How Dare the Sun Rise

“My mother had a very difficult time in those early years of marriage […] But she was also very strong willed, determined to rise above the people who made her feel small […] The women in our culture are known for working incredibly hard, juggling so many things—raising the children, working on the farm, harvesting, fetching and chopping firewood, and then cooking dinner for the men. Traditionally, the women prepare the meals and the husbands eat alone, or with their male friends, not with their wives. It makes me cringe, but that is the culture.” 

Sandra discusses her mother Rachel’s miscarriages and the social alienation she received as a result of them. Rachel, like other women in her culture, was narrowly defined by traditional gender conventions—namely the expectation to produce offspring. Sandra recognizes how women from her tribe were ostracized and dictated by men, but she also sees how well these women endure and reveal their extraordinary capability to manage multiple tasks, thereby subtly undermining men’s lack of faith in their abilities. 

“It was part of an unfortunate culture […] in which young men would kidnap a girl, rape her, and then marry her. The rape is committed so that the girl is too ashamed to go back home, or so that her family won’t ask for her back. Hundreds, if not thousands, of girls have been married this way. It is one of the reasons why I think my parents were so passionate about educating their girls, so that we could learn that no one can take away our worth.” 

Sandra describes the sexist customs of her culture as “unfortunate,” indicating her belief that men and women inherited conventions that they have difficulty shirking. Obey these conventions is often to the detriment of hundreds of girls experience sexual assault and ultimately blame themselves for this violence. This belief further undermines girls as it ties their value inextricably to their virginity.

“When it came to war, my parents could shelter us from only so much. I knew the sounds of war before I knew how to do a cartwheel.” 

Sandra explains how commonplace conflict was in the Congo while she was growing up. This robbed her of the innocence that people presume children should have and reinforces the understanding that innocence, too, is a privilege. 

“My mom was the original feminist. Selling cows and running businesses were considered jobs for men, but she did her own thing. She was a true trailblazer.” 

Sandra is describing how her mother broke with the convention of her tribe by providing income for her family. Rachel was Sandra’s first exemplar of feminism—hence, her use of the adjective “original.”   

“We would dance and vigorously shake our butts and hips—twerking, basically. Where I come from, twerking is not sexualized the way it is in America. The boys sometimes do it better than the girls. Everyone does it. It’s wild and fun and freeing, not about sex.” 

Twerking is a dance that has African origins, but Sandra becomes aware of the dance’s sexualization in American culture, as it involves rapid movement of the hips. Though the Democratic Republic of the Congo is a country more likely to be associated with sexism, Sandra points out the ways in which America’s hypersexualization of girls and women is also limiting, due to the pressure that is placed on them to put themselves on display.

“I remember thinking: How dare the sun rise, as if it were any other day, after such a gruesome night.” 

The rising sun is symbolic of renewal and the continuation of life, which outrages Sandra, who has just suffered the traumas of losing her younger sister and believing her mother was dead. 

“We found my cousin’s body, which had not been burned. I didn’t understand death yet. I knew that older people died, and I knew that people could get sick and die, but not kids. I had never thought about how children could die, especially such a violent death. I thought someone would come and say it was all a dream. I wanted to wake up from this nightmare.” 

The day after the massacre, Sandra and her surviving relatives looked for the remains of Deborah and her cousin. Sandra finds it incredible that death, which she believed should only happen to the sick or elderly, could strike healthy children. The freshness of the trauma makes the violence seem incredible.

“I have decided to tell this story because I have learned that I do have a voice. I do not want to be a part of this culture of silence. This book is my voice […] So many girls around the world—refugee girls in particular—suffer in silence after being sexually assaulted by someone they knew. Most rapes happen at the hands of a relative or friend, not a stranger. I want girls to know that they have the power to speak out […] No matter what culture or country you are from, there will always be pressure to remain silent […] But you don’t have to protect sexual predators […] The predators expect you to stay silent. You can prove them wrong.” 

Sandra recounts being sexually assaulted by the father of her friend Ganza, whose home she and her family were staying in to avoid war. Ganza refused to believe the truth about his father, and Sandra never told anyone else about the incident. She uses her memoir as a platform to revisit painful memories she had long suppressed to protect others, later realizing that this silence mainly protects the abuser.

“I didn’t really know how to picture America. I had no solid frame of reference, no true mental image of the place. I had the general impression that in addition to being freezing cold and snowy all the time, it was a land where people were happy and rich. That’s the idea I had gotten from the UN caseworkers, and from anything I had ever seen on TV over the years. I also figured there were a lot of white people there. I had the feeling that nothing bad ever happened to people in America. The caseworkers painted a picture of America as a dream, the land of opportunity.” 

