Day 2 from Juliane Okot Bitek's 100 days

      100 days is a collection of poems that recall the horror, pain and senseless loss and innocence in the Rwandan genocide. The words are so powerful, they make you feel the emotions of living, dying, pain, loss and all other emotions that represented the madness of the genocide.

       Bitek says the poem started out by being inspired by the quiet homage to the 1994 Rwandan genocide that the Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu started pasting on the social media in April with the hashtags #Kwibuka20 #100Days. She says these pieces should give us a way to understand better the Rwandan genocide and other wars we have endured.


Day 2
This will not be a litany of remembrances:
We know who the guilty are
The guilty know themselves
This is a charge against the witnesses
& those who cannot speak
This is a charge against those who speak incompletely
& incoherently
Against nature who saw everything & did nothing
against the bodies that dissolved
& the ones that refused to dissolve
those that insisted on writing the landscape with bones
This is a charge against pain
against heartbreak
against laughter
against the dead.