative and more dense. I chose to use a block format rather than line breaks to compress the telling and to indicate that the poem was more narrative than conventionally poetic. I took out the section markers, using indented stanzas to serve as

History of “The Poem”

105

a more subtle bridge between the sections. Lastly, I re-titled the piece to direct a reader’s attention toward elements that ran through the entirety of the poem. In this round of revision, I took out what I saw as non-essential parts of the interactions and conversations the poem contained. And, because I wanted to create more complexity and openness in the conclusion, rather than using the last line of the poem to tidy things up (as I had with the earlier versions), I introduced at the end an ambiguity that would, I thought, prompt the reader to greater consideration and understanding.

Sharing the Final Version When I returned to Rwanda with the poetry manuscript in 2013, I met with Agnes to share with her the final version of “The Poem.” As with the rest of the individuals with whom I shared final pre-publication poems, I explained to her the purpose of my visit, concluding with my wish for accuracy and my desire for her to see what I had done with the poem that included her story and name. As with the others, I told her that it was her choice whether or not her actual name was to be used (for more details on these conversations, see Chap. 7). Agnes and I read the poem together. I talked at length about why I had chosen the title and what the poem was trying to say. Agnes nodded, but said nothing. I suggested that she might wish to take the manuscript home with her in order to read through the rest of the poems at her leisure, perhaps with someone who could help her with the translation and the poetic intent. I was scheduled to fly home within a couple of days and I did not want her to feel rushed, so I asked her to send her feedback to me by email and she agreed. A few weeks later I got a message from her through one of her children.3 Although I had been clear that I was only asking about factual accuracy and the use of her name (or not), she had sent a list of changes she wished to see in the poem. I wrote back, first clarifying for her in general what I was trying to do in the poem—that is, it was my intention to affirm her work and her lived choices, and that to do that most effectively I had made artistic decisions that would strengthen and make visible the themes that ran through the poem. I explained that as a form of art, poems select, shape, condense, and seek to evoke for poetic effect. Then I responded to her issues one by one. In my responses, I tried to listen to the concerns behind the words, and I offered to make many of the changes to the poem that she requested. However, it seemed Agnes’s ultimate discomfort was with the final lines of the poem, where I had revised my earlier draft to create a more open and indeterminate ending. She wanted a more straightforward and unambiguous final statement that she believed would better convey her experience. When I wrote back, I explained that I intended the ending, 3 Agnes

and my conversations around the poem (both in person and electronically) always took place with one of Agnes’s children serving as interpreter, allowing for more nuanced linguistic understandings on both our parts.

106

8 Poetic Respect; Poetic Letting Go

with its openness, to be a rhetorical statement that could serve as powerful thinkingpoint after the reader finishes reading the poem. I told her that as a result, I did not want the last lines to be too directive or explicitly wrapped up. I wrote to her a bit about truth and Truth (see Chaps. 6 and 7) and the desire I had for the poem to communicate poetic Truth in the most compelling way possible. I emailed back a revised version of the poem, having made nearly all the other changes she requested (and believing the poem was better as a result of her suggestions), but also knowing I would not be able to do much to change the ending of the poem. I could not actually find a way to bridge the gap between Agnes’s wish for what to her was a clear and unambiguous ending and my own need to maintain what I saw as a crucial element of its poetic (and more evocative) rendering. She emailed a response very soon (again, through one of her children) saying she understood about the poetic aspects, but explaining that she still was not comfortable with the ending to the poem. I went back to the poem, looking for ways to rewrite the ending—to finish the poem a few lines earlier, or to go back to drafts where I included a more direct closing statement that summarized the poem. But, as a poet, I could not bring myself to return to a previous (and overwritten) version of the conclusion and, ultimately, could not find a way around what I viewed as a mismatch between Agnes’s more literal reading of the last lines of the poem and my more poetic intent. In thinking through our interactions around the poem’s ending, I also thought about her initial discomfort with the editing I had done earlier in the poem. In my revisions, I had trimmed material that felt to me to be explanatory and unpoetically extraneous, and tried to foreground aspects of the poem that I thought would strengthen the theme. Agnes’s responses suggested that she wished for just the opposite—she did not want to have those aspects intensified and she missed the context that the deleted material had provided in the poem. Suddenly it became clearer to me that our differences were not merely about words, nor was it the case that Agnes simply did not understand what I as a poet wanted to have happen in the poem. Moreover, it did not seem that, even with further explanation, I could (or should try to) make my poetic intentions or desires more convincing and thereby help to alleviate her concerns. There was something else going on—something I, as an outsider, could not fully understand, but that I needed to respect. I wished I could have found a way to include the poem in the collection, but I could not find a solution that would be acceptable to Agnes, nor could I change what for me were crucial aspects of the poem. As someone committed to bearing witness in collaboration with my companions in Rwanda, I knew I could not disregard Agnes’s concerns by simply claiming my own artistic liberties. I needed to make the changes she requested, or I needed to remove the poem. As a poet, I felt it would not be true to my own aesthetic sense of the poem if I made the revisions to the ending that Agnes asked for; therefore, I chose to remove the poem. It was a hard decision, given the time and care I had devoted to it, given the important role I believed it played in the collection (it spoke clearly about a particular sort of post-genocide recovery and resilience), and given

