The Weight of Words: A Co-Constructed Narrative of Love And/In Trauma

What does it mean to come of age in the light of trauma? To find love? Can suffering be shared? How close can one get to a trauma they didn’t experience and to someone who survived it? In this work, I combine personal narrative, trauma theory, and oral histories of ten child survivors of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. By telling the story of my time in Rwanda in 2008, the things I heard and the people I met, I hope to offer up myself and this work as an example, or perhaps more aptly, an experiment, to how we might share the weight of words.