A Pianist in Rwanda

After meeting with the director of the hospital and discussing the current research on the somatic benefits of music for the sick and dying, Sharon is going to play a short concert. We unload the electronic keyboard, an instrument she carts around to many of her performances, and carry it into one of the clinics. A young man, healthy-looking, possibly an employee, follows us and finds one of the few outlets along the long, narrow hallway. There are no individual rooms in this ward. Patients are kept everywhere and anywhere—some two to a bed, hooked up to IVs, some bandaged and sitting or slung facing the stains on the unpainted walls. Others wander aimlessly, negotiating the buckets and basins on the floor.

The young man sits down next to Sharon at the keyboard. He looks at the keys for a while and then tentatively taps out a few notes in the bass. Gradually, he gains enough confidence to play the one pop-style song he knows. He plays it over and over with increasing verve until Sharon joins him in an improvised duet. When she finally begins the concert he watches her hands with such intense interest he barely notices the little girl who suddenly nestles into his lap, her one good eye exposed but still scabbed and crusty, the other taped in a blood-soaked bandage. When the music is over, she claps her hands and jumps up and down. “Est-ce que vous pouvez retourner demain?” she asks. “Non. Tous les jours. Revenir tous les jours.”

After the concert, Sharon and I walk over to the Mille Collines. “It was extremely successful,” I comment. “Everyone loved it and wanted more, including the director, who was skeptical at first.” “That’s why I came back to Rwanda,” she says. “This experience is worth everything to me—more than any important concert back home. To be of some real use and give something that has actual significance and purpose is enormously satisfying. I think many classical artists in the West share my frustration with the reluctance to acknowledge their value. Rwanda is a country in repair and mourning, and music has the capacity to heal and regenerate. I have spent my life struggling with the intangibles of art, but I’ve always felt torn by the insular nature of the pursuit and the moral conundrum that it presents in a world with real suffering.

“I love the way this audience responds to music,” she adds. “With such immediacy and depth. I suppose it’s the emotional range of classical music that is so appealing. I gave a class for some advanced students who blew me away. I played a virtuosic piece by Bach for them, demonstrating different approaches to the same music. I did it once as brilliantly as I could and then again in a slower more contemplative manner. I was sure the kids would respond to the fast, showy playing like they would in North America, but to my great surprise, they all preferred the second rendition. ‘C’était spirituelle,’ they said, almost instantly.”

Sharon and I enter the Mille Collines and walk downstairs to the poolside bar, which sings Graham Greene—a kind of 1950s Hollywood glamour in retirement, little thrills of danger sewn in the undertones. There are the prostitutes, the spies, the distinguished academics, the indistinguishable academics, the middle-aged hausfraus with unfortunate eyebrow-plucking decisions, the divorced, tattooed, Nebraskan engineers on suspiciously long-term irrigation projects, the pot-bellied businessmen in Hawaiian shirts, their expensive wives. There are the stingy crusts of old money, the cool, boozed-up film crews, the designer-clothed gorilla seekers, and then there is one actual, all-dressed witch. I know she’s a witch because her eyes swim like goldfish and she spits at everything young and beautiful in the room. She provokes me when I pass by her with such a powerful grab of my arm that it sends me scared. I wipe the sweat of her spell off my elbow and cast my own little demon in her direction. She recoils immediately.

Somewhere in Kigali, there is a small burgeoning music conservatory. Like most places in the city, it has no address, because most streets in Kigali have no names. This is not unlike the old Rwandan tradition for naming newborns, a task left exclusively to the father, who can take anywhere from eight days to eight years to name his child. The given name bears no resemblance to his own because surnames are not used, so tracing a family for any reason is next to impossible. As is getting somewhere. In Kigali, it seems, if you haven’t already been there, you can’t get there. Luckily, our driver has been everywhere. We drive to the conservatory and pull up onto a steep, gated driveway. A group of poised, churchgoing students stand ready to greet us. Grateful for having survived the trip, I emerge from under my seat. I take a moment to fix my hair and readjust my esophagus. It has not been easy for me to grasp the advantages of right-hand steering with right-side drive on single-lane mountain roads that have neither lights nor speed limits in traffic of new scooter-taxi drivers who are understandably still curious about “just how fast can this thing go.”

marlene lee, the founder and director of this, the only conservatory in the country, is an American-born vocalist and choral director who has lived in Rwanda for twenty-seven years. She is now close to retirement and, unlike many ex-pats, speaks Kinyarwanda. Petite and elegant, in the mould of 1950s movie stars like Donna Reed, she has an evangelical zeal and has been teaching music to the local population for many years. She opened the conservatory a few years ago and today has a growing student body of over a hundred children, teenagers, and adults. For about $7 a month the students learn theory, reading, sight-singing, and piano, among other things. She has also reintroduced the inanga, a traditional lyre-like instrument that has fallen by the wayside in Rwanda, as has most of the traditional music. Carved from a single piece of wood, it is tuned a bit like a guitar, one of the eight strings plucking the accompaniment to mordent old African melodies. It is positioned across the lap, takes the shape of a small canoe, and is difficult to play. Only a handful of people still know and can play the repertoire. One of them is now seventy-nine (one of the oldest citizens of nearby Gitarama) and has been teaching this instrument to his daughter, Sophie, since she was five years old. She now teaches the inanga at the conservatory, where interest in the instrument is blossoming.

Rwandans like to say that they do not play music, they are music. Their instruments characterize the elements of fire, water, earth, and wind. In Rwanda, the traditional music is associated with the dance, ikinimba, which dramatizes the country’s proud history, choreographing the feats of kings, warriors, and heroes, and retelling the tales and legends of its people. It is an important source as there is almost no written history of the culture. In the current climate of reconciliation, where the sidewalk is shared by victim and perpetrator, the brave attempt to move on and the winding, subversive contours of shame and grief threaten to erase this also.

Sophie has agreed to perform on the inanga for the concert at the Mille Collines and on this day gives a preview to the gathered student audience. She sings a typical Rwandan song, many of which are tributes to the beauty of a cow, a symbol of wealth and prosperity, or meditations on the phantasm of a star. Sophie sits at the front of the room and lays the inanga on her lap. She seems to sing to another world. There is a surprisingly bland melancholy to her voice, and her eyes have sunk into a deaf stare. The melody she sings repeats over and over, circling around the same narrow intervals. I listen to this music hypnotized, hung between a sky I’ve never seen and a ground that is no longer firm. In the stillness of the song, the inanga strums a constant lilting rhythm, like liquid from a stream.

Some of the older students at the conservatory are advanced enough to have become teachers, but none have ever been exposed to the mastery of a great pianist. When Rena Sharon sits at the keyboard in the stony conservatory, the kids listen with an attention that is almost audible. They have never seen hands fly up and down a keyboard at that speed or heard piano playing so delicate. They have never been swept by the wave of a musical phrase and then shipwrecked on a beach of private daydreams. Slowly their hands unfold and their perfect postures relax. Sharon plays Barber, Debussy, and Gershwin, but above all Bach, with such expressive clarity that I feel that I am hearing this music for the first time too. In Rwanda, it is not just the performer who is on trial. It is also the composer.