Sandra gets the idea that the United States is a wintry place because UN officials show her and other refugees videos that depict America in this way. Meanwhile, her own experience of American media, which overwhelmingly depicts white people, blinded her to the diversity that she would later experience. Sandra finds that white privilege, and a societal adherence to overlooking the nation’s flaws, is the true story of America.

“I began to realize that maybe it didn’t matter where you lived in the world, that people are people everywhere, not so different after all.” 

Sandra expresses her feelings in response to being teased, particularly for being foreign. In this statement, she reveals how people tend to position themselves against those whom they feel do not belong. This tendency to ostracize is universal and, thus, makes everyone Sandra has encountered—both in Central Africa and the United States—seem the same.

“As refugees in America, we were at the bottom of the heap. Your credentials from your home country don’t matter […] People in America don’t care about college degrees or careers from Africa. Princesse had worked so hard to get that education. We had been through so much to get our golden ticket to America. But we were invisible.” 

Sandra laments about how her parents, who always had good jobs, were reduced to difficult, low-wage work, and how her sister’s degree was not valid in the United States. To Sandra, it seemed as though Americans looked down on Africa and believed no educated or career-oriented person could come from the continent. Sandra is commenting on a common prejudice in the West about the African continent being universally poor, inferior, and regressive, which led people to have low expectations for her and her family. 

“It was all too much. I grew angry at the world, furious at God. I lost my faith. I decided there was no God and that everything my parents had told me about him was a lie. I thought no one loved us and no one cared, least of all God. My family was falling apart.” 

This is Sandra’s response to the world’s apparent obliviousness to incessant suffering. She has just experienced yet another trauma—nearly losing her father in an accident and watching him in a coma. Her rage, which is understandable for someone who has endured a series of misfortunes, is an expression of frustration. Despite her and her family’s devotion to God and their dedication to being good people, they are made to suffer and seem always in danger of losing another member. 

“I wanted to be friends with people who looked like me. I wondered if they assumed I was from a wealthy white district because of the way I spoke. Of course, that could not have been further from the truth. Eventually, I started trying to sound “black” when I talked to them. I’m sure I sounded ridiculous […] Still, I kept trying. It got to a point that I would switch the way I spoke, depending on whether I was talking to someone black or white, except among my good friends. I was hardly even aware that I was speaking differently to different people. I was trying to belong to both groups, but I belonged in neither.” 

Sandra describes her experience with code-switching: changing her manner of speaking depending on the race of those whom she is around. The problem, however, was that Sandra’s attempts to use “black” language came off as inauthentic. Though the color of her skin gave the other Black students the sense that she ought to belong, she was distanced from African American culture because of her childhood in Africa. Sandra’s foibles seem amusing, but the pressure she experiences from her peers indicates that many of them internalized the view that there is a particular way to be Black. This attitude inadvertently denies Sandra her own cultural expression.

“Yes, Africa has many problems, but there is so much beauty, so much goodness too. In America, the images of Africa make it seem as if it is a place where only bad things happen. Conversely, in Africa, the images of America make it seem like it is a land so divine, only good things happen.” 

Sandra speaks to the ways in which her country and the United States misunderstand each other as a result of believing what they see in the media. On American news programming, and in many films, the African continent is monolithically presented as a place that is beset by war, disease, and poverty. Meanwhile, the predominant images of Americans are of successful, upper-middle class people.

“One day in history class, my teacher talked about America’s history of slavery. During the lesson, the white kids glanced around at the black kids; there were just a few of us […] I wanted to say, ‘Why are you looking at me?’ It seemed as if they assumed that as a black person, I was a speaker for all black people. But I was learning the history of American slavery myself. At the same time, I didn’t want to come off as clueless. I didn’t want the black kids to say, ‘She doesn’t know how to be black.’ I worried that I would never be black enough.” 

Once again, Sandra feels ostracized because white people assume, based on the color of her skin, that her ancestors were enslaved. This reveals their inability to conceive the fact that not all Black people share the same history. This ignorance is also prevalent among Black students. Thus, it likely has less to do with the teens’ personal prejudices than it does with their lack of global awareness and their presumption that their cultural context is the only legitimate one.

“Over the weeks, as I learned more about American history, I started to understand more about what it meant to be African American, and the ongoing and complex fight for equality […] I noticed that on TV it seemed as if black people were always committing crimes. In fact, it seemed like black people were solely responsible for crime in America […] The images were so negative, I was sort of scared of being black […] I wondered if black people in America were mostly bad. I thought that perhaps I needed to prove to white people that I wasn’t like the criminals I saw on TV.” 

