“There Is No Other Way to Say This”: Andrew Kaufman’s Rwanda Poems by Michael Centore
The Rwanda Poems:
Voices and Visions from the Genocide
By Andrew Kaufman
NYQ Books, 2023
$18.95 110 pp.
There is a poem by Carolyn Forché that has haunted me since I first discovered it over twenty years ago. It is called “The Colonel,” and it grew out of Forché’s experience working as a human rights advocate in El Salvador in the late 1970s. The poem describes an evening spent dining with an officer in the notoriously brutal regime of Carlos Humberto Romero, then the nation’s president, whose repressive military dictatorship had carried out scores of atrocities against its own people. After dinner, following “some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern,” the officer gets up from the table and returns with a paper sack. A general atmosphere of menace is condensed and specified:
He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this.
“The Colonel” is written in prose, and its journalistic terseness heightens the horror of the image. The tone is dry, desiccated; even the lyrical impulse of the simile is quickly qualified by the following sentence. “There is no other way to say this” seems to me like an admission of the limits of metaphor—of poetry, even, whose goal is precisely to find other ways to express the fluidity of the phenomenal world—when brought up against the outer edges of human experience at its most extreme or debased. And yet, paradoxically, it is the limits of metaphor that end up lending the scene its veracity. Left alone, the bag of severed ears might be “unbelievable”—a charge Forché herself has pointedly repudiated—but the poet’s touch of the peach halves certifies the presence of a human intelligence that, by the sheer act of registering the moment, makes it real to us.
This, I think, is what people mean when they speak of a “poetry of witness,” and its particular qualities were continually on my mind as I read and reread Andrew Kaufman’s stunning new collection, The Rwanda Poems. Kaufman is a past contributor to Today’s American Catholic, where he has published an autobiographical account of how these poems came to be as well as translations of the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu with professor Antonio Cortijo Ocaña. I am not sure if Kaufman was translating Espriu at the time of writing The Rwanda Poems, but I can hear echoes of the Catalan’s spare music and threadbare metaphysics in lines from “The Kigali Genocide Memorial”:
I wake as though reciting, I was born in the years
between Holocaust and holocausts,
and the centuries surround me
with fire.
“I have given my life for the hard prize / of a few bare words,” Espriu wrote in 1963, a confession that calls to mind Robert Bly’s assessment of another Spanish poet, Antonio Machado, and the cohort he came up with: “When Spain lost the remains of her empire in 1898,” Bly says, “the writers of that generation realized that the old rhetorical bluff was over, and they had to live with reduced expectations, a diminished thing, sadness, grief, limited resources, a few words that were honest.” “A few bare words,” “a few words that were honest”—these feel like synonyms for “There is no other way to say this,” which is itself a negative image of speechlessness. Listen to the way Kaufman shears the lines in half steps in another section of “The Kigali Genocide Memorial”:
They found many who are buried here in churches.
They found many in latrines.
Many in classrooms.
In swamps.
They found many in makeshift mass graves.
In forests.
They found many at roadblocks.
They found many in wells.
In their homes.
In rivers.
The effect is that of a poem swallowing itself. Each instance of “They found” corresponds to the living, just as each instance of “Many” corresponds to the dead; their alternating excisions and inclusions strike me less as a formal choice and more an emotional one, the lines gulping back the words like stifled sobs. In those three two-word lines, deposited like boulders in the wake of a receding glacier, we are left with a skeletal archipelago of burial sites—swamps, forests, rivers—that maps the brutal anonymity of mass death when converted into facts: 800,000 in three months, 8,000 a day, doubling, as Kaufman notes in his introduction in one of those mordant comparisons endemic to the twentieth century, “the daily assembly-line efficiency of even the Third Reich.”