Sharing the Final Version

107

my immense admiration for Agnes and her story. Yet, in the end, it was clear to me that Agnes’s concerns needed to take precedence over my own. The entire interaction surfaced many questions for me about the challenges and responsibilities of being a researcher who also is a poet.

Looking Back from a Distance Years later, I brought up the exchange in a conversation with a Rwandan friend, Jo.4 She proposed a few reasons why Agnes might have felt so strongly about the poem when she had been supportive and enthusiastic about the earlier versions I had shown her. Jo surmised that the biggest reasons might have had to do with the final stage of “going public” with the poem. She reminded me that much of the writing I had done on Rwanda, particularly at the start, grew out of and was centered on relationships. In the context of relationship, Agnes may have felt fine sharing her personal experiences and thoughts with me and was pleased when my responses came back to her in the form of poems. However, when those poems were going to be made public in a published book, Agnes may have felt differently, unsure of how wide and diverse the reading audience might be. Jo went on to say that for Agnes, it might have been that the timing of the publication was still too close to the time of the genocide. At the point when Agnes read my completed manuscript, genocide survivors were continuing to struggle to come to terms with what had taken place, and references to things that happened may have been too immediate and too immediately painful. Perhaps at a later date making the poem public might have felt different, but at the moment it was simply too soon. It might have been that the long and unbroken history of colonial appropriation made Agnes unsure of my intentions, even after she and I had had years of positive interactions. Maybe it was protective, and she imagined that I might write something in the future that would jeopardize the safety of her family if she was linked too publicly to my words. It may also have been that there were cultural and political underpinnings to the exchange that I, as an outsider, simply did not understand. Agnes was a private person; her response was clearly a form of resistance to having the poem become widely known. Whatever the reason, it was certainly the case that part of my sense of the “poetic” in the poem was in conflict with Agnes’s desires. Poetic representation can be powerful in part due to its concentration and evocation, but from our exchanges it became clear that trimming down context clues and ending with an open rhetorical statement were incompatible with Agnes’s own ways of wanting to communicate certain aspects of her story. Consequently, the stronger my drafts became poetically, and the more they adhered to my own sense of aesthetics and poetic craft, the further they moved from Agnes’s own sense of specificity, accuracy, and truth.

4A

pseudonym.

