Chapter 06

Tears of Candelabra Trees

Ore — December 1995 — Mushubati, Rwanda

The sun had not yet pierced the horizon and only the most audacious roosters had begun to crow when Gabriel woke. Eyes sealed tight with hope, he slid his hand under his buttocks and sighed with relief when the hand came away dry.

He made his way out of the room, climbing over Nonori, still asleep on her mattress next to his. Mama had been gone for three days. Despite all that had happened, no one told him anything. He was a child, even though there was no longer such a thing. Or was it four days today?

Gabriel made it into the corridor and stood still, listening to the silence. To his left, the concrete courtyard was dark, but that didn’t mean much. The sun could rise in a matter of minutes. He refused to turn right, toward the room, where Papa lay. Forever now. He imagined the layer of cement poured over after Papa was buried, reaching its cold, cold fingers all the way here, to chill the soles of his feet. The last six months felt, by turns, like yesterday and one eternity ago. It didn’t matter anyway. It was done. With a handful of dirt, Gabriel had buried Papa. Everyone said it, like it was a good thing. They had seemed proud, especially Mama, like he had done something important. To Gabriel, it had felt like an accusation. But some things were just not voiced.

As soon as he’d seen the smooth, even and level surface of the cement, as he watched it dry in random patches over days, going from shade of gray to shade of gray, first wet slate then dark and smoky and, finally, chalky gray, the question had invaded his mind. Despite Gabriel ignoring it, it had refused to vacate the premises. Why cement? Even if he weren’t far too afraid of that room to investigate, what would he look for? He supposed he could always ask. But some questions were just not asked.

The dawn drew a rectangle of light at the end of the corridor, silhouetting a figure at its base. His heart was halfway to his throat when familiarity hit him. He knew the bend of that back, where he’d spent more time than any other child. Mama had returned. Perhaps he should have wondered why she sat there, alone in the dark, or even recognized the telltale shake of her shoulders. He didn’t.

“Mama?”

Mama’s head whipped around to face Gabriel, and for a moment, her eyes were wild, unfocused, as if she expected a bayonet rather than her ten-year-old son. Then, slowly, realization dawned and exhaustion settled back in before annoyance chased it away.

“Why are you up, child?” Mama said, in that way adults did when they did not really expect or want an answer. “Come sit next to me.” As if to emphasize the point, she patted the cement step next to her.

Gabriel yawned and did as Mama bid. “Where were you?” he asked.

She didn’t answer, even when she spoke. “Listen to me, Gabriel.” Her voice was low, urgent. “Tonight, we are leaving.”

Gabriel blinked, still sluggish with sleep. “Leaving?”

“We’re going to go visit your brother.”

The words hung there, impossibly large, like an elephant wedged into a small room. Gabriel understood, but lacked the proper context and concepts to fully grasp the idea. His big brother had made it to Uburayi, across the ocean, to Belgium, the place where white people lived. Only months ago, Gabriel wasn’t convinced they were real to begin with, and now he would see them. There had been the soldiers, of course, but to Gabriel soldiers and policemen were ideas, concepts, agents of chaos that terrified him. Not people.

Gabriel imagined himself telling Jaguar. He pictured his best friend’s face when he heard. He could see the two of them running from house to house, announcing it to everyone, because a thing this enormous could not belong to only one person. But everything had changed now. No one looked at Gabriel with kind eyes anymore. All were full of suspicion.

Gabriel looked up at Mama, about to ask who he could tell, but almost instantly, Mama seemed to regret having said anything. The color drained from her lips, and she leaned in so close she wrapped him in her scent of soap, body lotion, and clean sweat. Once, this was his favorite smell in the entire world. It used to bathe him in warmth and safety. Now, it was a scent. Nothing more.

Mama’s voice dropped into a razor-thin hiss. “If you speak a word of this, even a single whisper, Gabriel, even…” Mama paused, let out a staccato breath, then pursed her lips. “You’re not a child, now. Do you understand what will happen if they catch us?”

