really understand what it meant anyway. But being told to lie down on the ground was actually preparing you to be caned. When they come back in the evening they are drunk, or if it’s the weekend they start drinking in the morning and come back in the middle of the day. They call you from the house, where you are probably in the shade because it is very hot. We’re talking about a heat of about thirty to thirty-two degrees Celsius, but they tell you to lie down. So you lie down. There was the grave of my great-grandfather in the middle of the courtyard, and so they tell you to put your feet up on the grave and then you lie down in that slanting kind of position, me first, then my young sister and my young brother. And these guys are celebrating beating us, caning us. Whether they gave excuses I don’t remember. I just remember the beatings and how I could just control the pain. What was really painful for me was watching my younger siblings get punished for no reason. It still pains me to remember. Even today, I would rather somebody beat me than beat the next guy. I always knew that I could take more beatings than the guy next to me, and until now I still have the same feeling. Even with Nanna, whenever she is sick, I say, ‘I would prefer being sick because I can take it.’ Of course I can’t really take the sickness away from her, but that’s the feeling I have. That’s how I developed it and how I became protective of other people, especially Barbara, my youngest sister. She was never caned. Yet she ended up being the loser because we could not care for her properly. She wasn’t getting fed regularly or being bathed, because they were either caning us or sending us on funny errands or taking us to the gardens or something like that.”
“In one of your letters to me last year, you described how demoralized you had become in Denmark. Did you feel as demoralized as a child, suffering these beatings and unable to help your more vulnerable younger siblings?”
“There was one time I felt like that. This is a bit tricky. It was the lowest point. My auntie—”
“Your mother’s sister?”
“Yes, her blood sister. What she did probably prepared me for everything that I could stand. I woke up one morning when my grandmother wasn’t there. I didn’t know she had gone, but she wasn’t there. My auntie had been doing bad things to us for some time, but this morning she wakes up and tells me to undress and tells my young sister Mariam to undress as well, and then she calls her brother—she had a young brother called William—called him to come. And we are all in the same room, and then she is telling me basically to lie together with my sister and telling her young brother to lie with her in the same room. When we resisted, she throws me and my sister out of the room. We’re basically naked, and I didn’t care about that as much, but then she, she, she goes—how do you call that, how do I put that politely? She goes to the toilet, she excretes in the room, in the house itself. In the village wedon’t have toilets in the house, we’re supposed to walk and go to a latrine, but she really does it in the room, and then she calls me and my sister to clean it up.”
“When you say that she made you and Mariam lie down together, you mean—”
“Yeah, she wanted us to have intercourse.”
“Seriously!”
“Yeah, it was very serious. And when I say, ‘Your aunt cannot ask you to do something like that,’ she punishes me and my sister by telling us to clean up her excrement. And by the way, we’re not supposed to come with a hoe or anything, we’re supposed to collect it with our hands—yeah—literally wipe it up like cow dung and then take it out. So as I was hesitating, not wanting to do what she says, she says, ‘Now, Emma, you go and get leaves and come clean me up.’ And by the way, I’m talking about an auntie who is over eighteen years old—she was a big woman, she had boyfriends, we used to take messages to them, so she was an adult, she was not a young kid. So she tells me to clean her, and I think that was the point when I started to think of running away from that place. But what kept me going was the thought of my siblings. The problem was that there was no one I could ask to help. If I told someone, my auntie would get to hear of it, and there would be another war. Anyway, I think she was very good at convincing each and everybody that everything was okay. The problem was that she was almost always the one left to take care of us whenever the others went away. So that was how I got to the point where I could take anything. I didn’t care, didn’t blink. Even today, anything you told me to do, even walk around naked, I would do it without a second thought and come back here, pick up my coffee cup again and be okay.”
“Did your auntie resent having to look after you and your sister?
“Probably.”
“And she had to express that resentment by being unkind to you.”
“I wouldn’t think so, because, first of all, this is the most strange part of it—when my grandmother wanted to rest or have a free day at home, my aunt actually offered to look after us. If my grandmother was going for a burial or some other event, my aunt would offer to stay behind and keep us. She was never forced to do this. The problem was that no one ever questioned her. She was like a queen in that village. Everyone knew her. No one would believe our word against hers. And so we went on being punished, receiving the same treatment over and over again. She didn’t resent keeping us, no. I think she had this funny feeling of wanting to bully us, and probably because everybody was doing the same thing, she did it too. Ironically, she got pregnant, and then she died eight months into the pregnancy. There was a complication, and she passed away. Even at that moment, I refused to go for the burial. I said, ‘No, I can’t,’ even though it was really bad in our village not to go to a burial. But I didn’t, I didn’t go. And when I left that village in 1984 to stay with my mum, I did not return until 1990, when my grandmother passed away. She was the only person I would go there for, the only reason that would take me back there. Her death was the last time I went to that village, until 2007, when Nanna wanted to see the village. I went with her. Even then, they did not want us there, and I have extremely bad feelings whenever I go down there. Extremely bad feelings.” Emmanuel interrupted his narrative and called to Alice Maria, “Are you okay?” Maria responded in Danish. She was fine. But I couldn’t help remarking the connection between his sudden concern for Maria and his painful recollections of Peter and Mariam. And for a fleeting moment I asked myself whether Emmanuel’s spontaneous responsiveness to the ordeal of his siblings—answering the summons of their suffering, as it were, and suffering the eclipse of himself on their behalf—exemplified the ethical responsiveness of which Levinas spoke.
“So the punishment went on, and the worst of it was not what happened to me but what happened to my young siblings. I didn’t want anybody to touch them. Even when we went to school, the worst part was that we got separated. I went to one school and they went to another, and that almost killed me. I did not want to go to a different school, I wanted to stay with my younger siblings. I was not strong. I almost gave up. I ran away from home, from my grandmother’s place. I took off. I walked and walked and ended up in somebody’s home, where I started cleaning the house. I didn’t know them, but I cleaned their home anyway. They asked me where I’m from. I didn’t want to tell them, because I was scared they would send me back, just like that.
“It was from that period that I stopped being immobile, I stopped being home. That’s the time I realized that if life got too hard for me, I had the alternative to leave.”
When Emmanuel got up from the table to talk to Maria again, I asked myself whether this was what people do in an impasse, with all passages blocked. Desperate to recover some sense of freedom in mobility, they hit the road. Had the seeds of this solution been planted in Emmanuel’s mind when, as a small child, he learned of his father’s flight from Rwanda, and later, when his family fled the Iteso region where they had no right to be, no way of making a viable life?
Emmanuel returned to the table and apologized for the interruption.
“Were you in school during that period?” I asked. “That period