The Rwanda Poems is an attempt to glimpse through the interstices of these facts to recover the human stories between and behind them. Kaufman himself describes the book as “a work of nonfiction, a cousin in genre to the nonfiction novel,” and the pacing of the poems allows them to fall naturally into such a reading. It is a collection best assimilated as one would a novel, from front to back, beginning with “The Kigali Genocide Memorial” where the poet attempts to orient himself to the physical and psychical geography of a terrain still traumatized by violence, to the poems of the middle sections that use the words of survivors and perpetrators alike to articulate the narrative from within, to the small clutch of concluding poems that document travels to neighboring regions where the aftereffects of the genocide continue to permeate and permutate the atmosphere of daily life. Through all of this, the speaker—the anchoring I that, in the conventions of lyric poetry, is driven into the line like a stake to secure perspective—disappears and reappears, at times effacing itself to become pure channel for the testimony of others or, in the case of a poem called “What Was Saved at Ntarama Church Memorial,” for the mysterious silent witnesses of things:
A heavy padlock
Three piles of cups and bowls
A row of nail-studded cudgels
A schoolbook with Gamire, Jean
printed in a girl’s self-conscious
perfect block lettersA French dictionary
opened to PhilosophieA table-setting-size blade,
handle missing,
stuck in a skull
just above the forehead
It is the French dictionary that leaps out to me, not because it matches the schoolbook in its pathos or the cups and bowls in their evocation of communal life lost or the blade in its bald depiction of violence but because it manages, with the lightning flash of the image, to convey something of how a rationalist, colonialist mentality created conditions for a tragedy it was itself ill-equipped to understand. To read in Gérard Prunier’s book-length account of the genocide, apropos the Hutu radio broadcasts that demonized the Tutsi in the lead-up to the massacres, that “[i]t was indeed difficult for Westerners—and especially for French Cartesian minds—to make a meaningful connection between such obscure cultural allusions and the magnitude of the horror then being planned,” and to compare the syntax of that insight against Kaufman’s camera-click of the dictionary glimpsed amidst the objects saved from among the five thousand people murdered in a Catholic church in April 1994, is to begin to get at the difference between the way poetry and journalism deliver information on, and to, the world. The power of poetry’s delivery system is its compression, with the way, in this case, the word Philosophie hangs there in its end position on the line, immediately negated, or at least neutralized by, the blade. The blade indicts the dictionary as the dictionary indicts the history that surrounds the poem and in which these objects subsist—indicts the species of Western Enlightenment thinking that would, under the guise of “scientific theory” propagated by European colonists, systematize ideas of racial superiority that fragmented Rwandese society and led ultimately to genocide.

Children’s desks and blackboard at Kabgayi Hospital, a genocide site outside Muhanga-Gitarama, Rwanda. Adam Jones, Ph.D. / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0
In his biography of US diplomat Richard Holbrooke, George Packer describes how the genocide failed to arouse the attention of the world until it was much too late. The Clinton Administration “steadily looked away,” Packer tells us, while US National Security Advisor Tony Lake “didn’t hold a single high-level meeting on Rwanda.” Pressed for comment, the State Department could muster no more than the tortured legalisms that are the obverse of American guilelessness yet equally part of our national character. “Although there have been acts of genocide in Rwanda, all the murders cannot be put into that category,” department spokeswoman Christine Shelly dissembled to the International Herald Tribune. When the United Nations asked for armored cars to help in their already stymied peacekeeping efforts, we conceded not to donate but to rent them, and then dithered for three weeks before facilitating their delivery.
In light of these facts, it becomes possible to read The Rwanda Poems in another way, as a work of atonement. Seen from thirty years’ distance, the international response to the genocide now looks like an early indicator of what Pope Francis has named “the globalization of indifference”—a drop of acid that landed at the tail end of the twentieth century and has already corroded the contours of the twenty-first. Kaufman’s response in these poems is to do something that is rare for an American, which is to step back and listen to the cries of the afflicted, both those who have endured violence and those who have committed it (and thus become victims in their own way, through the sufferings of their conscience), without attempting to talk over them or resorting to moralizing cliches. “Life Sentence,” which Kaufman singled out for analysis in the autobiographical essay referenced above, is one such example of this poetry of receptivity; another that takes its first line as its title is similar in form (a monologue broken into quatrains) and content (an interview with an inmate at Kigali City Prison). The italics are preserved in the original:
They killed our president. He was like our father.
I am trained by Interahamwe.
They kill our leader to get power
and force us from our country.