Of course he knew. Sometimes it felt like, for the past year or so, there had been nothing but knowing, despite school having been closed. He had known, seen, felt too much. Far too much. In the dawn sky, the sun was clearing the ridge now, painting the concrete courtyard in shades of butter-yellow light.

Finally, Mama’s gaze, wondering, peering, perhaps even accusing, drifted off Gabriel’s face as she turned toward the morning sun and closed her eyes. “Don’t go anywhere today.”

The command did not surprise Gabriel. “But I’m supposed to meet Jaguar.”

Mama drew a breath. Gabriel waited for her to forbid it. He would have to leave without saying goodbye to his friend or risk disobeying and suffering the consequences.

But she paused, her head cocked for a moment. The silence stretched, filled with the distant sound of a radio, the crow of a rooster, the ordinary noises of a village trying to pretend it was still a village. Then she looked down at him.

“You cannot tell him,” she said at last. “Not one word.” She shook her head, as if having a debate with herself. “Do you understand, Gabriel? Not even Jaguar.”

Gabriel said that he did, that he wouldn’t. At that moment, however, with the possibility of one last sortie with his best friend, where they pretended that everything was still the same, that they were still the same, Gabriel would have sworn to anything.

The afternoon heat had thinned by the time Jaguar and Gabriel, having spent the better part of the day devising and revising plans, gave up. Gabriel couldn’t recall when this recurring activity had started, or how many afternoons and schemes they’d burned on their quest to catch swifts. Rumor had it that if you caught a swift and jumped over your crush while holding the bird, she would fall madly in love with you. Of course, neither had considered that, perhaps, finding a girl willing to let them, bird in hand, jump over her might prove a tad more challenging than catching said bird. In any case, the soon-to-be-spellbound lovers needn’t worry. So far, the boys‘ track record was abysmal, and today was not going to be any different. The damnable birds were swift, after all.

As if to mock them, quick wings sliced the afternoon air, black and white blurs dipping low over the scrub before vaulting into the blue sky, forever out of reach of two boys with churning feet and cupped, greedy hands.

Defeated, they turned and took off in the opposite direction to the flock of birds, up the hill, toward the guava orchard next to the dirt path to the public school. Gabriel and Jaguar had the kind of friendship where little needed to be said, and it was no surprise when both turned toward the other upon glimpsing the orchard. The grumpy old man who owned it had fenced it off, preferring to let the fruit fall and rot rather than let the schoolchildren pluck some.

The fence of twigs and dirt ran around his property, but since the boys had come from the back, there was a chance he wouldn’t notice them. And if Gabriel, who was taller, hoisted Jaguar on his shoulders, they could just about reach the literal low-hanging fruit. Besides, from here, they had little choice but to skirt the fence to join the path, the only one that snaked up the hill, from the river down below to the cemetery on top of the mountain.

Only moments after they began on the barely visible footpath sandwiched between the dirt fence to their right and dense, nettle-infested brush on the other, the old man stepped through a gap in the mud wall, dragging his twisted right leg, as if to greet them. He said nothing and came no closer. He leaned most of his weight to his left, on a wooden cane so dark it was almost black and so old it glistened as if it was varnished. In his right hand, he gripped a rusted machete, fingers opening and closing around the handle while he looked at the boys.

When the boys passed him, so close Gabriel made out individual rings of the stain on his khaki shirt, Jaguar first, then Gabriel offered a polite and formal greeting. Of course. They weren’t savages, after all. The old man offered a greeting in response, of course, but this meant nothing. Even the smile, wide and open-mouthed, exposing the missing front teeth, eyes creased as if sincere, might have been a threat as much as a social nicety. Once they were past, both boys turned around, facing the way they had come, and backed away step by step, never taking their eyes off the old man or his machete, until a bend around his property swallowed him. Any thought of gorging on juicy guava was long forgotten.

