It Is Difficult

Here is an excerpt from an introductory frontispiece of IT IS DIFFICULT, a book about Alfredo Jaar's Rwanda Project from 1994-1998.

Jaar quotes Nigerian writer Ben Okri who won the Booker Prize in 1991.

In "A PRAYER FROM THE LIVING," Orki writes:

Inside, all the space was taken up with the dead.

But here the air didn't have death in it. The air had prayer in it. The prayers stank more than the deaths. But all the dead here were differently dead from the corpses outside.

The dead in the school were--forgive the paradox--alive. I have no other word to explain the serenity. I felt they had made the room holy because they had, in their last moments, thought not of themselves but of all people who suffer. I felt that to be the case because I felt myself doing the same thing. I crawled to a corner, sat against at wall, and felt myself praying for the whole human race. I prayed--knowing full well that prayers are possibly an utter waste of time--but I prayed for everything that lived, for mountains and trees, for animals and streams, and for human beings, wherever they might be. I heard the great anguished cry of all mankind, its great haunting music as well.

And I, too, without moving my mouth, for I had no energy, began to sing in silence. I sang all through the evening. And when I looked at the body next to me and found the luminous unfamiliarity of its face to be that of my lover's--I sang all through the recognition.

I sang silently even when a good-hearted white man came into the school building with a television camera and, weeping, recorded the roomful of the dead for the world--and I hoped he recorded my singing, too.