When we travel, whether to a place for the first time or a return, what is it that we seek beyond the thrill of adventure? And when we return to a place, what are we really going back to?
If places hold memory, fragments of lives once lived, or histories of stories told and buried, what is it we hope to find in them? Is it some moment we want to relive? Unanswered lingering question/s? Or perhaps something we’re desperate to hold on to, afraid it will get lost should we never return?
In 2023, I wrote a poem titled Mental Gravesite. It captured a sensation I hadn’t fully understood then: that returning to a place, even just in the mind, is often an act of excavation.
I’m here at this gravesite
Yet again
Wondering what can I salvage
In this return
What remains to dig up
That I have not already foundThese flowers have wilted away
The dust has gathered
The headstone sits broken
This ground hardens
With every visit I seem to make
In these early daysFor what will I find
If I dig further
But the shattered and broken pieces
That parted my skin wide openShall I sit here instead
And let these tears flow
Onto this groundPerhaps they shall water this soil
And spring new life
Flowers of all sorts
For when I next find myself
Revisiting this mental gravesite
Even now, the poem feels like a kind of question I’m still living through. What lingers after we leave? What rises unexpectedly when we return? I later added this section a few months down the line
What still lingers on
If not but the sight
Of the flowers springing to life
And their delicate smell wafting my way.Perhaps it’s this that aches me so…
How is it
That something so beautiful
Could ever come to life
In the places that dared swallow me whole?
Recently, while on a bus back to Kigali from Huye town, my mind returned to that question: what are we really in search of when we return to places, to memories, to histories not entirely our own? We were about an hour out of Kigali in a small town called Muhanga. Like many other parts of Rwanda, the hilly landscapes stretched off into the horizon. Trees blurred past the window, roadside genocide memorials stood solemnly with their signs and silence, and people ferried goods on bicycles, weaving their way through the snake-like meandering road.
My body, despite being present in that seat on the bus, was still carrying reflections from a silent retreat I’d just completed a few weeks back in Bugesera (yet another town located 30 minutes out of Kigali). I’d carried my journal, my yoga mat, and a copy of The Selected Works of Kahlil Gibran to the retreat. On the first silent day, I read a line from the reflective pieces that I jotted down in my journal:
“The silence of aloneness revealed to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.”
Silence has a way of turning you inward. When the noise of the world stills, you become your only conversation partner. Things you’d buried or delayed begin to rise, uninvited but necessary. At the retreat, the only escape was my journal and listening to the birds in the trees. I’d been thinking a lot about transition and especially how we still ourselves enough to really embrace such a period. To be present with it. But I also soon found that the silence pushed forward something else - a different way of understanding return, not just to a place, but to a state of being.
That inward seeking eventually became outward, too.
It led me to Huye, Rwanda’s “intellectual capital” and home to the Ethnographic Museum. I spent an entire Saturday afternoon at the Museum taking in exhibit after exhibit. The museum traces the roots of the Banyarwanda people: their language, food, clothing, rituals, songs and so much more. Ethnography, I suppose, is beautiful in that way: it lets you encounter life that once was, as it continues to breathe itself into the present moment.
Earlier, at a restaurant where I stopped for lunch, the waiter had asked what had brought me to Huye. I told him I wanted to “dig my feet a little deeper into this land.” It was true. On previous visits to the country, I had often viewed Rwanda through a more critical lens - assessing its societal structure, its silences, the curated manner of its public life… And yes, there are many moments where that still happens. But the truth is, it’s far too easy to slap on assumptions we have about a place and its people, especially when they’re influenced by media narratives. What is harder to do is to welcome the quiet work of listening, observing, and hopefully understanding. Staying long enough for complexity to really settle.
And complexity for me was leaving Huye with a deep sadness and sorrow that I still can’t quite name. What I know is that it speaks to the growing divergence between what once was and what now is.
So what do we return for? What do we seek in traveling?
On the bus, lost in thoughts and reflections, I realised that sometimes we seek answers. Sometimes, we seek to relive a feeling. Other times, we return not to find something, but to let something rise within us.
A friend recently said to me while getting coffee, “You’re such a seeker, Liz!” I laughed.
It’s not so much of an answer or what I find in my seekhood, but what unravels in the process. Like noticing the beingness of my own ethnography - the way I, too, am a site of memory, observation, and change. Like knowing that maybe silence is where courage begins. Or that maybe in the places that nearly swallowed us whole, flowers do still bloom. And perhaps - just perhaps - that quiet maybe is simply enough.
Books I’ve been reading:
The Selected Works of Kahlil Gibran. Many know him for the book “The Prophet,” but in reading his other stories, The Prophet seems to have taken a back seat. I have especially loved “The Broken Wings,” “Nymphs of the Valley,” “Between Christ and Ishtar,” and “Spirits Rebellious.”
“Witnessing: From the Rwanda Tragedy to Healing in South Africa” by Pie-Pacifique Kabalira-Uwase. A moving autobiography that I feel captures the essence of what it means to hold on to hope when all else seems lost.
“When Victims Become Killers” by Mamdani Mahmoud. This was a revisit, having first read the book back in undergrad. What was different this time was that I felt somewhat immersed in what felt far and removed then - almost like reading with more empathy and understanding. I think this might be the number one book I recommend to anyone wondering where to start if they’re curious about the genocide in Rwanda and how it came to be.
“Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice” by Rupa Marya and Raj Patel. When my Masters supervisor recommended I read this book in preparation for my research journey, I didn’t prioritise it. Who knew I’d be back a year later devouring each page with curiosity and awe! I’ve filled the book with scribbles and notes and though I’m not done yet, I know it’s a book I’ll return to often. “…the body is itself a kind of place—not a solid object but a terrain through which things pass, and in which they sometimes settle and sediment. To wonder why some things settle in some bodies and not in others is to begin to ask questions about power, injustice, and inequity, questions that are bound in modern medicine with questions of colonialism.”
“The Translator” by Leila Aboulela. A short novel that follows a young Sudanese Muslim scholar who falls in love with a secular Scottish academic, yet their worlds could not be further apart. It is “…ultimately the story of one woman’s courage to stay true to her beliefs, herself, and her newfound love.”
Till next time, take care!