Real Change News | Beauty, found among the shards

November 12, 2008
Vol: 15 No: 47

Feature

Beauty, found among the shards

by: Rosette Royale , Assistant Editor

Writer Terry Tempest Williams learned how to create mosaics. Then she applied this skill to the fragmented world around her.

Writer and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams didn’t want to travel to Rwanda, but felt she had to. Part of Finding Beauty in a Broken World chronicles how the making of mosaics played a part in healing those scarred by genocide.

Photo by: Sherry Loeser , Contributing Photographer

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Direct eye contact breeds intimacy. Look at someone long enough and the distance between you, no matter how vast, contracts almost into nothingness. And if you doubt the awesome power contained within a locked gaze, you’d surely change your mind if you peered into the cool, gray eyes of Terry Tempest Williams.

Of course, for many — the environmentally conscious, the Westerner, the activist with a love of lyricism — an intimate connection with Williams already exists, not through eye-to-eye contact, but through what her eyes have witnessed and transformed into words. These words have flowed across the pages of 15 books, with her 1991 release, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Vintage, $13.95), holding a special place for many. In that slim yet weighty volume, Williams balances the tale of her mother’s battle with ovarian cancer with the environmental degradation of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in Utah, her home state. Her affecting prose, written with the skill and economy of a poet, enlivens her most recent work, Finding Beauty in a Broken World (Pantheon, $26), a memoir/ treatise that uses the practice of creating mosaics as a metaphor to examine how a fragmented world — torn asunder by genocide, by species extermination — can be made whole again.

If the book sounds serious, it is. Along with being deeply affecting and serene too. Much like Williams herself, who came to town last month for a near sold-out lecture at Benaroya Hall. The day before her talk, she sat down for a chat on the top floor of the main branch of the Seattle Public Library. Raindrops cascaded upon the glass exterior. And, in the reverent hush, she spoke of Rwanda and sorrow, of evil and saviors, of the prairie dog and the Navajo, of the broken and the healed. And never once did Williams shift her eyes from mine.

You called your book Finding Beauty in a Broken World. So what are some signs our world is broken?
Our capacity to concentrate. We no longer have time to observe, to think, to be, to feel in a full way, whether it’s watching prairie dogs or whether it’s watching rain. Being present with one another, being present with the world we’re in. I think we move so fast, our time is fragmented, fractured. The fact that Congress had a $700 billion bailout: That says to me that all sense of reason and proportion is broken in this country. Call it greed, call it accountability, call it our own incapacity to restrain ourselves in this very consumptive world. I have friends who are Buddhists, who say, “Nothing’s broken. This is what is.” But I guess I have too much of an activist’s heart, and I see justice broken, I see our civil liberties broken.

You know, this book was really set on the cusp of Sept. 11, and I was in Washington, D.C. when it happened. Immediately I saw how the rhetoric shifted, and how fear was ushered in. And instead of this beautiful encapsulating moment of empathy — that we are with the world, we’re all vulnerable together — what I saw was “Us vs. them,” “We’re gonna smoke them out,” and everyone just shut down. And I made the decision as a writer, as a citizen, to speak out. I heard Dick Cheney say, “The energy policy that we’re developing is being made behind closed doors.” And I wrote an op-ed that said, “Our energy policy may be constructed behind closed doors and in secret, but if you want to see what it looks like, come to Utah, where it’s a ground-thumping experience.” The government gave [the Bureau of Land Management] the first order that our public lands are not our public commons, but should be opened up to oil and gas interests. They sent out these 40,000-pound thumper trucks and roared through wilderness study areas, no public process.

What really became scary was my own rhetoric had become as brittle and shrill as those I was opposing. I had lost my poetry in this anger. And I went down to the ocean and — call it a plea, call it a prayer — I just said, “Give me one wild word.” And the word that came back was mosaic. And I took it literally. I could never have imagined where that journey would lead me: to Rwanda, literally creating mosaics out of the rubble of the war, with genocide survivors.

