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WORK TITLE: Cockroaches
WORK NOTES: trans by Jordan Stump
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1956
WEBSITE: http://scholastiquemukasonga.net/en/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: Rwandan
http://scholastiquemukasonga.net/en/biography/ * https://www.newwelshreview.com/article.php?id=645
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1956, in Gikongoro Province, Rwanda; children: two.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and social worker. Has worked as a social worker in Caen, France.
AWARDS:Ahamadou Kourouma Prize and Renault Prize, both 2012, both for Notre-Dame du Nil; Océans France Prize, 2013; French Voices Award, 2014.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Scholastique Mukasonga is a Rwandan writer and social worker based in France. She moved to France during the early 1990s, when the unrest in Rwanda became too dangerous for her to stay. Mukasonga lost more than two dozen family members during the genocide of 1994. She has written both fiction and nonfiction volumes in French. Some have been translated into English. In an interview with Suzy Ceulan Hughes, a contributor to the New Welsh Review Web site, Mukasonga stated: “I’ve often said it was the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis in 1994 that made me a writer. Writing has been a way of mourning for me and, with my books, I’ve woven a shroud for those whose bodies, buried in mass graves or scattered in ossuaries, are lost forever. It was in 2004, when I finally found the courage to go home to Nyamata, that I became aware of my duty of remembrance, because I could write.”
Cockroaches
Mukasonga’s first novel is Inyenzi, ou, Les cafards, which was published in English as Cockroaches. Through the characters, she tells the story of her family’s experiences during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda.
Tara Cheesman-Olmsted, a contributor to Quarterly Conversation Online, commented: “Mukasonga writes in the voice of an oral storyteller, betraying her attempts to structure her grief. Clean and conversational, the sentences are devoid of dramatic hyperbole, and yet still manage to convey a deep sense of loss, subdued rage and the survivor’s guilt underlying it all. It is Mukasonga’s no-nonsense tone which we hold on to when she relates, with brutal clarity, the fates of the people she loves. She chooses her words carefully, lest they overcome her and frighten away her ghosts.” “Mukasonga’s … powerful and poignant book plants itself in that terrible absence, its stone etched with a difficult, necessary grief,” suggested a Publishers Weekly reviewer. Writing on Asymptote Online, M. René Bradshaw asserted: “More compendious than it is confessional, Cockroaches assumes an on-the-scene or in-the-mind tense of storytelling, making the distance between Mukasonga’s past and present seem minimal. … Jordan Stump’s translation of the original French allows Mukasonga’s sentences to ring like completed, present instants. The sentences are sparse, distinct, like clipped phrases, their reality is the act that they contain, and they bleed into one another to give the impression of continuous inevitability.” Bradshaw added: “Cockroaches is a physically small book with a small, soft voice that whispers to us of the thousands of unnamed, unwritten memoirs, reaffirming their existence, refusing to forget: it is both witness literature and, likely against Mukasonga’s own intentions, a survival epic.” Writing on the Translationista Web site, Susan Bernofsky remarked: “Mukasonga’s storytelling is always clear and sharp.” Bernofsky praised “how she manages to interweave the political and the personal so skillfully and to such powerful effect.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews Online described the volume as “a thoughtful, sobering firsthand account of the refugee experience, a story that speaks to readers far beyond the African highlands.” “Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir of waiting for the genocide to begin takes its title from the word that the Hutus—Rwanda’s dominant tribe—called the Tutsis: cockroaches,” wrote Charles R. Larson for Counter Punch Online.
Our Lady of the Nile and Coeur tambour
Our Lady of the Nile, which was first released in French as Notre-Dame du Nil: Roman, is a novel that focuses on the attendees of a posh Rwandan school, or lycée. When tensions arise between the Hutus and Tutsis in the country, the students’ lives are affected.
Reviewing Our Lady of the Nile in the Christian Science Monitor, Christopher Byrd suggested: “Mukasonga is a gifted storyteller with a sure sense of plot construction and an aptitude for crafting piquant descriptions.” Byrd added: “If Our Lady of the Nile is constrained by its tendentious characterizations of people–each character a political point or archetype–it is buoyed by its air of foreboding consequence that imparts urgency to almost every page.” Madeleine LaRue, a contributor to Music and Literature Online, commented: “Although Our Lady of the Nile is not without its flaws—certain characters are too schematic, and dialogue and exposition are occasionally clumsy–we should nevertheless welcome the opportunity to read Mukasonga’s work in English.” LaRue concluded: “Genocide is incomprehensible, but not because it occurs in Africa. The West has indeed too often dismissed suffering in Africa, but books like Our Lady of the Nile remind us why we must not be dismissive, why we must not look away.” Writing for Kenyon Review Online, George S. MacLeod remarked: “Without falling into pathos or excessive sentimentality, Mukasonga makes palpable the complex social fabric that was already beginning to crack and which the genocide would completely tear apart.” “This is an astonishing book: Mukasonga’s style is so light, so charming, and yet her story could not be more sombre, more chastening, if it tried,” asserted Rachel Cooke on the Guardian Online.
Coeur tambour: Roman is a novel written in French that chronicles the life of a fictional singer called Kitami. Adele King, a critic in World Literature Today, remarked: “Mukasonga’s Coeur tambour shows the strength that can come from describing the truth of Rwanda.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Christian Science Monitor, October 1, 2014, Christopher Byrd, review of Our Lady of the Nile.
Publishers Weekly, August 15, 2016, review of Cockroaches, p. 42.
