Sherry Chandler

Hotel Rwanda

So my calendar tells me that this is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and I will try to meditate a bit on what it is that makes us want to commit genocide against our fellow humans. Pray, if you will, if prayer is, as Georgia Stamper defines it, a medition of empathy and compassion.

This last weekend, my family and I finally got enough courage to watch Hotel Rwanda. It was as intense an experience as I had thought it would be, and yet a very, very good movie.

Recently, reading in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, I was struck by this statement: “If any literary work is emotionally ‘depressing,’ there is something wrong with either the writing or the reader’s response.” Hotel Rwanda was not depressing — it is, after all, primarily about the heights to which a human can rise in times of unimaginable adversity. It might also be called a poem or an act of prayer. It was beautiful in an awful way. Sobering.

Never again is the motto. And yet we did not act to stop that holocaust in Rwanda. We are not acting in Darfur. Our invasion was the catalyst for something very similar in Iraq, though I hope not of the same magnitude. We did help out in Bosnia. But that is in Europe. Is that what the difference is?

Here is a poem that I found this morning by Joseph S. Cotter, Jr. (more on him tomorrow). It was written in 1918 or 19, just before he died. It evokes some irony, now, I think.

Africa

A thousand years of darkness in her face,
She turns at last from out the centuries’ blight
Of labored moan and dull oppression’s might,
To slowly mount the rugged path and trace
Her measured step unto her ancient place.
And upward, ever upward towards the light
She strains, seeing afar the day when right
Shall rule the world and justice leaven the race.

Now bare her swarthy arm and firm her sword,
She stands where Universal Freedom bleeds,
And slays in holy wrath to save the word
Of nations and their puny, boasting creeds.
Sear with the truth, O God, each doubting heart,
Of mankind’s need and Afric’s gloried part.

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