I saw Hotel Rwanda yesterday. It was an incredible movie. I started crying half way through it. Elizabeth says she started crying half way through the trailer for it, and refuses to see the movie.
President Clinton said the thing he regretted most about his presidency was ignoring the situation in Rwanda. He, and the rest of the Western world, should be ashamed.
The movie is like an African Shindler's List, only hotter and more colorful. The Germans killed the Jews cold-bloodedly and methodically. The Hutu's killed the Tutsi's passionately and messily. But the Tutsi's were just as dead as the Jews.
I loved Don Cheadle in this role. I hope he gets some attention for it.
I had to struggle to find poetry to express this movie. Here's one that is close:
The End and the Beginning
After every war
someone has to tidy up.
Things won't pick
themselves up, after all.
Someone has to shove
the rubble to the roadsides
so the carts loaded with corpses
can get by.
Someone has to trudge
through sludge and ashes,
through the sofa springs,
the shards of glass,
the bloody rags.
Someone has to lug the post
to prop the wall,
someone has to glaze the window,
set the door in its frame.
No sound bites, no photo opportunities,
and it takes years.
All the cameras have gone
to other wars.
The bridges need to be rebuilt,
the railroad stations, too.
Shirtsleeves will be rolled
to shreds.
Someone, broom in hand,
still remembers how it was.
Someone else listens, nodding
his unshattered head.
But others are bound to be bustling nearby
who'll find all that
a little boring.
From time to time someone still must
dig up a rusted argument
from underneath a bush
and haul it off to the dump.
Those who knew
what this was all about
must make way for those
who know little.
And less than that.
And at last nothing less than nothing.
Someone has to lie there
in the grass that covers up
the causes and effects
with a cornstalk in his teeth,
gawking at clouds.
Wislawa Szymborska