World Literature Today, March-April, 2015, Andreea Gabudeanu, review of Our Lady of the Nile, p. 60; January-February, 2017, Adele King, review of Coeur tambour: Roman, p. 81.
ONLINE
Asymptote Online, http://www.asymptotejournal.com/ (June 13, 2017), M. René Bradshaw, review of Cockroaches.
Counter Punch Online, http://www.counterpunch.org/ (January 6, 2017), Charles R. Larson, review of Cockroaches.
Guardian Online (London, England), https://www.theguardian.com/ (October 19, 2015), Rachel Cooke, review of Our Lady of the Nile.
Kenyon Review Online, http://www.kenyonreview.org/ (June 13, 2017), George S. MacLeod, review of Our Lady of the Nile.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (August 21, 2016), review of Cockroaches.
Music and Literature Online, http://www.musicandliterature.org/ (September 23, 2014), Madeleine LaRue, review of Our Lady of the Nile.
New Welsh Review Online, https://www.newwelshreview.com/ (June 13, 2017), Suzy Ceulan Hughes, author interview.
Quarterly Conversation Online, http://quarterlyconversation.com/ (March 13, 2017), Tara Cheesman-Olmsted, review of Cockroaches and interview with translator.
Scholastique Mukasonga Home Page, http://scholastiquemukasonga.net (June 13, 2017).
Translationista, http://translationista.com/ (March 19, 2017 ), Susan Bernofsky, review of Cockroaches.*
Scholastique Mukasonga
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Scholastique Mukasonga
Scholastique Mukasonga (born 1956) is a Rwandan author living in France.[1]
She was born in Gikongoro Province in 1956.[2] Mukasonga left Rwanda before the Rwandan genocide, which killed 27 members of her family,[3] her mother being one of them.[2] Beginning in 1992 she worked in Caen, France as a social worker,[4] and she currently lives in Lower Normandy.[5]
Works
[icon] This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (May 2015)
2006: Inyenzi ou les cafards (autobiographical book)[2]
2008: La femme aux pieds nus (autobiographical book) - Dedicated to Mukasonga's mother[2]
2010: L’Iguifou (autobiographical book)[2]
2012: Our Lady of the Nile (novel)
2012 Ahmadou Kourouma Prize (fr), Prix Renaudot[5]
2014: Ce que murmurent les collines (fr) - A collection of stories
QUOTED: "Mukasonga writes in the voice of an oral storyteller, betraying her attempts to structure her grief. Clean and conversational, the sentences are devoid of dramatic hyperbole, and yet still manage to convey a deep sense of loss, subdued rage and the survivor’s guilt underlying it all. It is Mukasonga’s no-nonsense tone which we hold on to when she relates, with brutal clarity, the fates of the people she loves. She chooses her words carefully, lest they overcome her and frighten away her ghosts."
Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga
Review by Tara Cheesman-Olmsted — Published on March 13, 2017
Published in Issue 47
Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga (tr. Jordan Stump). Archipelago Books. $16.00, 165pp.
Sometimes Scholastique Mukasonga sits alone at her kitchen table late at night, writing. She is mourning her dead while seeking their ghosts.
Over and over, I write and rewrite their names in the blue-covered notebook, trying to prove to myself that they existed; I speak their names one by one, in the dark and the silence. I have to fix a face on each name, hang some shred of memory. I don’t want to cry, I feel tears running down my cheeks. I close my eyes. This will be another sleepless night. I have so many dead to sit up with.
The opening pages of Cockroaches, Mukasonga’s memoir about the Rwandan genocide and the decades surrounding it, introduces a distinctive narrative style and framework onto the story that follows. Mukasonga creates an intimate space where she can speak. She seats us across the table and, in hushed tones (her children sleeping in the next room), shares her memories.
It begins in the late 1950s, after the Rwandan Revolution. Hutus are in power. Mukasonga and her Tutsi relatives are forcefully relocated to Nyamata, in eastern Rwanda. Then they are moved to Gitwe, a village built by the government specifically to put displaced Tutsis. They will remain there for a time, but eventually will find a more permanent home in Gitagata. Gitagata is where her family will be killed.
Mukasonga scrutinizes the events leading up to and including the 1994 Rwandan genocide subjectively, focusing on memories of her family and childhood. She uses individual experience as a way to personalize what most of us know only from the newspaper. Some of her memories are good—time spent with her mother, ditching school to gather fruit with friends, and the making of banana wine. Others are painful—being called Inyenzi, cockroach; the threat of rape; hiding in the bush from men with machetes and spiked clubs. She speaks of the persistent state of fear, of looming danger, that she and her loved ones endured. She describes “noises, shouts, a hum like a swarm of bees, a growl filling the air.” This is the sound of the “pogroms.” Horrors appear on these pages in the guise of normality.
Many of the boys were posted along the shoreline, as if standing guard. When we walked into the water to fill our calabashes, we saw what they were guarding: the tied up bodies of victims slowly dying in the shallows of the lake, little waves washing over them now and then. The newcomers were there to keep away the families who wanted to rescue their children or at least take home their bodies. For a long time we found little pieces of skin and rotting body parts in our calabashes when we fetched water.