The converse of learning through television that America seems mostly white and wealthy is learning that American media often portrays Black people as overwhelmingly poor and morally deviant. Through her naïveté, Sandra reveals how non-Black people sometimes develop racist notions through media and how Black people internalize these racist messages.

“I went to the awards conference at Princeton University and met kids from all over the country—American Muslims, Native Americans, African Americans. They shared their experiences, and I learned that there was so much discrimination toward all kinds of minorities in America […] I could see that I was just beginning to scratch the surface of understanding race in America.” 

After winning an award for her photo exhibition of refugees, Sandra meets many different Americans of color whose unique experiences help her understand the intricacies of race in the United States. Their stories also help her understand why her classmates have difficulty accepting her as an American.

“Back then, more than five years earlier, the capital city was mired in corruption, with crumbling roads and buildings, slums in the middle of the city. Now on the city streets, the kids looked like American kids, busy with their cell phones, scrolling through Twitter and Facebook. Yet a few hours outside their city, children are living in a different universe, a refugee camp where water is the prized possession.” 

Sandra went back to Rwanda to attend a wedding and notices that, despite the country’s economic progress, many Rwandans are not feeling the economic boom. This description illustrates the contrast between stability and displacement within this African nation, where there are both displays of plenty and of dire poverty.

“Seeing the faces of my people, I experienced a rush of sudden joy. They all looked just like me […] I didn’t need to explain anything about myself like I do in America—my accent, my homeland, my heritage. They spoke my language, Kinyamulenge […] At the same time, they seemed to know right away that we were from another world […] On the faces of the people around us, I could see a universal expression […] a look of hopelessness, a sense of resignation […] My sisters and I had arrived with hope in our eyes. We looked different.” 

Though she feels at home among the people at the refugee camp, Sandra sees the ways in which living in America has changed her and her family. The experience reinforces her sense of existing between worlds. Though she feels rooted in her tribal identity, she has also assimilated to American ways and adopted an air of optimism that she could not develop in her war-torn homeland. 

“But I quickly realized that that there was a definite type at Houghton: white skin, long beautiful hair, everything I didn’t have. For the most part, white boys liked white girls, and black boys liked white girls. There was no space for my dark skin. I had male friends of both races, but I felt more like an accessory to enhance their coolness factor than a pretty girl they could ask out on a date.” 

Sandra’s dating life at Houghton College suffers because of racism. She realizes Black women are regarded as the least desirable—a situation made doubly difficult by her being a dark-skinned Black woman. As she did during her early adolescence, Sandra feels pressured to conform to a beauty standard she cannot meet. At the same time, her male friends fetishize her as exotic and seem self-congratulatory about associating with someone so different from themselves.

“I was learning about shades of black in America, and about how your skin tone determines where you stand on the beauty scale […] Basically, the lighter skinned you are, and the smaller and straighter your nose is, the ‘prettier’ you are. I also began to understand why hair is such an important issue for African American women […] My black friends explained that since they were already considered second tier to white women in the looks department, it was important not to have unruly hair. Black hair, in its natural state, is ‘nappy’ and disorderly, they told me […] They said black women have to keep their hair tidy and straight, like white women, if they want to be taken seriously at work and in school.” 

In this passage, Sandra addresses colorism, which causes darker-skinned women to get frequently overlooked as emblems of beauty or desirability. 

“I was envious that Rocco had grown up in America, a place where people could date across cultures and it was not an issue.” 

Sandra thinks about her mother’s stubborn refusal to accept the possibility of her children dating someone outside of their specific tribe. The narrowness of Rachel’s perspective, particularly in relation to the many romantic options that the United States offers, leads Sandra to believe that the perspectives of people from within her culture are exceptionally limited. On the other hand, Sandra’s relatively minimal understanding of American history and her recent awareness of American racism, causes her to overestimate Americans’ openness to interracial relationships. Her assumption that it is “not an issue” comes from her unawareness that, until 1967, interracial marriage was illegal in many Southern states. Interracial relationships, especially those between Black and white people, remain a subject of controversy.

“Some of the men from my tribe began to warm up to me. Instead of being concerned that a young woman was speaking for the community, they saw that I was developing a voice that could help people understand our experience.” 

Sandra reflects on how the men in her community learn to trust her after she achieves a degree of fame for being an activist for refugees from her tribe. Her description, in this context, of developing a voice contrasts with the ways in which she felt silenced, particularly after she was sexually assaulted, by sexist conventions in her culture. Ironically, activism draws her closer to her community, despite her exhibition of behavior that would have normally distanced her from it.