As soon as they could no longer see the old man, both turned once more and sprinted like madmen, neither knowing who was following whom. They didn’t stop until they reached the wider path up the hill, and even then, they only slowed as the incline took its toll.

They drifted to the high fallow field where nothing grew except waist-high weeds, a mosaic of patchy wildflowers, and giant Euphorbia trees. The candelabra branches reached upward, thick and leafless, their fleshy green skin naked beneath the sun.

Gabriel selected a stone from the scatter at his feet, tested its weight in his palm, and let it fly. The rock struck with a muffled plop, leaving a darker-green bruise behind. Moments later, a bead of milky sap welled from the wound, then another, until a thin tear traced down the tree’s pale skin.

Jaguar threw next. His stone cracked against a higher limb; another milky streak began its poisonous crawl. They scavenged the dirt for ammunition, giggling when, at times, their search caused a dozen crickets to jump away before resuming their songs. Besides the occasional laughter and insectile orchestra, the boys enjoyed each other’s company in silence, throwing in steady, rhythmic succession.

Ever since Gabriel and his family had returned to the village, their days were variations of this, cautious footwork around an open ditch. He and Jaguar had circled those terrible months apart last year with careful feet, kicking at words and letting them lie. Even the aftermath they handled with care, like a secret that could never be unspilled. They skirted the burnt roofs and the silence in the compounds as if naming them might summon the blood back into the soil. And never, as per an agreement they had never made, did either share what they had seen, done or failed to do, or endured.

Gabriel hefted a smooth pebble, turning it between his thumb and forefinger. “I found Mama crying this morning,” he said.

“Why?” Jaguar, whose motion Gabriel had interrupted, loosened his shoulders, cocked his arm, and let his stone fly.

Gabriel shrugged, hurled his pebble, missed. “The noise must have woken her.” That Mama was gone was another secret Gabriel must not reveal. He paused, picked up another rock, wondering if he had told that one to Jaguar, and shrugged again. “The rocks last night.”

Once again, Jaguar’s arm froze mid-swing. His shoulders locked. He stared at the white tear on the bark and his jaw worked. While he pretended to watch the sap stretch and dry, Gabriel’s gaze was on his best friend.

He wanted to be angry at Jaguar. They’d always told each other everything. Before. Well, not everything, but as much as they were allowed. As much as they could get away with by defying their parents. Now, people were throwing rocks at Gabriel’s house in the middle of the night, banging on the iron gate, howling like wolves. And Jaguar knew something. Maybe even who.

His own secret pressed against his teeth, Mama’s voice still in his ears, not one word, not even to Jaguar. He swallowed the bitter taste of his own deceit.

When he looked down, a stone caught his eye, the color of a dust storm, with rings and bright specks embedded under a glossy layer.

He held it up. “Let’s come back,” he said before he could stop himself. “We’ll each find ten rocks to throw at that tree.” He pointed a finger at the tree they’d been bombarding, where older scars bore witness to their previous games. “First to make the sap touch the ground wins.”

“Tomorrow?” Jaguar’s voice shook with emotion and Gabriel knew that if he met his friend’s gaze, he would spill everything.

“Uh-huh,” he said, purposefully keeping his gaze away from Jaguar. “Tomorrow.”

As he cast one final look on the trees, all green, hulking yet fragile, their candelabra arms raised to the heavens as if in supplication, one question was on his mind. Had he just lied to his friend? He had, after all, not promised to meet him here. Had he? Did it matter? Yes. Yes, of course it mattered. After all, Gabriel knew that this was it.

Tomorrow, for them, would never come.

A few months ago, I was telling my children to get ready because we were going to see Mamie, their grandmother.

My daughter, putting on her shoes, called to me. “Dad, why do you never call Mamie Mama? You know she’s your mother, right?” Yes, she actually did phrase it exactly like that.