When she is seventeen her parents arrange for Mukasonga and her brother, André, to be smuggled over the border into the neighboring country of Burundi. “With no one to count on, we had to look after ourselves, so we came up with a plan. . . . As long as I was in school, André would work to support us and pay for my studies; once I finished and found a job, once I was self-sufficient, he’d go back to school. Then it would be my turn to support him. We followed our plan to the letter.” They will work to fulfill the hopes of their parents, building lives for themselves outside of Rwanda. Mukasonga becomes a social worker; André a doctor. They will leave Burundi to settle in France and Senegal. Both will find partners, marry, and have children of their own. They will sneak back into Rwanda for infrequent and perilous visits.
They, Mukasonga tells us, were chosen by their parents to survive, and the knowledge of that is at the crux of her memoir. Grief is something we accept as an unavoidable part of the human experience, but what happens when you have too many people to grieve for? Where do you find consolation for the simultaneous loss of not one but several family members—parents, brothers and sisters, small children, even unborn babies who have been murdered? How do you look their killers, who remain free and unpunished, in the eye?
These questions are never asked out loud, but it is impossible not to infer them. Cockroaches is not about the complicated political situation in Rwanda. It does not go out of its way to examine the history of the ethnic tensions which led to the 1994 genocide. Though it touches on the courts of reconciliation, Mukasonga shows no interest in exploring them as a concept or an institution. Rather, she has written a memorial to the dead, in particular her dead. Toward the end it will unravel in places and become a list of names with a few, brief memories attached: Joséphine Kabanene, the prettiest and proudest girl in the village; Rukorera, the man who had cows; Sekimonyo, the tall beekeeper and the school teacher Birota.
And when I close my eyes, what I see is always the same night, a night in the dry season, a night lit by the full moon. The women are busy around the three stones of the hearth. Sitting cross-legged on either side of the road, the men a gravely talking and passing around calabashes of sorghum or banana beer. Little boys are playing with a banana-leaf ball in the road; others are racing after the old bicycle wheels they use as hoops, giggling wildly. The girls have swept the yard and the road and now they’re singing and dancing. And now the women are studying the moon, whose illuminated face, they believe, reveals the future. In my memories, that enormous moon is always there, hanging over the village to pour out its pale blue light.
In the bright night of my memory, they’re all there.
On its surface Cockroaches follows a linear timeline. The chapter headings often include the year or years in which their events occur. There is a concerted effort to formalize memory and to separate the facts from the emotions they inspire. But Mukasonga writes in the voice of an oral storyteller, betraying her attempts to structure her grief. Clean and conversational, the sentences are devoid of dramatic hyperbole, and yet still manage to convey a deep sense of loss, subdued rage and the survivor’s guilt underlying it all. It is Mukasonga’s no-nonsense tone which we hold on to when she relates, with brutal clarity, the fates of the people she loves. She chooses her words carefully, lest they overcome her and frighten away her ghosts.
A Brief Interview With Jordan Stump
Jordan Stump received the 2001 French-American Foundation’s Translation Prize for his translation of Le Jardin des Plantes by Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon. In 2006, Stump was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. He has translated the work of Eric Chevillard, Marie Redonnet, Patrick Modiano, Honoré de Balzac, and Jules Verne, among others. He is a professor of French literature at the University of Nebraska. He graciously agreed to answer some questions about translating Cockroaches.
Tara Cheesman: Does translating a memoir required a level of engagement and interaction with the author beyond what might be required by a work of fiction?
Jordan Stump: I can certainly see why it might, but I translated this book in much the way I always do, which is to say that I don’t contact the author until I’m very close to a final draft, with a list of purely practical questions about the translation. We wrote back and forth a bit at that point, but really not all that much. I don’t have any kind of ethical or ideological objection to that close interaction; I simply don’t want to be a nuisance to writers who I know have many other things to do.
TC: So you and Scholastique Mukasonga have never met?
JS: We met for the first time last month at a reading in New York; now that I’ve met her, and feel more closely connected to her, it will be interesting to see if the friendship we struck up will affect my next translation of her work, which is a lovely book called La femme aux pieds nus, a portrait of her mother. Hearing her voice, getting a feel for her sense of humor, her warmth—surely those things will affect that translation somehow, but I’m a great believer in the power of the words alone: everything comes out through the words of a text, I suppose, and nothing more is really essential.
TC: I was also wondering whether you did any supplementary reading on the Rwandan genocide, specifically, or on genocides in general?
JS: I didn’t do any supplementary reading—as I said earlier, I believe in the power of the words themselves. However, I had a colleague, Chantal Kalisa, who died tragically a year ago, and Chantal and I talked a lot about Mukasonga’s book. Chantal, like Mukasonga, was not in Rwanda at the time, so in a sense her experience was a perfect echo of what’s described in the book. I learned a great deal from Chantal, and our talks made the book seem much more immediate to me, much more real.
TC: One thing that struck me about Cockroaches is that Scholastique Mukasonga is a survivor and victim of genocide—but am I wrong in thinking that she does not identify herself as such because she was not present on the day her family was killed? Her writing seems to be a way in which she is dealing with both her grief and guilt (survivor’s guilt).
JS: Yes, that’s exactly right: she was chosen to survive by her family, but not specifically to survive this particular genocide, if you see what I mean. There’s the guilt, but also the knowledge, as hard as it is to entirely accept, that by surviving she was not just fulfilling their wishes but keeping them alive.
TC: Can you explain what you mean when you say that “she was chosen to survive . . . but not specifically to survive this particular genocide”?