Interahamwe is a Kinyarwanda term that translates to “those who work together”; it became the name for the Hutu-supported civilian militia that morphed into the death squads that carried out the genocide. The president is Juvenal Habyarimana, Hutu leader of Rwanda, whose plane was shot down by a missile on April 6, 1994. Whether this was done by members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), a Tutsi rebel group, or Hutu extremists fed up with what they perceived as Habyarimana’s concessions to the Tutsi, and to democratic governance more broadly as defined by the Arusha Accords, remains a subject of contention. That lethal ambiguity cascades through the poem and is complexified by the fact that the genocidaires targeted Hutu moderates whom they saw as insufficiently committed to the project of racial dominance in addition to the despised Tutsi. The speaker continues:
We all belong then to Interahamwe.
Each one we kill—a collaborator.
Yes. They try to force us from our country.
No. I did no looting. I did no torture.The men we killed? I said, collaborators.
We had only knife, stones, and machetes.
I told you, No looting. No torture.
We send for help when we find big families.
“Collaborator” is a mutable word here. Is the speaker referring to Tutsis who are collaborating with each other and the RPF to resist the genocide and overtake the interim government, or to opposition Hutu who are “collaborating” with the Tutsis by refusing to endorse their wholesale slaughter? I’m not sure Kaufman’s interlocutor knows:
Only weapons—I said, knife, spear, and machete.
‘What was I thinking then?’ Nothing. Just the war.
Get help if we find large family.
The only one I killed—he was an invader.
“Invader” lands us in less ambiguous territory, when we consider that this is how the Tutsi would have been known to a Hutu aggressor at the height of the genocide. Members of the RPF invaded Rwanda from their outpost in Uganda in 1990, touching off the civil war and the chain of events that would terminate in catastrophe. The speaker’s mind stabilizes long enough to confess to a single murder, yet I find myself flinching in the line before, which is itself a recapitulation of the last line of the previous stanza: Get help if we find large family. There is a dark double meaning here. First is the self-exonerating claim taken at face value: that the speaker and his accomplices did, in fact, in some break in their bloodlust, try to aid (how?) these “families.” This claim, however, is invalidated by virtually all the historical evidence. If anything, it was just the opposite: family members were forced by the Hutu to watch their relations be maimed, raped, burnt, and disemboweled before they themselves were killed. This leaves the second shadow meaning, which terrifies us in a twofold way: first, when we grasp that the “help” implied here may mean seeking assistance to destroy and not to save; and then again when we realize that this may be a kind of confession within a confession, secreted away in seemingly innocuous language.
After two stanzas where the speaker describes cutting the throat of the “invader” “twice with the machete,” the poem concludes with its tangled skein of contradiction and confession, qualification and exculpation. I’ll quote the final four stanzas in full:
I see many bodies floating in the river.
The number killed at roadblock? Maybe eighty—
traitors. Our job was to guard our sector.
Some killed send children. To help our enemy.Those I help kill at roadblock? Maybe sixty.
I do not want to talk to you anymore.
I tell you they send children to help our enemy.
What reason you ask your questions for?I don’t want to talk to you anymore.
In some houses we have to terminate babies.
I said, What you asking your questions for?
Our groups orders come from the ruling party.I have no thoughts when they terminate babies—
enemies invaded us to take power.
Orders come from ruling party.
I love our president. He was like our father.
It’s hard to know where to begin here. The immediate thing is the leap from the speaker having confessed to one murder earlier in the poem to now assisting with “Maybe sixty.” (“Roadblocks” were checkpoints set up by the Interahamwe to detain—and often worse than detain—the Tutsi and their sympathizers.) There is the strange ambiguity of the repeated accusation: “Some killed send children. To help our enemy.” Is the speaker referencing the RPF’s use of child soldiers—reportedly in the thousands at the height of the war—and using it as justification for Hutu violence more broadly? What about the movement from “collaborator” to “invader” to “traitor” to name the enemy, and the way in which this last term, like the first, could be read as a charge against Hutu moderates? Or the infernal admission of “having to”—the modal verb only increases the grotesquerie—“terminate babies,” slipped in between the twinned tetchiness of the lines “I don’t want to talk to you anymore” and “What you asking your questions for”? Or the switch in that very admission from first person to third when the speaker repeats it in the final stanza, a kind of grammatical offsetting of personal responsibility? Or the image of bodies floating in the river like the specter of death itself as it flows through the language of the poem? Or the knowledge that we as readers who stand at a historical distance from the speaker’s subjectivity gain when we glean that he was among the thousands who, in Prunier’s diagnosis, were manipulated by extremist forces to “feel that they had no choice but to kill to protect themselves from an evil that was both facelessly abstract and embodied in the most ordinary person living next door”? Or what that knowledge does to our understanding of structural sin, of personal versus collective culpability, of—and it feels right to say his name here; he is the poem’s narrator and dedicatee: Eugene Nikinahe—what it does to our understanding of Eugene Nikinahe, and whether we are allowed to feel remorse for him, and the ways by which that moral quagmire takes us into the heart of Christianity’s impossible possibility?