I told her the truth as I knew it then. I didn’t know. Just one of those things that happens over time. But afterward, my brain went to work. Once the computation was over, I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d called Mama… well, Mama. At some point, she had become Mucyecuru, the female equivalent of Muzehe. Then, at some other point, Mamie.

That question never really left me. To this day, I still bump my brain against it. It makes me sad and yet I can’t put the why of it into words. It also made and still makes me think about how little affection Mama had shown my siblings and me. Not lack of love, mind you. That we never lacked.

But, for instance, I wanted to understand why Mama never told me she loved me. Or if she did, I can’t remember when. This, mind you, despite having heard her tell other people she loved them, having been told how much she loved this person or that person, and knowing without the shadow of a doubt that she did love me.

This might seem trivial for someone in touch with all their self, but opening some of these doors was only possible to me once I had faced my hardest thing. That meant affording myself the right to not be all consistent all the time. It was okay to love and resent someone at the same time. I have loved and admired Mama so much and for so many years, that I barely dared let any dissenting feelings rise to the surface. How could I? Surely, I couldn’t be so ungrateful as to spit in the face of all her sacrifices? That she encouraged that self-recrimination is one reason I resented her. That I now understand she too was a product of her environment, her circumstances, and that not everything that hurts you is a crime for which you must exact justice, tells me that I’m on the right track.

Guilt was often how I expected conversations with Mama to end. Taking it to anyone else would be kwiha amenyo ya rubanda. To make a fool of oneself, roughly, though that loses so much of what is contained in the expression. Giving yourself to strangers’ teeth. Delivering yourself to wide-open mouths, presumably awaiting something tender enough to bite into.

You see, dear friend, Kinyarwanda is a layered language. All spoken languages rely on nonverbal cues to some extent, but Kinyarwanda and its cousin, Kirundi, take the practice to a whole new level. I remember my army friends making fun of me whenever I took a phone call in their presence. “How can you have a whole conversation in which you say nothing but ‘hmmm’, ‘eeh’, and more ‘mhhh’?”

Which, of course, brings me to Michela Wrong.

I remember my bewilderment while reading the introduction to her book Do Not Disturb. Who on earth does this woman think she is? Why would a British lady dare write this stuff about Rwanda? Why is it necessary for her to demean, to humiliate, to spew such horrors about my culture? Oh, man. I was filled with such sweet, delicious indignation.

Challenge accepted, Michela, I thought to myself as I put pen and paper in front of me and set out to dive into some research and prove, once and for all, why Wrong was as wrong as wrong can be. Pun very much intended, thank you very much. I mean, you didn’t expect me to waste that opportunity, did you?

While not the first line of her book, “In Rwanda, lying is an art form” is found so early in the introduction that it might as well be. Wrong attributes the phrase to a successor to one of Rwanda’s prime ministers, who told it to her in a Brussels hotel lobby.

The next quote, “Of all the liars in Africa, I believe the people of Ruanda are by far the most thorough,” Wrong attributes to Ewart Grogan, whom she describes as an English adventurer. My own research painted a far less glowing picture of him, that of a colonialist and racist. Well, that sort of goes hand in hand, doesn’t it? To be fair to Wrong, though, I doubt she wanted to polish his image. Had she wanted that, I suspect she would have chosen a quote far less revealing of the person my research turned up. Anyway. Whatever his character, last I checked, being an asshole didn’t necessarily make one wrong. And, as it turns out, I recognize enough in what he says that I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, however unpleasantly foul the water.

Then we have, “Rwandans are liars and it is a part of their culture. From childhood they are taught to not tell the truth, especially if it can hurt them.” Wrong attributes this to Agathe Uwilingiyimana, the aforementioned prime minister whose successor owns the first quote.

While on my quest to rebuff what I viewed, at the time, as Wrong’s assault on Rwandan culture, I came across the next citation. While germane to the point Wrong was trying to make, she didn’t include it in her book despite mentioning human rights activist, Alison Des Forges, the person who brought the quote to fame, on multiple occasions.