JS: What I meant was that a very strong sense of imminent destruction hung over Mukasonga family (and many others, of course) from her earliest childhood. For decades, her parents’ greatest concern was the survival, in whole or in part, of their children—the notion that the children would have one day to flee to Burundi, for instance, long predated the rumblings of genocide that caused them to finally flee, and predated by decades the full-scale genocide of 1994. In other words, the thing that she would have to survive isn’t any one particular event; the threat was constant and ambient.
TC: I wish I had more questions for you, but Cockroaches truly is a straightforward book. The writer’s voice is so clear and certain (your translation captured it beautifully) that I have to agree with you that the words stand perfectly on their own.
JS: I certainly know what you mean about the straightforwardness of the book—for me as well, it’s hard to talk about “how I translated it,” because mostly I felt like what I needed to do was get out of the way and let the voice of the original come through. There’s a certain kind of “heroic” model of translation, where the translator grapples and transmutes and recreates etc, and with this book that kind of approach would be a travesty. She has a beautiful voice, so a translator should simply let her talk. I guess that’s one way of answering your second question: you have to avoid poeticizing the book, but also you have to be careful not to make its straightforwardness mannered. There’s nothing mannered about this book, and for a translator like me who has a certain fondness for mannered books, that’s a bit of a challenge.
TC: Were there any other challenges you faced?
JS: The cultural distance between Mukasonga and me: the experience she’s describing is so far from my own that it feels a little odd, a little wrong, for me to be purporting to reproduce her voice—in English, furthermore, a language as un-marginalized as it’s possible to be (and what is this book if not the story of a lifelong marginalization/). All that feels a little strange, as I say, but it simply has to be got over, or rather one simply to strive, at all times, to make the distance not matter all that much, to let her voice come through all the same, in spite of all the reasons why it shouldn’t.
TC: Thank you so much for taking the time to answer my questions.
JS: My pleasure!
Born in Rwanda in 1956, Scholastique Mukasonga experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced to the polluted and under-developed Bugesera district of Rwanda. Mukasonga was later forced to leave the school of social work in Butare and flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only 2 years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, Mukasonga learned that 27 of her family members had been massacred. Twelve years later, Gallimard published her autobiographical account Inyenzi ou les Cafards, which marked Mukasonga’s entry into literature. This was followed by the publication of La femme aux pieds nus in 2008 and L’Iguifou in 2010, both widely praised. Her first novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, won the Ahamadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012, as well as the Océans France Ô prize in 2013 and the French Voices Award in 2014.
QUOTED: "I’ve often said it was the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis in 1994 that made me a writer. Writing has been a way of mourning for me and, with my books, I’ve woven a shroud for those whose bodies, buried in mass graves or scattered in ossuaries, are lost forever. It was in 2004, when I finally found the courage to go home to Nyamata, that I became aware of my duty of remembrance, because I could write."
INTERVIEW by Suzy Ceulan Hughes
NWR Issue 102
Interview with Scholastique Mukasonga
NWR: Hello, Scholastique. Firstly, I’d like to say how pleased I am to be bringing your short story, ‘Le Deuil’ (Mourning), to English readers for the first time (in NWR’s winter edition, 102, published 1 December), especially just now, as the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide approaches. It feels like an important remembrance. You’ve said it was the genocide that made you a writer and that you see yourself as a memory-bearer. I wonder if you’d like to talk a little more about that – about your vocation as a writer, and your books as works of tribute and remembrance.
Scholastique Mukasonga: I’ve often said it was the genocide of Rwanda’s Tutsis in 1994 that made me a writer. Writing has been a way of mourning for me and, with my books, I’ve woven a shroud for those whose bodies, buried in mass graves or scattered in ossuaries, are lost forever. It was in 2004, when I finally found the courage to go home to Nyamata, that I became aware of my duty of remembrance, because I could write. I was somehow the memory-bearer for those whose very existence, whose every trace, the génocidaires had wanted to wipe out and deny. That’s why my first two books were autobiographical. I started writing fiction because I felt it gave me the distance I needed to say things that couldn’t be expressed in straightforward autobiography.
NWR: Something that really strikes me about your books is the way in which they contextualise the genocide, and I think this is especially important for Western readers. In ‘Le Deuil’ (Mourning), you portray a common Western response to the first news of the genocide: ‘Yes, there’d been massacres, but there were always massacres in Africa [...] These were tribal, atavistic, primitive hatreds that were beyond comprehension.’ Your memoirs and short stories take us back to the first wave of forced exiles and massacres in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and your novel provides a much longer view of the historical events that culminated in the genocide. Do you see yourself as a political writer, with a duty not just to remember but also to inform?
SM: I’m not a political writer or a historian. Many Africa specialists, like Jean-Pierre Chrétien, have studied the way in which the myths of nineteenth-century European racist anthropology interpreted Rwandan society in terms of races and invasions – an interpretation that had tragic consequences for Rwandan society. The character of Fontenailles in Notre-Dame du Nil (Our Lady of the Nile), uses irony to lay bare the myths the colonial administrators and missionaries had created about the Tutsis. The genocide didn’t suddenly erupt on 7 April 1994; it began on 1 November 1959*, and its ideological roots go back to the 1930s and beyond.
NWR: Although your books embrace major historical events and political themes, the focus is always on the day-to-day experiences of ordinary people. Your narratives are full of gentle humour, and you achieve a real tenderness of tone without ever slipping into sentimentality. It seems to me that you strike a delicate balance.