I’ve dwelt on this poem so long, and in such forensic detail, because I believe it typifies Kaufman’s achievement in The Rwanda Poems; it represents something of what the book is and does. Before all else, the poem is in part the pilgrimage Kaufman made to the site of the genocide. He placed himself there and became, in the vein of the reporter whose working methods resonate with those of the poet, an eye and an ear. He provided a space for his subject to speak—in this case a human, though equally in other cases an object or a landscape—and did not attempt to tamp down the confusions or self-contradictions. Instead, with the deftness of the poet’s touch and a touch of the confessor, he gently teased out the shapes of sound and symmetry and rhythm—framing the moment, as it were, creating a bounded space by which we can try to align our conscience to Czeslaw Milosz’s prompt: “Here, in a moral protest against the order of the world, in our asking ourselves where this scream of horror comes from, the defense of the peculiar place of man begins.” In the foregoing poem this boundedness is created by a chiasmatic structure of first and last lines:
They killed our president. He is like our father
becomes
I love our president. He was like our father.
Killed to love, is to was; past tense, present tense, present tense, past tense. The design is subtle, but it is still a design: it brackets and encloses the poem’s testimony, a chaos of memory within a chiasmus. Even in those poems where the authorial voice is more overt—poems like “Tell me what you know about me,” where Kaufman tries to draw out the confession of a man responsible for the bombing of a church in Nyamata south of Kigali, or the recollection of a conversation with two young adults who lost their families in the genocide in “Emmanuel and Joseline”—Kaufman never overrides his subjects; he feathers his perspective into their accounts with care and restraint, so the voice always remains one of accompaniment. In “Emmanuel and Joseline” especially, this self-effacing technique makes me think of the French poet Yves Bonnefoy’s formulation: “Poetry owes a debt to what’s truly important: compassion, and the humility that it instills.” It is one short step from Bonnefoy to the South African Dominican Albert Nolan:
Compassion is the basis of truth. The experience of compassion is the experience of suffering or feeling with someone. To suffer or feel with man, nature and God is to be in tune with the rhythms and impulses of life. This is also the experience of solidarity, solidarity with man, nature and God.
“Rhythms and impulses” sounds like shorthand for the kinetic music of the poetic line, the kenotic movement of the poet as he descends into his verse. We could add to Bonnefoy and Nolan another pair, Octavio Paz and Jean Sulivan. Paz: “That which is beyond history is called poetry.” Sulivan: “Before acting politically, faith acts poetically.” Kaufman may have begun with historical and political questions, but by filtering them through a distinct poetic sensibility rooted in listening he has arrived at something else—something like a restoration or re-membering of human being that had been smothered by unspeakable cruelty. He reminds us how “The Colonel” can carry through to Luke 22, where another ear lost to political violence is not swept thoughtlessly onto the ground but healed to hear again with a merciful touch. ♦
Michael Centore is the editor of Today’s American Catholic.
Thank you, MIchael! At first reception, I scanned and tried to quick read this article. To no avail ! I then decided to read it carefully. I am impressed with what I am sure was the time, thought, and care that is evident in the sculpturing of a long and intricate article. The depth of analysis and the complexity of what you conveyed leaves an abiding impression of this terrible period in our recent history. Thank you, again! My read brought me to re-visit the sadly failing experiences of Romeo Dallaire in his prevention efforts . Best wishes, Jack
Thank you so much, Michael! You brought vital awareness to one of the most tragic forgotten Genocides of the 20th century and one that was highly neglected in American media from the time it happened up until now.