108

8 Poetic Respect; Poetic Letting Go

Regardless of the reasons, our irresolvable differences kept us from being able to reach a compromise, and the result is that the poem was not included in the book. My position as a U.S. academic and an outsider in Rwanda needed to make way for Agnes’s voice and her ownership of her story. The poem contained her perspective and experience, and acknowledging her stance was not only relational, it was ethical as well. As Jo had explained in our conversation, my years of work in Rwanda grew out of relationship and trust. And this sort of inquiry—the kind that acknowledges the importance of collaboration, that co-creates, and that respects the teller—has great promise because it can empower everyone involved. According to Jo, this is the sort of work Rwandans have been advocating—that scholars first understand Rwandans, and only then begin to write. The way this can take place is for researchers to become part of a community, and poetic inquiry allows for that. As Jo put it, “to turn the truth into a poem, you first need someone to share the truth, and it is only in relationship that you will be told stories in an authentic way.” But a true respecting of relationship contains risk as well. Active participants (companions) change things. They bring to the work their own perspectives, desires, needs, fears, wishes, understandings, resistances, and demands. In giving up an insistence on scholarly distance and control and poetic autonomy, the poetic-inquirer places the poem at risk, but also perhaps learns more in the process. When inquirers cultivate an awareness of and a sensitivity to the multiple perspectives around the poem, the poem itself becomes less important than the needs of the relationship, the wishes of the individuals who appear in the poem, and the learning that can subsequently take place. This is, as Jo reminds, the only way to get closer to any sort of understanding.

Conclusion My interactions with Agnes brought forward for me important questions about poetic ownership—in research in general, in poetic inquiry in particular. Among the myriad stakeholders in any particular project, who determines what may be told and how? Initially, the answers to these questions seemed clear to me. The story was Agnes’s; the poem based on my response to that story was my own. I worked and reworked the poem so it would be able to enter the world as art that contained within it the potential for realization, understanding, and, perhaps, change. These were important goals for the work, and yet my exchanges with Agnes called these seemingly clear boundaries and these lofty (but one-sided) goals into question. Yes, the poems I wrote inquired into my personal lived experience of Rwanda, but that lived experience did not transpire context-free. Other people were woven into my stories and I became woven into theirs. It is the case that “The Poem” was my response to hearing parts of Agnes’s life; I am at the poem’s center, listening, asking,

Conclusion

109

observing, and responding. Still, I am not alone in the poem; Agnes is there beside me, sharing, recounting, explaining. Our goals in the moment that is conveyed in the poem might have been similar, or they might not. But as that moment found its way into words, and words found new shape and new weight, our goals diverged. In the hands of the poet and in the structure of the poem, our interactions had the potential to become a public record; as such, they carried a responsibility to poetic craft, but more importantly, because in the process a version of Agnes’s story would become fixed, concrete, public, marketable, and potentially risky, the telling of it (or not) ultimately and clearly belonged to her. Given that nearly everyone who hears about Agnes and my exchange has a different “take” on it, it seems that this particular situation brings forward complicated perspectives on aesthetics, lived experience, ownership, and authorship. And perhaps more than any other aspect of the work in Rwanda, my interactions with Agnes around “The Poem” taught me about the possibilities and the challenges of poetic inquiry. For even though poetic inquiry attends to the aesthetic, the investigative, the ethical, and the relational, it does not do so evenly across projects and time. When these aspects support and feed one another, they provide great strength and power—for the topic of the inquiry, for the inquirer, and for the colleagues/companions involved—but they exist in tension, and often one must be foregrounded at the expense of another. In the writing of “The Poem,” I, as a poet, opted for the poetic. Yet when Agnes came to this poem, she preferred the version in which I told the ending narrowly, specifically, unequivocally, and explicitly, without risk of misinterpretation—a stance that forced me to choose between the aesthetic and the relational (and ultimately the ethical) in this particular piece. I could not find a compromise that would meet both her needs and my own. In opting, as I did, for the relational, I believed the poem was no longer viable aesthetically and that it needed to be removed from the manuscript. Though in the process I let go the poem, in the end this mismatch was productive in allowing me to learn from the richness and complexities of the ongoing negotiations, and to recognize in the process the poet-inquirer’s need for clarity, humility, flexibility, and continuing adaptation. Here is my (much later) poetic response to what occurred, as I considered lingering questions about stories, origins, relationships—and, of course, poems. This very brief poem illustrates the complex and irresolvable questions I found myself caught in in my interactions with Agnes. It speaks to the heart of the matter: the original story is Agnes’s; the poem as it is written and revised is mine. Yet the two are, in many ways, inseparable, and the question has no simple answer. In the end, though, I have come to believe that arriving at an answer is less important than engaging with the question itself.