“A message is given to many, but those who are meant to understand, understand.”

You see, dear friend, the more I dove into all those quotes, the more I was bothered. Why was I bothered? Well, because of things that I disliked. I disliked the sweeping generalizations, blankets cast so wide as to be careless. I disliked that sometimes the quotes, while on the right track, failed to fully grasp the meaning of what they were citing. And I disliked that I could make that determination. It meant that I was attuned to the cultural idiosyncrasies enough to catch that subtlety. Beyond this, I had to admit what I recognized of myself, of my experiences, in the quotes or in the spaces hidden behind the words.

Like Gabriel and Jaguar and their quest to catch a pair of swifts, I had failed. That doesn’t make Rwanda the world capital of lies, but it was time for me to dismiss my indictment of Michela Wrong, and look elsewhere for the source of my frustrations.

So, what exactly was I recognizing?

The thread I see running through these quotes and the proverb is not lies exactly, but deception. Inauthenticity. There’s no difference, you may think, but I beg to differ. All lies are deceptions, but not all deceptions are lies. Which brings me back to the proverb. Let’s give it a closer look.

A message is given to many, but those who are meant to understand, understand.

As much as I wished it was alien to me, undecipherable, it isn’t. It’s actually pretty straightforward. Or, at least, it is for me, and I suspect it will be for many Rwandans and Burundians. What I hear in this proverb is a celebration of the usage, nay the mastery, of doublespeak, a skill that is, this is true, prized in my own culture, probably the single thing I hate most about it. And don’t get me wrong, I love most other facets of the Rwandan culture. But have you ever been with a new group of friends when they say something cryptic and you somehow know they’re talking about you? That proverb is that feeling, codified, and made into a nice little nugget to drop whenever you want to elicit maximum awkwardness.

I cannot take credit for this next story. My cousin told it at our last family get-together. It had us all in stitches, and he gave me permission to retell it, though he does it far more justice than I ever could.

My maternal grandmother’s family was local aristocracy in our village, so the older ladies from the surrounding households would gather at her place to gossip, exchange news, and swap recipes. She had dogs, including an old one that always liked to lie at her feet and laze in the sun.

Ordinarily, passing gas is a source of shame, and the polite convention is to pretend you have no idea who was responsible, especially when it was you, while everyone else suffers in awkward silence until the moment passes. In my cousin’s telling, however, pretending was not a valid menu option. Whenever one of those old ladies let one slip, she would immediately kick the confused dog and curse it, making sure to lament how dog farts were, naturally, the worst. Of course, the more vigorously the dog was blamed, the more effective the diversion became.

Legend has it that as soon as the old ladies started filing through the gate, the dog would begin shaking like an old Nokia 3310 on vibrate. Eventually, the poor dog became so traumatized that the instant it heard or smelled anything funny, it would spring to its paws, ears perked, bark once, and dart for the hills.

I realize that I made quite a few claims about Burundian culture, mostly by tightly coupling it with Rwanda’s. While I can claim the right to describe my own culture in terms I see fit, because this is backed up by a lifetime of belonging to said culture, it isn’t so with Burundi. This is why I feel compelled to highlight Rwanda and Burundi’s shared histories. Both countries were once Great Lakes kingdoms before the advent of colonialism. First Germany, then Belgium, administered these colonies, the latter under the name Ruanda-Urundi, until their independence, the same year, in 1962. They even share the same ethnic groups, with the same names, and the same historical divides. This would, of course, culminate in a shared tragedy when the plane carrying Rwanda and Burundi’s then-presidents was shot down. This event in April 1994 led to a horrific genocide for one country and a decades-long civil war for the other.

There. History lesson over, and not too painful, right? Anyway, I understand that political history might not convince you. How about a more personal one? As established previously in “Le Blanc,” I previously dated a Burundian woman. Of course, it goes without saying that it isn't my claim that dating a Burundian, for however long, entitles me to her culture. Valérie and I were living together at the time, however, and a couple of friends who were present at the time were also Burundian. There. I’ve set the scene.