SM: Humour has always been an integral part of my books. It gives me the distance I need to carry on writing without succumbing to the pain and madness that stalk survivors. Even in tragic circumstances, a sense of humour is something that all Rwandans share. It feels important to stress that.
NWR: So far, all of your books have been written in French (Rwanda’s adopted colonial language before the new Anglophone policy introduced by Paul Kagame), but you give your writing a distinctive texture by using a lot of Kinyarwandan words. I know African writers are increasingly reclaiming their pre-colonial heritage by writing in their indigenous languages. Do you think you might write in Kinyarwanda in the future, or do you think it would affect the likelihood of your work appearing in English, and perhaps in other languages too?
SM: Of course, I’d love to write in Kinyarwanda. But who would publish me? In Rwanda, even though English is now the official language, my readers are still mainly French speakers. Notre-Dame du Nil, for example, is on the curriculum for the French-medium baccalaureate at one of Kigali’s most prestigious secondary schools, Green Hills. I like to think that my work is also part of the canon of Francophone African literature, which is vibrant and thriving.
NWR: It’s been fascinating for me, both as a reader and as a translator, to see your journey as a writer, from the pure autobiography of your two memoirs to the strongly autobiographical short stories, and then your debut novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, which won the the prestigious Prix Renaudot in 2012. I know Melanie Mauthner is currently translating Notre-Dame du Nil, and let’s hope that English translations of your other books will follow. In the meantime, do you have another book in the pipeline for those of us who are lucky enough to be able to read your books in French?
SM: I have a new collection of short stories that’s nearly ready. But the short story form isn’t very popular among French publishers. Perhaps the recent Nobel Prize [awarded to Canadian short story writer Alice Munro] will arouse renewed interest in the form.
NWR: Thank you, Scholastique. It’s been a real pleasure working with you, and I’m looking forward to seeing all your books in English before too long.
Books by Scholastique Mukasonga:
Inyenzi ou les Cafards (Gallimard, 2006)
La femme aux pieds nus (Gallimard, 2008)
L’Iguifou – nouvelles rwandaises (Gallimard, 2010)
Notre-Dame du Nil (Gallimard, 2012)
Our Lady of the Nile (Melanie Mauthner’s translation of Notre-Dame du Nil (forthcoming from Archipelago Books)
QUOTED: "Mukasonga's ... powerful and poignant book plants itself in that terrible absence, its stone etched with a difficult, necessary grief."
Cockroaches
263.33 (Aug. 15, 2016): p42.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Cockroaches Scholastique Mukasonga, trans. from the French by Iordan Stump. Archipelago (PRH, dist.), $18 trade paper (250p) ISBN 978-0914671-53-4
In this harrowing autobiographical novel, a Rwandan woman recounts a girlhood riven by the vicious war between the Tutsis and the Hutus, a conflict that left 37 of her family members murdered in the 1994 genocide. Opening with her family's expulsion from their native village, the early chapters illustrate the major trials and minor joys of communal exile. Scenes of unthinkable horror abut moments of great humanity: the narrator sees a friend maimed by a grenade; she connects with her mother by helping her tend to her garden. Academic excellence delivers the narrator from the refugee camp, first to a selective boarding school, then to an academy for social workers across the border in Burundi. After a final visit to her parents in 1986, the narrator settles in France, where she watches the genocide from afar, painfully helpless. Nearly a decade later, the narrator returns to the site of the refugee camp, where no signs of the lives lost can be found. Mukasonga's (Our Lady of the Nile) powerful and poignant book plants itself in that terrible absence, its stone etched with a difficult, necessary grief. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Cockroaches." Publishers Weekly, 15 Aug. 2016, p. 42. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA461444497&it=r&asid=90a51283cd2e6a7612dab951475b3adf. Accessed 8 May 2017.
QUOTED: "Mukasonga's Coeur Tambour shows the strength that can come from describing the truth of Rwanda."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A461444497
Scholastique Mukasonga. Coeur Tambour
Adele King
91.1 (January-February 2017): p81.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Scholastique Mukasonga. Coeur Tambour. Paris. Gallimard. 2016. 176 pages.
Scholastique Mukasonga, whose family was destroyed in the Rwandan genocide and who won a prestigious prize for the novel Notre-Dame du Nil (2012), now has published Coeur Tambour, less a novel than a fable, told in three parts, all concerned with the life and death of a woman who is both a musician and the symbol of the events in Rwanda.
The life and death of Kitami--a famous singer, who, among other prestigious accomplishments, sold thousands of records and filled a large concert hall in Queens--is told from several points of view. Her death remains a mystery, as her reputation is based not only on her talent but also on how she is related to Rwanda.
The story is first told as a third-person narration of events when Kitami meets the men who will make up her band, Pedro, their manager and their plans to travel. They are a Jamaican rasta, who welcomed the arrival of Haile Selassie to his island; a Guadeloupean who tells the story of Napoleon and the French takeover of Guadeloupe; and a man who defines himself as either Rwandan or Ugandan, depending on how European authorities cut up the countries in Africa. While Kitami is initially skeptical of West Indian drums, she learns that they originate in the suffering of Africans and that drums have hearts. After traveling to Africa, the band goes to Montserrat.
The second part is more descriptive, telling the memoirs of a young Rwandan woman named Prisca, who is a bright student living with a typical family and supported by a Catholic missionary, although as a Tutsi she cannot receive as much from the authorities as a Hutu. She becomes inspired by the spirit of Nyabinghi, the spirit of Kitami, a queen of women, who will never die. Prisca realizes that she has entered into the legend of the Black Amazon. With Pedros help she manages to take a great drum from its hiding spot before the Hutus destroy it.