110

8 Poetic Respect; Poetic Letting Go

whose poem is it? does heat exist in the flame or the wood? and further back, in the tree or the match? is song born in the bird’s throat or in the listening ear? does the fallen flower ever stop belonging to the tree?

Chapter 9

Conclusion: Engaging with the Lives of Others

Twenty Years On at the end of the two-decade road is a house tin roof stone fence windows still wanting for glass and yes the house is a house and yes the storm clouds are clouds and yes the cradled child is a child miracle the haze of his hair miracle the scent of his skin two decades ago his mother hid in the swamps for weeks orphan teeth loosening budding breasts shriveled against hunger’s ribs two decades ago she alone carried the future her greatgrandmother’s voice her twinbrothers’ smiles The poem “Twenty Years On” was originally published in Crosswinds Poetry Journal, 2020, V, pp. 7–8. ©Laura Apol. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 L. Apol, Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda, Studies in Arts-Based Educational Research 3, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56562-6_9

111

112

9 Conclusion: Engaging with the Lives of Others

through bloodied days through panic nights there is nothing she says nothing that can touch me now her hand on the curve of the baby’s her baby’s back and I take it in the miracle hair the rutted road with the mud red drive the roof in the rainstorm such bright wings. (Apol, 2020, pp. 7–8) My visits to Rwanda and the relationships that resulted have spanned many years. I have seen the country—and lives within the country—change over time. I have watched as Rwandans commemorated fifteen years post-genocide, twenty years, then twenty-five. I have sustained friendships across distance; I have watched recoveries that have taken place, both individually and country-wide. And I have continued to think about the poems that were the result of my interactions and experiences. “Twenty Years On” was written well after the publication of Requiem, Rwanda (Apol, 2015). It is about the decades that followed genocide, the ways traumatized lives move on—haltingly, miraculously, in broken fits and starts. As the speaker in the poem, once again I am an observer, taking it in: the woman’s experience of genocide twenty years before, the new life she is building, and her sense that, having survived the worst, there is nothing more to fear. At the end of the poem, the image of the tin roof as guardian wings works in two ways: a metal roof is, in Rwanda, a sign of prosperity and security—an indication in the poem that the woman who lives under that roof now has stability in her life. The image is also an allusion to the poem “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)—a poem of resilience in which, after describing the way humans have degraded the earth, Hopkins posits that nature is “never spent [….] Because the Holy Ghost over the bent/World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.” I wanted to bring that same sentiment and that sense of the Divine to this poem of Rwanda; the years of watching, of listening, of writing enabled me as a poet to recognize, up close, the lingering effects of genocide that will never be entirely erased, along with a resilience that, two decades later, brings a young woman who spent weeks of the genocide hiding in terror into a place of recovery—recovery that is at once incomplete, miraculous, forward-looking, and sacred.

Art as Inquiry; Inquiry as Art My time in Rwanda called me to locations, emotional spaces, relationships, means of doing research, and aesthetic terrains I had never before considered—to literal and metaphoric landscapes I had never explored. My poems, then, were an attempt