You didn’t want to go. Yet you did. How did you overcome your apprehension?
My brother had just passed away from lymphoma. Our family has known death, as all families do. In our case, we’re down-winders from where nuclear tests were conducted from ’52 to ’62, and below ground ‘til ’92, so I just, I didn’t want to go. That was one reason: my own grief.

In a deeper sense I didn’t want to confront my own complicity in turning away, in averting my gaze as Clinton did when, in a hundred days, a million Tutsis were murdered. And what did our country do? They debated for three months whether this truly was a genocide. I didn’t want to go and have to confront my own inaction. I said, “No,” [to] Lily Yeh, [who] is so fierce—

Who is Lily Yeh?
Lily Yeh is a Chinese-American artist. Beautiful community spirit. She’s done all this amazing work in Philadelphia. She is a mosaicist. I said no, and she just kept staring. And I said. “Yes.” And I think on some fundamental level, I knew that if I said no to Rwanda, I would be saying no to my own humanity, to my own spiritual obligations.

What was it like when you first got there — you know, first impressions sometimes hit you hard.
I had two. One: How exquisite the country was. I mean gorgeous. Lush. It’s on the equator. These beautiful white snow-capped hills. [Rwanda] means “Land of a thousand hills.” I was not prepared for the physical beauty. That was my first impression.

The second impression, when we got out of the plane, was this one woman’s eyes. They were eyes turned inward. They were so heavy. And then we were immediately taken by the Red Cross to one of the churches where 10,000 people had been murdered. And there I met a young woman. And if one can be soaked in sorrow, she was. Her parents’ bones were there. She was the storyteller, the keeper of that story, and I think she was more connected to the dead than the living. And she told of the massacre, that she was in the fields where her mother told her to stay, as her family was butchered by Hutus. And you realize every square inch of the country has been bathed in blood.

There’s this expression, “Never again.”

After being in Rwanda, what came to me was “Never again” is actually “Never? Again.” A gentleman named Raphael Lemkin, who was Jewish, in the ‘40’s came up with this term [genocide]. And I honestly don’t think there’s anything in our human imagination, even though it’s happened again and again, to really understand what it is. I think, unless you’ve been there, or talked to someone who’s been there, it becomes an abstraction. For me, I had to see those bones, I had to see the women plowing the fields with their hoes, with bags of potatoes and bags of skulls, both bearing equal weight.

Is there a depth to sorrow that one can’t fathom?
I felt it there. The other thing that I couldn’t fathom is the resiliency of the human spirit. The capacity of the children to sing, their hunger to write, to read, to learn. In that sense, it was a place of extraordinary faith. [With Rwandan President] Paul Kagame, his leadership, it’s one of the most thrilling places on earth right now, in terms of their vision of reconstruction and of how they are seeing the health of the environment, the health of the villages, the health of the economy, all intertwined. Talk about a mosaic.

You had this line in the book: “Social change depends on love.” Why do you think that’s so?
Because I think it’s in our capacity to open our hearts to one another. I think it’s Lily Yeh: She went to Rwanda and she met with the women and the women said, “We need a place to bury the bones of our children.” And so, as an artist, she, with the women, made these plans for a genocidal memorial. She came back, got a team, called them barefoot artists, we went back together, and all of us constructed this. And so, finding beauty in a broken world is really creating beauty in the world we find. Louis Kakumba, who was my translator, was saying that what he knows about Rwanda is that it’s two hands: on one, we’re angels; on the other, we’re Satan. How do we bring those two hands together in prayer?

One part [of the book] was about prairie dogs. Can you talk about why they’re important?
I love prairie dogs because they’re the “Untouchables.” I love prairie dogs because, as kids, my brothers called them “Pop guts.” I watched everyone in the West with their .22’s and shotguns shoot the hell out of them. And against all odds – development, highways, shooting galleries, poisoning, drowning, gassing – they survived. They have this sophisticated communication system: They can identify “Man with gun,” “Man with dog,” “Man with gun that was here last week,” “Woman in red shirt,” “Woman in green shirt.” I would watch the sentinels on the outside of the [prairie-dog] village start their alert calls, and I’d think, “There’s nothing here.” Two minutes later, a pronghorn, or a deer would walk through the village, or an owl would fly over. They’re so attentive. Because of prairie dogs, over 250 animals have homes: They’re a keystone species. So if we take away the prairie dog, we lose a varied world.