The final part of the novel is termed "Ruguina," the drum itself. It describes Kitami's death and the investigation of officials in Montserrat, who consider several alternatives without reaching any conclusion. James, the Ugandan, sees the death as an attack on the drum, for Kitami wanted to silence the chant that would announce greater sufferings: "Perhaps, in sacrificing herself under the drum, she could ward off Misfortune, as the kings and queens of Rwanda had done in the past. Misfortune, Kitami had told him, always thinks it is the strongest, but doesn't realize what comes afterward." Mukasonga's Coeur Tambour shows the strength that can come from describing the truth of Rwanda.
Adele King
Paris, France
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
King, Adele. "Scholastique Mukasonga. Coeur Tambour." World Literature Today, vol. 91, no. 1, 2017, p. 81+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475309232&it=r&asid=4f1758017eefb2de36a4d25a4ccd9de2. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475309232
Scholastique Mukasonga. Our Lady of the Nile
Andreea Gabudeanu
89.2 (March-April 2015): p60.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 University of Oklahoma
http://www.worldliteraturetoday.com
Scholastique Mukasonga. Our Lady of the Nile. Melanie Mauthner, tr. Brooklyn. Archipelago Books. 2014. ISBN 9780914671039
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Our Lady of the Nile (Notre-Dame du Nil, 2012) won the Prix Renaudot, the French Voices Award, as well as the 1994 Ahmadou Kourouma Prize. Scholastique Mukasonga lived the ethnic conflicts in Rwanda and lost twenty-seven of her family members as a result of the Tutsi genocide, while being forced to take refuge in France.
The novel reflects glimpses of a tension-filled past and slowly moves to uncover racial strife and the increase of genocidal actions against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda through the eyes of lycée girls enrolled at a Catholic boarding school that stands isolated on the Ikibira mountaintop by the river Nile, gated and guarded. The lycée was built by the Belgium colonizers in Africa and encompasses an isolated, delineated area above the poor village of Nyaminombe, with an exotic garden, a guest bungalow, and foreign teacher villas.
When the lycée opens, luxurious cars travel to the mountain to bring daughters of businessmen, governors, and the country's elite. They will all be trained accordingly to maintain status, increase their chances of an advantageous marriage, and make a fortune.
The only Tutsi girls in the lycée, Virginia and Veronica, are a minority (the yearly quota is two Tutsi students for twenty of other origins). Veronica accepts the veneration of Mr. de Fontenaille (a former plantation owner who discovered the shrine of a local queen and is fascinated by the idea of Tutsi Egyptian roots), and she participates in ritualistic performances centering on the image of Isis. Virginia draws away from the pagan rites and searches out the advice of a witch doctor in her aunt's village; she is determined to put the discovered shrine remains to rest and perform a traditional ritual cleansing of Fontenaille's desecrated burial site. She is driven by the apparitions of former local queens in her dreams.
The chain of authority reverses toward the end of the novel: at the beginning, Mother Superior maintains the religious place of authority, seconded by Father Hermenegilde, but toward the end of the novel Gloriosa, one of the lycée's students, takes advantage of her father's political influence and status to become the feared head of racial persecution in the school. She orders beatings, rapes, and executions. Gloriosa not only represents the feared militant political youth ready to commit atrocities against the Tutsi but also the abusive force that eventually destroys the religious symbol of the Lady of the Nile's statue in order to make sure it does not have a Tutsi nose and reflects only Hutu facial features. The destruction of the statue's head under Gloriosas hammer blows signifies the decimation of faith and the dominance of the New Man, tormented by racist thoughts and extreme violence.
Andreea Gabudeanu
Bristow, Virginia
Gabudeanu, Andreea
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Gabudeanu, Andreea. "Scholastique Mukasonga. Our Lady of the Nile." World Literature Today, vol. 89, no. 2, 2015, p. 60. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA419151799&it=r&asid=4f616f5b014945feb057b66313a13e96. Accessed 8 May 2017.
QUOTED: "Mukasonga is a gifted storyteller with a sure sense of plot construction, and an aptitude for crafting piquant descriptions."
"If "Our Lady of the Nile" is constrained by its tendentious characterizations of people–each character a political point or archetype–it is buoyed by its air of foreboding consequence that imparts urgency to almost every page."
Gale Document Number: GALE|A419151799
'Our Lady of the Nile,' a novel set in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide, has an air of foreboding and urgency
Christopher Byrd
(Oct. 1, 2014): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2014 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Byline: Christopher Byrd
Twenty years ago, one of the most comprehensive bloodlettings in human history happened in the small Central African country of Rwanda. Beginning in April and continuing for some 100 days into July, a state-sponsored campaign of mass extermination was waged by the country's majority Hutu population against their Tutsi neighbors. It is estimated that between 800,000 and 1 million people were murdered. According to Survivor's Fund (SURF), this averaged out to six men, women, and children killed every minute - a rate that surpassed that of any Nazi concentration camp. Descriptions of the slaughter return frequently to the stupefying amount of physical labor involved. Whole communities - kids included - were mobilized to take part in the killings. On the radio, citizens were exhorted to use whatever makeshift weapons were available: knives, clubs, rope, machetes; little was distant or antiseptic about this butchery.