Art as Inquiry; Inquiry as Art

113

at telling a story about research and interactions that were unfamiliar, complicated, and ongoing—a story that could not have been told through conventional means and that relied, for its power, on the affordances of poetry. Stepping back to view the process of writing along with the written (and sometimes published) products is an opportunity to consider what can be learned through the creation of poems: to examine and explore my own lived experience through poetic craft; to gain insight into complex social, cultural, and historical human interactions; to develop a heightened sense of self-awareness and ethical responsibility; to forge authentic and evolving personal relationships with the Rwandans who journeyed with me. Experimenting with the ways scholarly research might take the form of poems—poems that range from personal to political, that move from understanding to action—allows both the reader and the writer to enter and re-enter an event and helps demonstrate what poetry can teach. In the writing of this book, what I discovered as an inquirer into the process and the product is that four aspects of poetic inquiry repeatedly came up: the importance of craft (the aesthetic); the imperative of accuracy and reliability (the investigative); the significance of ethical responsibility that leads to action (witness); the centrality of relational connectedness and accountability (withness). And while these aspects may (and often do) show up in poetry that does not also identify itself as inquiry, the specific activity of inquiring poetically brings them to the fore and provides a platform from which to tease out and examine various aspects that might otherwise go unremarked. My poems involving and invoking Rwanda taught me, then, not only about genocide, about Rwanda, and about myself; they taught me as well about elements of poetic craft and about poetic inquiry as a means both of observing and of knowing, of understanding and of conveying. I learned that poetry can teach lessons that are personal, public, political, and profound, and poetic inquiry enabled me to trace these lessons through the development and examination of my own poems. Communicating the outcomes of the writing-for-healing work in the form of poems allowed me, through poetic representation, to negotiate shifting literal and literary “truth;” to acknowledge the unequal power relationships that both make possible and emerge from speaking to and about an “Other;” to craft, from trauma, research with artistic and aesthetic integrity; and to explore my responsibility in turning life events into art that honors both the teller and the story, all the while respecting the needs of the audience and the authenticity and quality of the telling. Through poetic inquiry, I was able to trace the progression as I moved from using writing as a way to understand my personal responses to horror and loss, to using writing as a means of engaging with the stories of others, to imagining a wider audience for the poems, and to chronicling my eventual return to Rwanda to share my work. In the process, I had the opportunity to ask new questions, to better understand myself as a poet, and to recognize the inherent power of poems. And yet, research that takes the form of poetic inquiry cannot help but stumble over the very elements that give it strength. As a hybrid in the worlds of research and art, poetic inquiry in its best iteration is both academically defensible and aesthetically compelling; it pulls in readers through its artistry and informs them through the veracity and richness of its detail. However, such a happy marriage between research

114

9 Conclusion: Engaging with the Lives of Others

and art is not inevitable, and sometimes poetic inquiry fails at one or the other (and sometimes at both), requiring it to continually navigate the spaces betwixt and between. If it is good research, can it be good poetry as well? And if it is good poetry, can it be good research too? Always, for the poet-inquirer, for the research, and for the poems themselves, the answer must be an unequivocal yes. Finally, it is the case that poetic inquiry takes time—often significantly more time than other modes of research might require. Meeting the demands of research along with the demands of art is a complicated and tenuous process. Good research that results in bad poetry does not constitute effective art; good poetry that grows out of bad research does not constitute effective inquiry. And so, poet-inquirers learn first in the doing, and they continue to learn through the various iterations of writing, revising, and sharing their work. The process of revision, the importance of investigation and accuracy, the commitment to engaging ethically with topics and individuals, and the relational aspects that undergird the work make this a process that requires ongoing attention, growth, and discovery—in short, a process that unfolds across time.

The Role of the Poem in Poetic Inquiry In order to consider poetic inquiry’s affordances and challenges—that is, those aspects that give it strength and that make it complicated as well—it is necessary that something be inquired into. In my own case, I have demonstrated my evolving understandings of poetic inquiry through an examination of my experiences in Rwanda and the poems that resulted. Throughout these chapters, then, I have traced my writing from early drafts—simplistic, overwritten, and naïve; drafts designed to help me make sense of my own learning and responses, and most often not poems at all— through to a published collection that also represented my developing commitment to poetry as a means of social action and change. Initially, the poems—poems that I was learning on and learning through—allowed me to engage with and make sense of what proved to be exceedingly difficult knowledge. Poetic inquiry provided a means to honor the challenges and complexities of my experiences in Rwanda. In the process of revision, I was pushed to think beyond my usual sense of poetic aesthetics, to work toward a more effective way to convey the material and to produce what were, not only for me but for a wider audience as well, poems that demonstrated poetic craft and skill. At times, this meant that I needed to learn more, to provide readers with additional information (within or outside poems, often in the form of essays or notes), or to create poems with the specific intent of giving background or perspective. In living with and into the poems, I recognized that my poetry took the form of “poetry of witness,” which included self-awareness and an ethical commitment not only to empathy, but also to transformation and action. And if witness required this awareness of self in the service of change, a corresponding commitment to withness required me to acknowledge the relational responsibilities that accompany research-poems—withness that ranged from poems of observation to the immensely personal and highly committed co-inhabitation of a poem.

