Written piece
we are not merely surviving
Laura Rwiliriza
Rwanda
About this piece
This poem is my antithesis for the Rwanda I have come to know and love. Everything here has grown like the fruit of labour tended, tested, and earned. The Commonwealth Quilt gives me the chance to join like minds, and to stamp a piece of tumult that has blossomed into rising.
I knew the mountain before I reached it.
Heard it first in my mother’s voice,
in the way she said the hills
like she was placing something sacred
back into her mouth.
The coffee tree does not hurry.
It takes the mist into its leaves,
the red soil into its roots,
and waits
patient as a woman who learned
that what ripens slowly
holds its flavour longest.
I learned that too.
In other people’s countries.
Before I ever came home.
They told me about the grass.
How they sat on it
neighbour and neighbour,
the one who lost, the one who took.
No roof. No bench. No robe.
No mercy yet
only the earth beneath them,
and the word.
Gacaca.
We say it quietly,
the way you say the name
of someone you are still
learning to forgive.
Justice that did not close its eyes.
That looked, and looked,
and somehow
held.
There are those who mistake a table for a village.
Who call a club a commonwealth
and wonder why nothing grows.
Who speak of shared values
while the old hands
still shape the room.
The snake, meanwhile,
has found its tail.
It is eating.
It does not notice.
Rwanda noticed.
We did not rise by waiting for a seat.
We called the whole country to the grass.
We put women at the centre
not as symbol
but as architecture.
We said: every voice is load-bearing.
Every hand that weaves
holds the weight of what comes next.
Every hill, every harvest,
every child who was told
she did not belong
became the fuel.
That is inclusivity.
Not a policy.
A fire.
Then someone lifted a thread.
Not one woman. Many.
My mother, yes
but also her sister,
and the aunties she never knew I knew,
the ones long gone
whose names I carried
without being told to.
The friends who danced with me
when the world outside
did not know our names.
The nieces watching now,
learning the pattern
from the way I hold the thread.
The basket does not know
which hand began it.
Only that it was passed
kitchen to kitchen,
border to border,
exile to exile,
dance to dance,
generation to generation
until it reached mine.
And I did not drop it.
Every spiral
the work of more than one.
Every thread
a woman who refused
to let the weaving stop.
You do not join a basket.
You weave it.
Every thread load-bearing.
Every hand necessary.
That is not membership.
That is commonwealth.
The real kind.
This is how we stitch what lasts
not with force,
not in a single season,
but thread by thread,
word by word,
hill by hill,
neighbour by neighbour.
The mountain still bears coffee.
The grass still holds memory.
The basket still carries what we dare
to offer one another.
We are not merely surviving.
We are weaving.
We are building
something strong enough
to hold the weight
of what comes next.