One needn't lean on metaphysics or theology to grapple with the roots of such evil. As Scholastique Mukasonga shows in her expeditiously paced novel, Our Lady of the Nile, an ideology of resentment - a hangover of Rwanda's colonialist history - was lodged throughout the country well before 1994. Mukasonga sets her novel at a lycee for girls fifteen years prior to the genocide. By adapting the genre of the boarding school novel, she gives a universal texture to the resentment, envy, and opportunism that are a part of any student body - but which in this context laid the runway for the physical and sexual violence perpetuated on the behalf of what the world would come to know as Hutu Power.
Nestled high above a valley, in the Nyambinombe district, the school takes its name from a statue of the Virgin Mary located some two kilometers away from its campus where it overlooks a stream credited as the source of the Nile River. As the book's narrator, students, and teachers eagerly note, Our Lady of the Nile is tasked with grooming the country's young, female elite. Although the Mother Superior who heads the school pays lip service to the idea that the young women in her charge might use their education to secure prominent positions in the labor force, most of the students view such contentions as vapid idealism that does not speak to their predicament.
The patriarchal expectations heaped on these girls make a description like this typical: "He viewed his daughter as a prime ornament for embassy dinners and receptions." A rhetorical crescendo occurs halfway through the story when one of the seniors rebukes the novel's de facto villain, Gloriosa - a pompous, two-dimensional demagogue who openly threatens the small quota of admitted Tutsi students.
"That's enough," Gloriosa said... "It's time we remembered who we are and where we are. We are the lycee of Our Lady of the Nile, which trains Rwanda's female elite. We're the ones who've been chosen to spearhead women's advancement. Let us be worthy of the trust placed in us by the majority people."
"Gloriosa," said Imaculee, "do you think it's already time for you to give us one of your politician-type speeches? Like we were at a rally? Women's advancement, well let's talk about that! The reason most of us are here is for our family's advancement, not for our own future but for that of the clan. We were already fine merchandise, since nearly all of us are daughters of rich and powerful people, daughters of parents who know how to trade us for the highest price, and a diploma will inflate our worth even more..."
"Just listen to her," jeered Gloriosa, "she's talking like a white girl in the movies, or in those books the French teacher makes us read."
There is a stagy quality to some of this dialogue which -- though obviously called out in the above -- nonetheless crops up elsewhere. At times, the characters feel a bit artificial, as if they are informing on themselves:
"Listen, Virginia, there's something I want to tell you. But don't breathe a word to anyone.""You know we Tutsi never reveal our secrets, Veronica. We're taught to keep our mouths shut."
Though the dialogue skews too much to blatant declarations for my tastes, Mukasonga is a gifted storyteller with a sure sense of plot construction, and an aptitude for crafting piquant descriptions. Despite my quibbles, "Our Lady of the Nile" swept me up with its artful bitterness. The novel has many targets. Like the skin-whitening creams pedaled to black women, or a teacher who buys into the sort of notorious argument advanced in Hegel's "Lectures on the Philosophy of History" (1837) that Africa has "no historical part of the World" - which is recast in the novel's parlance as "History meant Europe, and Geography, Africa."
Mukasonga rightly traces the origins of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict to European, or more precisely Belgian colonialists who pursued a divide and conquer strategy by elevating the Tutsis in society on account of their supposed racial superiority - lighter skin tone, smaller noses, etc. These spurious racial generalizations took corrosive hold over the society despite the fact that Hutus and Tutsis had intermarried for generations, leaving their bloodlines indistinguishable. By the time the colonialists switched sides and backed the Hutus over the Tutsis near the end of their colonial tenure, a perilous sense of grievance was cultivated in a top-down fashion that a militant, political class used to consolidate power.
If "Our Lady of the Nile" is constrained by its tendentious characterizations of people - each character a political point or archetype - it is buoyed by its air of foreboding consequence that imparts urgency to almost every page.
Christopher Byrd is a writer who lives in New York.
Christopher Byrd
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Byrd, Christopher. "'Our Lady of the Nile,' a novel set in Rwanda before the 1994 genocide, has an air of foreboding and urgency." Christian Science Monitor, 1 Oct. 2014. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA384270142&it=r&asid=84165752ed35413c149abe6391024eda. Accessed 8 May 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A384270142
QUOTED: "More compendious than it is confessional, Cockroaches assumes an on-the-scene or in-the-mind tense of storytelling, making the distance between Mukasonga’s past and present seem minimal."
"Jordan Stump’s translation of the original French allows Mukasonga’s sentences to ring like completed, present instants. The sentences are sparse, distinct, like clipped phrases, their reality is the act that they contain, and they bleed into one another to give the impression of continuous inevitability."
"Cockroaches is a physically small book with a small, soft voice that whispers to us of the thousands of unnamed, unwritten memoirs, reaffirming their existence, refusing to forget: it is both witness literature and, likely against Mukasonga’s own intentions, a survival epic."
M. René Bradshaw reviews Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga
Translated from the French by Jordan Stump (Archipelago Books, 2016)
The problem with most memorials and public remembrances marking strategic mass killings—war and genocide being the two major examples from the twentieth century—is that they cannot, and do not, individualize death. In the case of genocide, failing to return names or individual histories to victims can recur to genocide’s inherent ambition to depersonalize, collectivize, and forget. As the trauma researcher Sara Guyer compellingly suggests, the genocide memorials in Rwanda, including Nyamata, that preserve and expose the bones of the dead reflect a complicated, unbalanced distinction between commemorating the organized extermination of a population and commemorating “death in general.” In this circular logic, the memorials inadvertently reveal anew the necessity of an impossible testimony—the testimony of the dead.