The Role of the Poem in Poetic Inquiry

115

Making the poems public by bringing them back to my companions in Rwanda was a moment of huge vulnerability on all our parts; when combined, aesthetics, inquiry, witness, and withness not only respond to but also pose a new set of questions. While a focus on the aesthetic, scholarly, ethical, and relational aspects of poetic inquiry foregrounds some of the productive tensions and rich possibilities of this form of research, it likewise exposes some of the uncomfortable pressures when poet-researchers are required to attend to a set of differing demands. It was not until I returned with the poems to Rwanda, though, that I fully experienced the tensions inherent in the sometimes complementary and sometimes competing aspects of poetic inquiry. The result of my return was sometimes affirming, sometimes confusing, and sometimes filled with disappointment. No matter the outcome, though, it was another opportunity to learn through the doing of inquiry. It goes without saying that I am both a better inquirer and a better poet as a result of these interactions around the finished poems, and that the transformative power of art is possible only through a productive messiness and an uncertainty of process.

Broader Implications The lessons that accompany my use of poetry in Rwanda as a study in poetic inquiry go beyond arts-based research. Working in Rwanda, developing poems with a commitment to the aesthetic, the investigative, the ethical, and the relational also speaks more generally to other forms of cross-national, cross-cultural research. An acknowledgment of the researcher’s own positionality and power, the need to provide documentation and information for an under-informed reader, and the necessity of taking time to build and follow through on relationships is appropriate not only in poetic inquiry but in wider boundary-crossing research enterprises as well. When it came to the published book on my work in Rwanda (Requiem, Rwanda, Apol, 2015), my inclusion of the opening and closing essays that laid out a brief history of Rwanda and described the complexities of being a white woman writing there, along with my commitment to providing notes to the poems and suggestions for further reading, met with mixed responses. Some poets insisted that the notes and essays were not necessary for a poetic understanding of the poems and, in fact, interfered with the poetic craft (I disagreed); an Africanist colleague maintained that the essays were crucial for a more full understanding of the context and the work. He wrote: I think the volume would be less effective without [the essays … they] reveal your sensitivities about your role as observer, recorder, rememberer, and outsider […] and as a muzungu.1 That is very powerful, I think, and for some readers would be very important. The problem is that these large issues you address about the occurrence of genocides and of the roles and ambiguities of those who observe post hoc are very important and are perspectives that 1 muzungu:

White person.

116

9 Conclusion: Engaging with the Lives of Others

many writers do not bring to the process. I think these are extremely important when you know your volume will appear in the context globally of the racialized character of Western perspectives on Africa and, especially, on Rwanda. (DW, personal communication, January 2011)

Including the essays and notes, then, was a political choice, as well as a decision affecting format and genre, and it speaks to and about the importance of building context and providing information in other boundary-crossing work. In addition to providing a model for a range of cross-national and cross-cultural work, poetic inquiry also serves as an example for other methods of qualitative research and for the approaches toward the production of knowledge that are central to them. With its commitment to aesthetics, investigation, witness, and withness, poetic inquiry has the ability to assist other qualitative stances and researchers in asking important questions that should—but often do not—surface, regardless of the methodology employed. For instance, poetic inquiry does not pretend to be impersonal, and thus makes space for other modes of qualitative research to resist apologetic or defensive stances when it comes to a perceived lack of “objectivity.” It is not the point in poetic inquiry to be objective, but rather to be openly relational, involved, vulnerable, compassionate, engaging, and interpersonal. This creates, addresses, and resolves a singular set of tensions around the role of the researcher in qualitative research, defying approaches that fail to acknowledge (or that actively deny) the impact of the inquirer on the inquiry, that insist that researchers maintain a stance of “neutrality” when it comes to relationships with the subject (or the “subjects”) of the research, and/or that advocate that researchers in effect “write themselves out” of their research findings. Likewise, the willingness in poetic inquiry to allow for thoughtful movement between story-truth and happening-truth2 (a strategy that would likely be criticized in other research method frameworks) can bolster an argument that all research is constructed and selective, and a recognition that such selectivity—when acknowledged—can and does produce inquiry that is not only effective, but affective as well. Just as poetic inquiry informs other boundary-crossing research and challenges (or perhaps supports) other qualitative methods, so too it provides evidence that poetic attention can be a form of social action, a way to influence perspectives and, ultimately, to bring about change. The poetry I wrote in Rwanda began as personal but moved fairly quickly into a more public form of communication related to what I was learning and experiencing. At heart, these poems were political—they were intended not only to inform, but also to challenge readers and to move them to action. In my learning about the history and culture of Rwanda, and in my interactions with my companions, I encountered examples of failures of humanity and issues of struggle and injustice as they occurred in the lives of present-day Rwandans. I wrote about them not only to inform a reading audience, but also to prompt those readers to work for change. The poems themselves make visible this journey—from personal to public to political—and poetic inquiry helped me step back and recognize how it had occurred. 2 For