Another woman, a friend of Valérie’s, had a habit of getting blackout drunk and then passing out on the living-room couch. This annoyed the hell out of me, especially because there was plenty of room to sleep it off, and we had small children who would eventually wake up to that scene. The next time I saw her downing drink after drink, our two friends were present as I complained to Valérie, as I always did. Had she, as we had agreed, spoken to her friend about this dreadful habit of hers? Valérie said she had. The four of us then lamented everything from her excessive drinking to ignoring what Valérie said were multiple reminders that this couch-surfing while intoxicated really bothered me. A couple of hours later, the children were in bed, it was getting late, and the couple were ready to head out.

A quick glance at the couch confirmed that, you guessed it, she was sprawled on the couch. Passed out. Look, could I have handled things differently? I'm sure I could have. It's certainly not one of my proudest moments. Valérie insisted there was nothing to be done but wait for her to wake up and raise the issue then.

Naturally, I woke her up, and raised the issue there and then. Gently, at first. My intent was simply to establish precedent, not traumatize the poor woman. I wanted it known that ignoring the requests and passing out would no longer cut it. Sleepily, the woman insisted I was the only person bothered by it, and mumbled something about not feeling like dealing with the stairs to go up to her room. Taken aback as I was, I expected someone else to say something.

Nobody did. This silence inched closer to the cliff where my patience was hanging by the tips of its conceptual fingers and stomped on them.

No longer bothering to mask the strain in my voice, I said I doubted I was the only one, but perhaps the others were too polite to say something. I may also have suggested that a grown woman shouldn’t need basic manners repeatedly explained to her, especially manners a seven-year-old could manage without being reminded. Yeah, looks like we had left the gentle suggestion stage behind.

Unsurprisingly, she was now as fully awake as she was pissed. Regardless, she glared at me, threw aside the light cover under which she was snuggling, and stormed, or rather staggered, off to bed. Afterward, after a couple of breaths to lower my own temperature, I asked the couple, who had agreed with me earlier, why they hadn’t said anything. When they exchanged awkward glances, laced with eyeing a clearly fuming Valérie, I asked if they too thought I should have let her off the hook and addressed the issue later. They thought I shouldn’t have raised it at all. I reminded them that the behavior bothered them, too. We could discuss it behind her back, apparently, but mentioning it to her was a bridge too far.

Maybe I should have let it go then. But this really irked me. I asked whether they could see how that might be seen as duplicitous. To their credit, they said they could. They still thought the right thing to do was to say nothing and let Valérie handle it according to the rules of their friendship. When I asked why and how this could possibly be the better way, they said it was the Burundian way. I have a feeling that they would have gladly added, and the Rwandan way too, but you wouldn’t know it, would you, Mister Le Blanc?

I kept wondering what all that concealment was protecting. Reputations? Relationships? The comfort of never having to acknowledge what everyone already knew? In “One in a Million,” I touched on how our capacity to spot the wrong thing helped us survive. As you’ve perhaps begun to notice, I’m rather obsessed with evolutionary psychology. I wonder whether deception, too, belongs in that inherited survival kit. In The Art of War, Sun Tzu made deception central to said art. Some of those principles go along the lines of When able to attack, we must seem unable, When moving or preparing, appear inactive, or Encourage overconfidence, then strike when the enemy is careless or disorganized.

From the old ladies and the dog to Gabriel and Mama to Michela Wrong to the drunk lady on the couch, and even to Sun Tzu’s stratagems, none of this is about pointing a finger, accusing, or vindicating my own behavior. For the longest time, I thought that perhaps if I understood why concealment mattered, why duplicity seemed like something to treasure, it might help me with the question of how to handle disclosure when it came to my own story. Spoiler alert, I never understood any of it, and it didn’t help.

