Never again...again
I had the privilege of spending a week in Kigali, Rwanda, on a work trip a couple of weeks ago. It was April, the month marking the 30th anniversary of the genocide in that country. On my last day there I had a couple of hours to walk around Kigali. It’s a very pleasant city to spend time in, though I can only imagine the layers of feeling, memory and complexity that exist out of view of the casual visitor – especially in a month that must be so difficult for so many.
On walls in various places there were posters about the anniversary, and then in the city centre I came across a plaque outside an office block: “Genocide: Never Again”. That sign has been sitting with me ever since. As I write this, student protests continue against the current genocide, this time in Gaza. So I’ve been wondering what happened to that promise of ‘never again’? Why do we keep saying ‘never again’, and yet, keep having an again and again and again?
Maybe our promises of ‘never again’ are so futile partly because of the stories we tell ourselves. About what ‘never again’ means, about the nature of genocide, and about ourselves. Perhaps part of the problem of ‘never again’ is that we are looking to prevent something that looks and feels like what happened before – that terrible event from the past that is seared into memory. Our stories of the past, and what happened, and how it happened, shape what we are looking for in the present and the future. But while patterns repeat, they vary in how they show up, and so we miss the warning signs once again.
I keep coming back to Mehret Mandefro’s post about history, story and memory – where she references Raul Peck’s documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes. Part of the problem is that we see genocide as rare and exceptional, when as Peck tries to show, it is a frequent, repetitive, structural part of colonialism, racism and the current capitalist global order.
As Vanessa Machado de Oliveira argues in Hospicing Modernity, and as many others have too, genocide, violence and destruction are part of the very essence of modernity. We cannot say ‘never again and have it be ‘never again’, when the everyday lives of people like me, living middle class lives in wealthy countries, are built on, and depend on, violence, death and destruction that have mostly been conveniently displaced onto someone and somewhere else (but which are increasingly coming home to roost).
As Machado de Oliveira also points out, it’s complicated. Modernity is the air we breathe – we can’t just remove ourselves from it, just stop being complicit. But as a first step we do have to give up our stories of ourselves as innocent and removed. ‘Never again’ can never only be about ‘then’ and ‘there’. Those people, in that place, at that time. It’s us, right now, every day.
Another limitation of ‘never again’ is that it’s only one part of the equation. It is important to make that commitment, to acknowledge our complicity and destructiveness and to make clear we find it unacceptable. But we also need to acknowledge the beauty and love and creativity that exists within and between us. As the experts tell us, in addition to stating what we do not want, we need to also state what we are for, say what it is that we do want in such a way that it supports yearning, desire, and demand for something better.
If a recent report is to be believed, the good news is that there’s already a deep longing across the globe for more and better, for “community and belonging, for safety, for agency, for understanding and feeling good.”
There’s a deep longing for a fundamental rethink (and a re-feel) of the truths we have been taught, the ideas we have about ourselves, ideas of what success looks like, of what we value and don’t, who we listen to and don’t. Whose lives count and whose do not. To me, that’s part of what the current protests represent.
There’s a longing for stories of ourselves, our past, present and future; layered stories that embody continuity, complexity, interdependence and connection. Stories that help us understand why and how our modern lives and modern selves are tied up inextricably with genocide and destruction as much as they are with creativity and love and beauty. Stories that, by showing us our continuity with the past and the future, by showing us our complexity and connectedness, will help us find the way out, to a new way of being, together.