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Hewa Rwanda - Letter to the absent pictures

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Hewa Rwanda - Letter to the absent description

Every year, Dorcy Rugamba returns to his family’s home in Kigali, Rwanda. Ivy still climbs the walls, calla lilies grow on the terrace, the palm and papaya trees are still there. His return was, however, impossible for many years.

Thirty years after the genocide in Rwanda, actor, author and director Dorcy Rugamba brings to life his work Hewa Rwanda – Letter to the absent, a profoundly moving tale of his family, culture and spirituality. In tandem with Senegalese multi-instrumentalist and singer Majnun, Rugamba presents a musical reading from this memoir.

A love letter to those who are no longer here, and a hymn to the living, he addresses his father, mother, and all those who are absent. Rugamba speaks of what he saw and what he learnt from them, and the time it took him to accept the unacceptable. He then asks himself: how can we translate into words what is out of our reach?

Dorcy Rugamba, a major figure of the Rwandan cultural scene brings us this moving, timeless account, carried along by powerful writing and a voice of rare intensity.

 

"While 'Hewa Rwanda, Letter to the Absent,' addresses the genocide, questions of mourning, and a family that was nearly annihilated, I primarily wanted it not to be a commemorative text but a hymn to life, so the tone of the text deliberately embraces lightness, humour, poetry, music, and life in all its aspects. 

"Over time, I realized, long after the genocide, that the victims, after losing their lives, faced another form of annihilation—the risk of their existence disappearing as well, after their bodies. Young Rwandans born afterward, as well as international audiences, no longer know who these people were. We often only know their number; sometimes their names are engraved on a stone. Their existence tends to vanish behind their status as victims. A person’s existence is much richer than his biological life. There are many things that survive death under normal circumstances: a person’s culture, their projects, their loves, their ambitions, their legacy, their ideals, their achievements, the struggles and challenges they faced during their existence and to which the world afterward is indebted. All of this, in the memory of the living, tends to fade before the enormity of the genocide.  

"This 'love letter to the absent' is therefore a hymn to life, an attempt to symbolically resurrect the absent so that their lives and existence can be restored to them, and they can cease to be merely the unfortunate victims of a genocide." 

Dorcy Rugamba

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