You know, the Navajos of Arizona: The Army Corps of Engineers came [to them] and said, “We’re eliminating the prairie dogs because they’re creating holes and it’s causing problem for cattle.” The Navajo elders listened and said, “If you take away the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.” The engineers burst out laughing. They went, eradicated the prairie dogs, and within a matter of months, the desert turned to hardpan because, without the prairie dogs aerating the soil, when the rains came, there was no place for it to percolate down. It would run off, creating flash floods. So they’re extraordinary creatures, living below and above ground, and they have a great deal to teach us about community.

I knew that many people would say, “How can you equate the village of a prairie dog to the village of genocide survivors?” And my response to that is: The extermination of a species or a people are predicated on the same impulse: prejudice, cruelty, arrogance, and ignorance. And these have to do with power and justice. And I think that until we can begin to see the world whole, we’ll continue to live in this fragmented, compartmentalized, detached world, where war continues.

Have you seen any evidence here in the United States where people are not detached?
I do, I do. I mean, look at this library. To me, this is a gesture in community. I see how this library strengthened all the other libraries. I think about the land-trust movement, all over America, where it’s small local cooperatives that are saying, “This wetland matters to us. This farm matters to us.” So on the local scene, I see tremendous cause for hope. I think it’s harder to see on the national level because there’s so much bickering. And greed.

But it seems there’s always a war going on somewhere.

Maybe it goes to what [my translator] Louis was saying: As human beings, we’re capable of great things and we’re capable of horrific things. I don’t know. I’ll tell you this: I don’t think I believed in evil until I went to Rwanda, and was face-to-face with one of the perpetrators, one of the killers: Kawawa.

At one point, I went to get the names of the prisoners that had been tried [for genocide.] One of them had been folded back into the community. So I went up to get names and I said, “How do you spell Kawawa?” And all of a sudden I heard, ‘K-A-W-A-W-A,’ and I looked up, and there he was. I thought, “Do I shake his hand? Do I make a gesture?” but he was just looking. And then Louis, the translator, came running up and said, “What just happened?” and I said, “Kawawa just spelled my na— I mean, his name.” I heard this slip, and right then [snaps her fingers], Kawawa grabbed the gun of the guard, turned around, and tried to kill us all. Luckily the gun jammed. There was no reasoning with this man, there was no, “Do I shake his hand?” This man was trying to figure out how to kill us, and it was absolute terror. Everyone fled. There were four Americans left with a lot of orphans that were hiding behind us, and Louis. And then the gun didn’t go off: It was an old AK-47. He was tackled by two of the men, and then they got up, and he walked out: no shackles, no chains. Nothing.

That night, one of the judges came over to where we were staying and said, “Kawawa has been taken back to the maximum security prison. We had become complacent. He helped us expedite the tens of thousands of trials we had, and we realized tonight, the Interahamwe [the Hutu paramilitary group that carried out the genocide] are still among us.” And [Kawawa] actually told them that he wanted to create an international scene, so people know the genocide is not finished.

What were you thinking, after that occurred?
I just thought: as an American, I have no clue. No clue whatsoever of what’s happening.

How can we all get a clue?
I don’t know. I do not know.

Last year, there was a study done, that 90 percent of the schools in Rwanda were still teaching genocide ideology. So, again, we’ve got this incredibly progressive government with Kagame, and then you have all this violence simmering on the surface. But I don’t know anything. And I think I know less having been to Rwanda. But what I did find was the resiliency of the people, how much they want to live in peace.

So do you think, in this country, we could really take the broken parts of who we are, and put them together to make some greater whole?
I do not think that we can look for someone or something to save us. We’re always looking for saviors. I don’t think they exist. I think we have to look at each other and say, “How can we help? What is the nature of our work? How can we be of use?” That’s the power of community. And that’s really what the mosaic is: to take different perspectives, points of views, and talents, and say, “What do we want to create?” Even in times of war.

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