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Pretty Pink Murderer

by laurafraser 

Posted: 02 November 2004
Word Count: 1125
Summary: The POV of the Rwandan murders' of the Genocide 1994. this poem is very contary to the way i normally write poetry-which is, yes corny as it sounds, from heart, pink is the colour of the prisoners uniform. i don't like this poem at all, but i wanted to see if i could write something in offer to Wozs' challenge. in the end I think poems are a fruitless excercise in understanding Genocides' unless they change people so that they never occur again.


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So you’ve dressed us in pink
What did you think?
That we’d repent and be so sorry
And thus take away all your worry.


So what did you think? What do you think?
That we’d repent and be so sorry.
That with a tear and a shaky hand you can wave away this Genocide in a hurry?
In this godless, soulless, joyless world where we are savages
you may like to remember what you did to us.
What you say to us&what it means to us.

(Or does that make you want to vomit,
you blinking, blushing stammering fool
that sits there with rumy eyes&tabacco stained fingers,
yes I now where they have been,
I know their story,
what they’ve pillaged&stolen&grabbed&now look at them there
sitting so serenly on your cotton pants over your shrivelled dick,
that failed to live it’s destiny
that revolting moment you were born).


Black bile scorches my throat when I think of you,
my fists tense&I want to rip at you&rip at you&savage you to death.
History means nothing to you - to you it means nothing
Instead you refuse to move forward because of your anorexic bloated rulebook:
Your western game of politics makes me laugh the laugh of Satan.

When you grab a bit of body you know not what bit it is.
It is soon to be nutrition for the maggots that you’ll kiss
the day when I’ll rip out your ragged wrecked limp beating heart.

Don’t you see the wonders of the mind?
That that which creates also ends, finishes.
When I go to murder it is not the body that I kill but for what they stand
My old friend Hatred slipped out of me a long time ago,
I am too ill now, I lack the energy now.
I am a depleted masticated being,
too swamped by a fever I pray will stay for eternity,
because it is my only certainty that I have fouled.


If you dare, (but only if you dare to see this glare),
Look at my eyes, these black pit-less beacons that lost all their hope the day they raped your child.
Pascal, or Lazarus, Olive, or Japetto, Jesus, Kofi, grand-mama or Madonna, Hassan Ngeze, Ferdinand Nahimana, their names were not of interest,
Tutsi, or Belgian, native or traitor, you are not a Hutu, well then welcome to your grave.

Ethnic hatred! the people scattered like autumnal leaves in this rainbow coloured world cried.
Savage violence! The people over this world sobbed.
Media violence, it’s all their fault the people all over this mutant infested world cried.
But I ask you what are opinions without action?
You may sit and judge and opine about what we did
but I would rather be a bomb that explodes than the one that is faulty and whimpers in its box.

Come in to my mind and there you will agony of my family
Agony of my people
Agony of the ones I slaughtered like squealing mules that would not bite their carrot
(My mother would not have been proud)
But I did it I did it. Yes I did do it.
I murdered, macheted&raped&I laughed&I smiled when blood&brain
splattered their colures over my face - like the cows that the Samburo suck from
I sucked away their lives the baby’s&the mummy’s&the daddy’s.
Who shall never excrete their poisoned degenerate waste on the beauty of this land.

So you’ve dressed us in pink
What did you think?
That we’d repent and be so sorry
And thus take away all your worry.


I am a Hutu, if you asked that of me
You may as well dress me up like a chimpanzee in a tutu
It’s the same humiliation
I am the train who will never arrive at your station
My path has a different destination

People sob and cry and say how could they?
My friends how could they?

Wild is insanity, so like bewitched souls we massacred the innocent
ripped off their ignorant-knowledge-shy heads
bound them in barbed wire, like Negro Christ’s
victims of evil escaping from the blackest most rotten pits of human souls.

And I tell you that I did not kill enough
I looked liked a rabid dog for more meat to set my teeth into -
the break of bones made something in me soar
Oh mighty vengeance! Sweet blood dripping vengeance
I shall never repent.
Like the black mamba, the black spider, my venom sleeps inside me forever.
And tell me when action is complete words shall never redeem, that is just icing on a non-existent cake.

And now you have dressed me in pink
And you ask me to recall my part that I played in this Genocide
So I will say the words,
Words that will take you to the places where mutilated bodies lie
I will take you there
You say that you want to know after all
So I tell you I will tell you that I tell you.

Ahhh. But you are backing away.

But come now my hand is even out stretched, walk with me to this place you call
hell

Ahhh, you have stalled, I see you are turning
Away from my outstretched hand
Like a black rose in pink wrapping,

Do you not want to hear of how I broke men’s fingers with a metal stick?
How they snapped like bricks smashed by boulders?
No? I am not surprised?
Or how women’s vaginas were stretched and how we inserted knives up there to twist their way to circumsision.
No? I am not surprised.
Feel repulsed, feel repelled, feel and say this is wrong.
(But then show me right).

Rwanda my country, what have I done to you?
pus&piss&bile&maggots writhe in my innermost being.
I have forgotten the truth.
I was so angry. I was so angry.

But you do not want to hear this, so, go to your beaches
Go to your vodka martinis and your ‘pinkies’
Sit with them, or serve them as you please
You pathetic weak-minded vile sellouts
Traitors to this country
To Af-ree-ka.
Af-ree-ka.
Af-ree-ka.


Gone are the days of the innocence of our tribes’ people.
Of the days when the power of nature was to be respected.
I am a son of this earth.
I was born of this earth. I am the colour of this earth. And to earth I shall return.

You make me sick, when I look at you again I feel poison lurking at the back of my throat
Like a tidal wave it obliterates all else
My heart is swimming in something putrid, stank smells ooze from my belly button
And still I laugh, like a machine gun with no bullets,
Because still I love.

Yes.

Because still I love.






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Comments by other Members



Fearless at 21:22 on 02 November 2004  Report this post
Laura

Impressed on first reading...will get back to you when I have spent some time digesting this.

Woz

Fearless at 20:37 on 03 November 2004  Report this post
Laura

Powerful, with a multitude of rhythms, making it something that could be performed; it could also be redrafted into a monologue for the stage. Worth considering, despite your feelings about the piece.

The barbarity reminds me of the details in Rezak Hukanovic's 'The Tenth Circle of Hell', and to a different extent, in Solzhenitsyn's 'The Gulag Archipelago'.

A few words on your comments in the summary at the top. I am not sure if there is one single form of expression that can reach out to everyone. If poetry touches a few, campaigns touch others, and screams of defiance some more, then it's a start...what a start then leads to can surprise us all.

You may well dislike or even hate what you have written, but you have researched this well and gotten into the persona of an everyday monster. This is a bit like the Felix Dennis poem about Saddam Hussein on the run - he too felt a bit out of sorts while writing it.

You may want to consider submitting this to Amnesty or perhaps the magazine Wasafiri.

Write on, Fearless

laurafraser at 22:26 on 03 November 2004  Report this post
Thank-you Woz.
Your comments always take my thoughts in directions they would not have ventured to otherwise-and for that fine sir thank-you! and yes will look into what you said (of course!)
x


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