laying one definition
laying one s ear”, gutega ugutwi means to offer one’s ear, oneself as a vessel willing to hold and behold someone else’s interior. Conjugated, gutega ugutwi becomes “ntega ugutwi”. Ntega ugutwi is both a plea and a command to orient one’s body and listening capacity to the other. So in this case, Ntega ugutwi becomes a request to sit in and with quiet, which Tina Campt (2017) defines as “a modality that surrounds and infuses sound with impact and affect, which creates the possibility for it to register as meaningful.” I begin with this meditation on tuning to make clear what I am asking of readers, which is to be deliberate in their encounter with the lives of the people I’m presenting in this thesis. It is a request to sit still and be hesitant to speak or cast an analytical gaze. Tuning into Rwanda is a request to purge ourselves of a homogenizing and