more on the uses of “story-truth” and “happening-truth” (O’Brien, 1990), see Chaps. 6 and 7.

Broader Implications

117

Finally, poetic inquiry speaks most compellingly to intimate and thoroughly human interactions as they take place. Witness, withness, and public/ation allow the individuals who appear in the poems to encounter a version of themselves and their stories as seen through the eyes of another. Louise is affirmed when she sees herself in a poem as “a strong and brave Louise,” one who is admired not only by the poem, but by the poet as well. Reframed, selective, honest in an intensely truthful way, the (re-)living and (re-)telling of a story takes shape in this way: stanza by stanza, word by word.

Finishing Thoughts Using poetry as a means of inquiry offers a range of possibilities for the inquirer, for the topic being studied, and for the listener or reader. It allows for intimacy, closeness, and familiarity, but also provides space for growth, uncertainty, and discovery. It can add to the literature of social justice and—in its best iteration—can serve as a means of activism and change. The first chapter of this book opens with a poem, “The Lives of Others” (Apol, 2015, pp. 28–29). It is a poem that demonstrates the power of close poetic attention by making visible my own learning to hear the questions (and the responses to the questions) in a set of stories that are imagined and appreciated, but that are never told. It is both impossible and imperative, this sort of engagement; it relies on open awareness—a commitment to watching and listening in order to hear what is never said. The poem “Twenty Years On” opens this, the book’s concluding chapter, in a similar manner; it is a poem that once again attends to the lives of others (this time observing a survivor in the decades that follow genocide) and that again demonstrates close poetic attention. It sees and hears the ways a traumatized individual moves from past to present and future, from grief-filled memories to moments of stability and hope. Poetic inquiry makes possible this ongoing engagement, brings forward journeys that are lived and journeys that are observed. By attending to aesthetics, accuracy, ethics, and relational accountability, poetic inquiry allows for the telling of a fuller, more human story than might otherwise be understood or conveyed—a story that puts forward questions, and at times puts forward answers to those questions as well. I close, then, with a recent poem written explicitly to end this volume. In “Bright the Dead,” I return to the notion of writer as witness, as listener, and as watcher— aware, engaged, responsive, and responsible; a poet-inquirer always in search of, and in the service of, words.

118

9 Conclusion: Engaging with the Lives of Others

Bright the Dead You shared with me your history, histories —bones mined from the dust— and then your comings back, tattered wings and hesitant flight, offered me the names of the unforgotten: testimonies of ash, of never and always forever un-done. Lifetimes of loss and promise, half-light to guide you, you fanned your guttering to strength and as you did, I listened— leaned in hard and listened, already turning what was heard

into lines.

References Apol, L. (2015). Requiem, Rwanda. Michigan State University Press. Apol, L. (2020). Twenty years on. Crosswinds Poetry Journal, V, 7–8. Hopkins, G. M. (1918). Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins now first published. Humphrey Milford. O’Brien, T. (1990). The things they carried. Houghton Mifflin.