Finding Beauty In A Broken World [Book Review]
Williams is known as a poet and nature writer. She begins from her home state of Utah. Over two weeks as a volunteer at Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah, Williams watches a black-tailed prairie dog colony during the spring. By incorporating experiences from the family construction business along with some history, she offers a fairly even-handed view on prairie dogs. The same government that does not want her in the park because she “signed on to a lawsuit against the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service,” also tells her brother that the ninth dog accidently killed will cost the company $200,000. Her detailed observations of the colony, however, really slows down the pace. Williams said during a recent interview that she was trying to convey the feeling of patience, of stillness, with the long series of terse passages on prairie dog behavior. She writes: “We are so removed from the lives of wild animals.”
In the second half of the book, Williams accompanies Lily Yeh, a friend and Chinese American artist, along with a small group of volunteers to Rwanda. With help from village women, they paint homes and build a memorial in the village of Rugerero to house the bones of the victims. Over one million Tutsis were killed during the 1994 genocide. One journey takes them to the nearby town of Nyamata.
I look up at the ceiling in the church. Holes from grenades appear as stars. Light is streaming down onto the pews. Empty pews. Rooms full of bones. Bags of bones, bulging, closed. Sacks of skulls. Piles of faded clothing. The alter cloth, once white, is now brown with blood. Ten thousand people were murdered here.
While this might be an easy book to put down, it is a hard book to forget. Williams does not offer simple answers to difficult questions. She does not proscribe. Her quest was discerning patterns in unexplored fragments of life.
