In 1993, the now retired Lieutenant General Romeo Dallaire was appointed to be the Force Commander for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Rwanda (UNAMIR). The mission, despite his skill as a commander and his passionate and unyielding efforts to gain both control on the ground and proper support from the UN, went disastrously wrong. In the end, 800 000 Rwandans were savagely murdered, and one Canadian was medically evacuated out of the country, broken beyond repair.
I read Shake Hands With The Devil, spellbound and horrified. That human beings could become monsters on such a vast scale shook me to my core. I read carefully but desperately, waiting stupidly for an impossible happy ending that I knew would not come. History is often terrible, no matter how deeply we wish it was otherwise.
In a strange coincidence, Dallaire came to speak only a few weeks later at our local university, and so it was that I saw the man in person.
He was shorter than I expected and lit on fire, blue eyes blazing, frustrated and haunted a decade later by all that should never have happened but never did. He had history on his shoulders and believed, somehow, that he personally had blood on his hands, that a genocide where humanity had toppled in on itself and given way to all its darkest brutality was somehow his fault.
When I met him later, at the book signing, I said very little. I had the sense that telling him I was honoured to meet him would have struck him as silly, guilt-ridden though he was. I could only try, feebly, to communicate my bottomless respect, to look into his eyes and bear witness, if not to the atrocities then at least to the broken solider standing, for all his torment, straight and proud before me. I asked him to sign his name and the last words of Shake Hands With the Devil, allons y…let’s go.
In Waiting For First Light, he has dared not to face the genocide but perhaps, even more bravely, himself. He writes painstakingly about his ongoing battles with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which he refers to as “an operational brain injury”. In his introduction, he quotes a passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
Forthwith this frame of mine was wrenched
With a woeful agony,
Which forced me to begin my tale;
And then it left me free.
Since then, at an uncertain hour,
That agony returns:
And till my ghastly tale is told,
This heart within me burns.
And then, Dallaire goes on to say this:
“We—the Ancient Mariner and I—both became mired in guilt, both wanted so much to die but could not, and both eventually chose to take meaningful action. We persevere in our resolve to ensure the story is never forgotten, and that those who died did not do so in vain.
When each of us told our story in its entirety for the first time, we began a cycle that will continue throughout our lives: reliving the pain by telling the story, an action that attenuates the pain, which then returns upon the telling and must be relived to be relieved.
Teaching others by sharing our stories relieves us, temporarily, of our suffering. Of course, full recovery from a trauma this great is impossible and lasting serenity will forever evade us. The Mariner and I lived, when so many beautiful, innocent people died. The pain of that will never cease, and so we both devote our lives to sharing the story with others who might understand and learn. In this way, we attempt to build an ethical legacy, creating sadder but wiser humans.”
Sadder but wiser humans, indeed. It doesn’t seem as though Dallaire will ever be healed. But those who struggle with post traumatic stress issues may be, if only a little, from the comfort of seeing that others walk a similar path, and if they are not serene along it, at least they have survived enough to share it. And in the sharing, somebody somewhere is a little less alone, and perhaps can understand their darkness a little more. There is mercy, however fleeting and inadequate, in that.