But when we can’t sympathize with a given viewpoint, I think, is precisely when we need to exercise empathy. I used to think that empathy just is; you have it or you don’t. But I disagree with my younger self. I couldn’t meet my goal of disproving Michela Wrong because it had never been about her. Neither was it about the various subjects she cited, in truth, though that would be closer to reality. No. The answer, as it almost always is, was inside all along. It is painful to look, eyes wide open, at oneself and not look away or close one’s eyes and imagine something different. However, I found that if you struggle against that urge and look long enough, you may be amazed at what you see.

So, are Rwandans and Burundians liars or not? Would they have dethroned the Targaryens, Lannisters, and stabbed the Starks in the back to win the Game of Thrones? Obviously, nothing is as simple as that. The lying perceived by the various people cited above was akin to when you want to find the perfect word for something, query your brain, but only get back lower quality synonyms. It’s not completely inaccurate, but it doesn’t do the thing justice. I believe that there is a component of Rwandan and Burundian cultures that does make an art form out of wielding information. Calling it mere lying doesn’t do it justice. Lies are only one tool for processing information in the most effective way to extract as much value for the wielder as possible. So is secrecy. So is gossip. So is knowing what to say to whom, when, and how.

Above all, dear friend, be charitable to the people in these pages. Especially Mama. Remember that everything I consider truth is filtered through my own lens, that I am pulling from events that are sometimes decades old, sometimes experienced through a period of heightened emotions, and we all know how emotion and objectivity go hand in hand, do we not? At times, for the sake of authenticity, I may say things that seem or are genuinely unkind toward her. I thought it important that I underline and highlight the environment in which she grew, evolved, and from which she was yanked at an age where reinventing yourself takes more courage than most have.

Mama was recently widowed, still mourning, and trying to get her children out of a nightmarish situation. That night, she would leave with me while her other children stayed behind. She thought this would be the first of several trips to bring them out. Keeping me quiet was part of getting us through that first departure.

I understand why she needed my silence. I also know how difficult it became, later, to speak about things that hurt. But did it really become too difficult or was I expecting Mama to honor a contract she didn’t even know existed? Did I adopt a new, more Belgian definition of what a mother should do, and expect that of Mama in addition to whatever else she was navigating? What rule said that both things could not be true at once? Love, gratitude, and resentment could all be there, but I struggled to give the resentment a voice.

You may find Mama cold and distant at times, and she was all that. Yet I have never doubted her love for me. Because I speak both languages, I felt it important to translate this little bit.

In my tween years and adolescence, if I said something I wasn’t supposed to say, Mama was always quick to say, Ariko jya umenya ubwenge. This means something like You need to wise up. Growing up, I was taught that exposing private matters meant kuzimura, to divulge secrets, or kujajwa, to speak out of turn and unnecessarily. Hey, once or twice, I’ve even been accused of gushyanuka, getting into business that didn’t need getting into.

This story has never been about preaching, so I shall refrain, and say this instead. I have been shackled by secrecy, by the constantly reinforced notion that exposing my business handed something, a mystical and oft unnamed weapon, to those who wish me ill. And, friend, I am sick and tired of feeling inadequate because I don’t default to nihilistic cynicism. I want to believe that whoever takes the time to read these stories will find something of value to them, whatever that might be. If that turns out to be some schadenfreude at my expense, so what?

If their designs are darker, ain’t nothing I can do about that.

Ultimately, we just have to accept the idea that there will be uncomfortable moments. I won’t seek them out, but as I promised in “Echoes of Little Stories,” neither will I be silenced or censored. Least of all by myself.

You see, dear friend, some stories are unborn children with their own will. They demand that you birth and loose them upon the world. Until you do, they will haunt and harass you like tenacious ghosts. So make no mistake. If a story demands to be told, I will tell it. Let the chips fall where they may.

Remember that being willing to share these moments doesn’t make it easy. I too have hidden things that I am afraid to touch. Here’s what I ask myself whenever something feels too intimate to share with the world.

Does it matter?

Do with that as you will.