"If we kill your wife for you," the Wizard says, "we must kill you. And your children, too." He thuds his stick. "Otherwise, after cleansing our land of Tutsi nuisance, your children will come after us. We must remain one. Nothing shall dilute our blood. Not God. Not marriage." (Akpan, 24)
When we were asked towards the end of our class discussion to pinpoint a section of "My Parents' Bedroom" that depicts the tension in the story, I immediately thought of this quote. Although there were subtle clues throughout the story to help explain why there was tension between the narrator's family and the general population (plus the narrator's extended family), I hadn't truly gained a complete understanding until this part of the story, where Akpan explicitly stated the motivation behind the town's hostility towards the narrator's parents. I felt that this paragraph, though small, was crucial to understanding the story because it put all the earlier and violent actions in perspective to the readers.
Although the battle in this story is between two ethnic groups, essentially showing what the Rwandan Genocide was like for families of Tutsi's, I found myself repeatedly drawing comparisons between what was going on in the story and the history of racial conflict between Blacks and Whites in the United States. The last part of this quote where the Wizard states "Nothing shall dilute our blood. Not God. Nor marriage" reminded me of miscegenation. According to Merriam-Webster, miscegenation is defined as: "marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race." Miscegenation, a prominent theme of racial supremacist movements, was quite frowned upon and was often associated with negative connotations. Those against miscegenation believed that the mixing of races negatively impacted the purity of the white race and culture. The Wizard saying "nothing shall dilute our blood" reminded me of this ideology that mixing races, or in this case ethnic groups, where one is viewed as superior to another results in the belief that the superior race/ethnic group has become damaged and impure.
I think that the most important words in this quote within the context of the entire story are "cleansing", "blood", and "marriage." I believe that these three words effectively summarize the problem that is built up throughout the entire story and explain why the town's solution is violence and murder. The deliberate choice to use the world cleansing implies that the Hutus believe there is something impure and dirty about the existence of the Tutsis and that it is almost essential to get rid of them in order to preserve the virtue of the Hutus. The significance of using the word blood follows the idea of miscegenation where the Hutus in the story live by the belief that Hutus and Tutsis should not be associated with each other because it ruins the sanctity of the Hutus. By using the word "blood," Akpan takes a literal approach to this belief, showing how the Hutus believe they would physically be ruined by having relations with Tutsis.
Finally, the last sentence of the paragraph where the Wizard says "Not marriage" shows that love and loyalty are strictly confined within the same ethnic group. Today, there is a saying of "It's not blood that makes you family. It's love." The conflict between the Hutus and the Tutsis, however, counters this ideology and instead shows that one can really only love someone who shares the same "ethnic blood" as them because otherwise the love is tainted. Akpan's style in writing the sentences in this paragraph as extremely terse and abrupt adds a lot more emphasis to their purpose. The town believes so strongly that Tutsis ruin Hutus that they are even willing to go outside the boundaries and kill a Hutu member as well, just as long as the goal of killing a Tutsi person is accomplished.
This quote is just one of many in this story that shows that blood relations were more important than anything else in this strife between the Hutus and the Tutsis. In general, I really liked this story because, since I hadn't known about the history of the Rwandan Genocide prior to reading this story, there was an element of mystery building up through the story that wasn't "resolved" for me until this point in the story.
