Illustration by Tom Bachtell

In Kigali last week, thousands of mourners trekked through a thick predawn fog to converge on Amahoro Stadium. By midmorning, in hot, raking sunshine, they filled the stands. The Army band, with sousaphones flashing, marched to the center of the field, arrayed itself there on a round stage, and began softly playing solemn hymns. President Paul Kagame arrived, along with a dozen other sitting and former heads of state from Africa and Europe. The sky clouded over. The air smelled like rain. A tall man in a brown suit appeared on the stage. He said that he was Fidel, a genocide survivor, and he started to tell how he was supposed to have been killed. Then the screaming began. The first voice was like a gull’s, a series of wild, high keening cries; the next was lower and slower, strangled with ache, but growing steadily louder in a drawn-out crescendo; after that came a frantic, full-throated babbling—a cascade of terrible, terrified pleading wails.

Every year, at the genocide-commemoration ceremonies during mourning week, scores of Rwandans erupt in this way, unstrung by grief, convulsed and thrashing when anyone comes near to soothe or subdue them, including, at the stadium, yellow-vested trauma teams who carry them out, bucking and still screaming. You can expect it, but you can’t protect against it. All around the stadium, all around the city, all around the country hung misty-gray banners displaying the word kwibuka—“remember.” The lacerating voices in the stadium make the banners seem almost cruel. Is it really healing to keep reopening a wound?

A lot of Rwandans will tell you that all through mourning week they are prone to bad and bitter feelings. For those who were there in 1994, during the genocide, memory can feel like an affliction, and the greater imperative has often been to learn how to forget enough for long enough to live in the present for the rest of the year. And for those who were not yet born—more than half the country today—what does it mean to be told to remember? Many Rwandan schools have yet to teach the history of the genocide.

The centerpiece of the stadium program was a song-and-dance spectacle, featuring six hundred and thirty performers in a pop-opera pageant of modern Rwandan history. In the beginning, a harmonious pre-colonial society is ruptured and polarized by the arrival of white colonizers. “Dehumanization started,” the narrator shouts over loud, hard-pulsing music. “And humans became objects.” The Rwandans cower and scatter in disarray. Then the killing begins: “Denying human dignity, life or death became the order of the day.” And, as the colonizers swap their pith helmets for U.N.-blue berets, climb into a Land Rover, and roar off, the abandoned Rwandans collapse one by one in an appallingly realistic spasm of mass death. Against the ensuing tableau of hundreds of lifeless bodies, the pitch of lamentation in the stadium achieved its most berserk emotion. It was too much, and at the same time it was wholly inadequate to the reality that it arose from.

The season of slaughter that decimated Rwanda twenty years ago is one of the defining outrages of humankind. At no other time in the history of our species were so many of us killed so fast or so intimately: roughly a million people in a hundred days, most of them butchered by hand, by their neighbors, with household tools and homemade weapons—machetes and hoes and hammers and clubs. The killing was programmatic, a campaign prepared and orchestrated by the state to extirpate the Tutsi minority in the name of an ideology known as Hutu Power. It was, in conception and execution, the starkest and most comprehensive case of genocide since the crime was defined in international law, in response to the Holocaust. But, at the time, Rwandans had no word for it.

What we call things is one way we remember them. In Kinyarwanda, the language of the country, the word gutsemba means to “massacre” or “exterminate,” but evidently the killers felt the need for a stronger expression to capture the intensity of their action and the absoluteness of their purpose. So they doubled down: they called what they were doing gutsembatsemba. To the Rwandan linguist Évariste Ntakirutimana, this redundancy proclaims the limitlessness and the relentlessness of the slaughter. The social psychologist Assumpta Mugiraneza does not disagree, but to her ear the emphasis is on the extremity of the slaughter. She says, “In Kinyarwanda, we reduplicate the root to underscore the radical aspect of the action. It describes the movement of coming back and reassuring oneself that the deed is completed. So gutsembatsemba is ‘to exterminate radically.’ ” Of course, the spirit of an expression is also tonal, and there’s a rhythmic punch to gutsembatsemba that caught the world-upside-down carnival energy of the Hutu Power enterprise. Sometimes, when a pack of killers went on the attack, they could be heard chanting, “Tuzabatsembatsemba, tuzabatsembatsemba”: “We all will exterminate you all.”

In July of 1994, three months after the killing began, Hutu Power was routed by Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front, which has run the country ever since. Soon, the more exact terms itsembabwoko (to describe the systematic massacre of Tutsis) and itsembatsemba (the killing of anti-extremist Hutus) gained currency. But some survivors, refusing to echo the killers’ language so closely, began speaking of “genocide,” appropriating the word shared by English and French, Rwanda’s secondary languages. They spelled it “jenoside,” and in 2003 it was codified in the country’s new constitution. Yet that still wasn’t the last word. In 2008, the government once again renamed the crime. Now they call it “the genocide against the Tutsi.” It’s an inelegant phrase that has been slow to take hold, perhaps because the foundational idea of Rwanda’s post-genocide order is to emphasize an inclusive national identity, and to treat Hutu and Tutsi as distinctions that belong more to the past. We are all Rwandans now: that’s the idea.

At Amahoro Stadium, cheers mixed with the cries as the show continued, with several dozen R.P.F. soldiers jogging onto the field and tenderly lifting the bodies up, restoring them to life. As the resurrected Rwandans regrouped center stage, flocks of children joined them, and the music soared. The nation was made whole again. But the screams did not let up. So there is memory that we manage, and there is memory that manages us. At the stadium, you had both, and, at times, two decades of aftermath felt equal to the moment between two heartbeats. ♦