I’m writing this on Independence Day, the United States’ birthday, an odd time to be thinking about Burundi, but that’s exactly what I’m doing. Burundi is a tiny nation in the African Great Lakes region, near the middle of the continent. It’s bordered by the enormous Lake Tanganyika on the west, and shares international boundaries with Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Rwanda.
Take time to recall that in Rwanda, in 1994, centuries-old tension between Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups exploded in a genocide that left 800,000 people dead over the course of four months. People were hacked to death with machetes and burned alive, en masse, inside churches. If the Rwandan genocide is a distant memory—or if, somehow, you’ve never heard of it—do yourself a favor and read Philip Gourevitch’s 1998 masterpiece, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. Or at least re-watch Hotel Rwanda.
The people of Burundi, like the people of Rwanda, mostly belong to either the Hutu or Tutsi ethnic groups. In Burundi, though, instead of a cataclysmic genocide, the ethnic tensions simmer and boil over from time to time in little genocides. A few thousand people killed here, another few thousand there. Whereas Rwanda, post-genocide, has re-forged itself and found a modicum of healing, Burundi’s wounds continue to bleed, mostly unbeknownst to anybody outside the region. Throw into this mix the toxic leadership at the highest levels of political office, and streams of refugees from that tiny country become painfully understandable.
I’m a writer, but I have this day job as a case manager. I work with low-income senior citizens in a particular apartment building in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Were it not for a housing subsidy, many residents would be homeless. Most are isolated in one way or the other. Friends and families are often out of the picture. It’s where I met a gentleman I’ll call “K,” a Burundian refugee. At the time of his arrival in America, he was 75 years old.
K only spoke Kirundi, a Burundian language spoken few other places in the world. I only speak English, and I’d never even heard of Kirundi before I met K. We could never communicate verbally. But that didn’t stop him from visiting me at my office a few times a week. Because of the language barrier, I was never certain exactly what he wanted each time he visited. As I think about it now, though, he probably simply came to visit. To see me, and I to see him. To spend a few moments in one another’s presence. He knew, inherently, something I’m still not sure I fully understand: A common language isn’t necessary for two people to form a relationship. Though, once, K pointed a bony finger at me and, with his brow furrowed, uttered the only English word I think he knew: “Coca-Cola.” The man wanted a Coke. I could understand that. I brought him a Coke. It felt like a relational victory.
One day, not long ago, I went to visit K at his apartment. He was in bad shape. His physical health had been in a long, slow decline over the course of months, and medical professionals eventually tagged him with the term “failure to thrive.” It meant that, though K was not suicidal, he had intentionally stopped performing the necessary daily tasks that keep a person alive—changing clothes, bathing, even eating. It indicated, in other words, that K was preparing to die. Though he may have been preparing for it, I must admit I wasn’t ready for him to die. I called 911.
I wish it surprised me that the responding Chattanooga Police Department officer who, by his own admission, had never heard of Burundi, cracked not one but two racially charged “jokes” at K’s expense. (I could tell they were meant to be jokes by the gravelly way he haw-hawed after each one.) K, an elderly, incapacitated Burundian refugee fleeing genocide a victim again, this time of racially-charged jokes from one of Chattanooga’s finest.
I filed a formal complaint to the officer’s supervisor. In his response to me, he detailed all the hours that he himself had spent in racial sensitivity training. He then explained away his subordinate’s bad behavior by saying the officer was joking about the Marvel movie Black Panther. And he sent me a link to Black Panther on IMDB, so I could read all about the movie and realize how, through several metaphysically impossible leaps in logic, the officer’s racial misconduct was justified. Again, I truly wish I were surprised.
The CPD officer’s racist response to K, though, seems emblematic of the otherness-fear that currently bogs us down as a nation. I’m not saying this officer was literally afraid of an old man who couldn’t even walk. But he was, evidently, terrified of what K represented—an incursion of other-ness, about which he had no knowledge and over which he had no control. Fear is the well-spring of racism, of course, and the deeply-rooted fear that prompted the officer’s mistreatment of K is the same fear that currently cripples the United States’ posture, large-scale, toward migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers.
The officer chose to gussy up his personal fear in the bravado of cruel jokes. The United States chooses to gussy up its fear in the bravado of phony political rhetoric. “All we’re trying to do is enforce our own laws. Don’t we have a right to do that?” Racism quickly becomes desperate, mindless, heartless action. Like making fun of an old man because of what he looks like. Or dividing families and storing their component human parts in squalor. It’s the way one behaves when one panics, and, make no mistake, the United States is panicking.
On June 24th, 2019, K died at the hospital. I visited him a few hours before he died. Nurses came and went and spoke to him in that extra-loud and over-articulated version of English that English speakers reserve for non-English speakers and the elderly. I sat there next to him and, at one point, it started to rain: Big, heavy drops outside K’s window, in a sort of physical manifestation of the gray and weighty gloom I felt. There had appeared to me, in the weeks leading up to K’s death, an extra sense of inevitability. The rain could have been tears of mourning. K, for his part, must have been certain and perhaps even impatient for death to finally arrive.
A lyric from a Tom Waits song called “Time,” comes to mind. Waits sings, “The rain sounds like a round of applause.” This is true for K. A round of applause from the universe for simply surviving as long as he had in the face of extraordinary circumstances. I’ll never know how K reflected on his life or even if he did. What did he think about the violence in his home country? Or a particular incident with a racist cop in the United States? I burn with anger at these injustices. I want to remember K as a man worthy of dignity—a dignity that, at the time of his death, only the rain afforded him.