Where are they now? In the memorial crypt of the church in Nyamata, nameless skulls among all the other bones? In the bush, beneath the brambles, in some mass grave that has yet to be found? Over and over, I write and rewrite their names in the blue-covered notebook, trying to prove to myself that they existed; I speak their names one by one, in the dark and the silence.
So begins Cockroaches, Scholastique Mukasonga’s story of her Tutsi family and their struggle to escape Rwanda’s ethnic violence. Even with the most influential books, you cannot usually tell all that much about their direction from a first sentence alone—for instance, you can’t necessarily distinguish the aims and aspirations of a “great classic” from those of a contemporary novel by its first sentence. “For a long time, I used to go to bed early . . . ” Now, that line does not exactly fire like a pistol. How could you guess, from the words themselves, that that’s the beginning of Swann’s Way? Conversely, the opening sentences of Cockroaches permeate the trajectory of the narrative like warning shots. Evoking the names of her massacred family members, Mukasonga dedicates this book to “everyone who died at Nyamata in the genocide” and “for all those of Nyamata who are named in this book and the many more who are not, for the few who have the sorrow of surviving.” From its first pages, Mukasonga’s remembering self-traces a trail of gunsmoke, leading to a backstory of the remembered dead for whom she is compelled to speak.
More compendious than it is confessional, Cockroaches assumes an on-the-scene or in-the-mind tense of storytelling, making the distance between Mukasonga’s past and present seem minimal. The titles of chapters provide historical cornerstones for understanding the events that facilitated the 1994 genocide and locate the tragic epic of Mukasonga’s family within this history. “The Late 1950s: A Childhood Disturbed” begins in the Gikongoro province, on the outskirts of the Nyundgwe forest, where Mukasonga was born. Over the next four decades, Mukasonga, her parents, and her six brothers and sisters undergo deportation to Nyamata (“1960: Internal Exile”) and witness the first legislative elections in Rwanda (“‘1961–1964’: ‘Democratic’ Exclusion”), which solidified Hutu supremacy and ushered in a new cycle of conflict and violence. In April 1994, members of the Hutu majority, directed by extremists in the capital of Kigali, murdered as many as 800,000 people. The genocide spread throughout the country with staggering rapidity and brutality as the Hutu Power government incited citizens to take up arms against the inyenzi—“cockroaches”—a metaphor used to demonize their Tutsi neighbors. In her adopted home of France, Mukasonga glances at a photograph of her family taken on the day of her youngest sister’s wedding. She writes, “They’re going to die. Maybe they already know it.”
Under constant armed surveillance marked by soldiers invading villages, unannounced, under the pretext of deterring Tutsi insurgence, Mukasonga and her family attempt to establish a permanent family home in the scrubland of Gitagata. In the midst of unnerving tension, the everyday joys of girlhood and community life are revealed to us: “And then others were strangely peaceful, as if our tormentors had forgotten us. Ordinary childhood days, few and far between.” Rallying the entire family to make banana beer, trailing elephants on the road as an acceptable strategy for arriving late to school, fetching water with cousins, and discovering the private pleasures of reading (“Sometimes I dreamed of an impossible thing: having a book all to myself.”): these small adventures of childhood, safeguarded by loving parents who are devoted to the advancement and education of their children despite unending persecution and poverty, allow us to come to understand how living is possible, how the family unit can sustain itself.
But with grievous wonderment—never self-pitying, though sometimes bordering on a sort of numbed explication—Mukasonga sprinkles crumbs for us to navigate the preconditions that facilitated “1994: The Genocide, the Long-Awaited Horror.” From 1963 to 1964, the Hutu-dominated government in Rwanda massacred thousands of Tutsis following the failed Tutsi revolt (“a real foretaste of the 1994 genocide”). In 1973, Mukasonga escaped across the border into Burundi with the aid of her brother’s best friend. She necessarily notes: “He wouldn’t be killed that morning. He would be killed twenty years later.” In the same year, General Juvenal Habyarimana, a Hutu from the north, seizes power in a military coup to become the third president of Rwanda. Jordan Stump’s translation of the original French allows Mukasonga’s sentences to ring like completed, present instants. The sentences are sparse, distinct, like clipped phrases, their reality is the act that they contain, and they bleed into one another to give the impression of continuous inevitability: “Humiliated, afraid, waiting day after day for what was to come, what we didn’t have a word for: genocide. And I alone preserve the memory of it. And that’s why I am writing this.” Genocide does not happen by chance, or out of spur-of-the-moment collective madness. If we approach Cockroaches expecting a historical investigation of the rise of the 1994 genocide and the outrageous lack of humanitarian intervention, or an inquiry into the origins and nature of evil, we ask both too much and too little of it.
Here, perhaps, is the advantage of Mukasonga having written Cockroaches many years after the events recounted (the original French version was published in 2006.). Her recollection, which does not seem to be worn away by time and controversy, also admits the necessity of taking a long—though by no means subsuming—view of historical events.
I would be doing a disservice to the book not to mention that it discloses some of the most unspeakable crimes of which I have ever heard. In this way, Mukasonga adopts the traumatic experiences—and thus the memories—of her family members as individuated events, inscribing them into the larger story. She discovers how her youngest sister, Jeanne, and her brother-in-law, Pierre, were murdered, insisting on describing, matter-of-factly, the harrowing details of their deaths. (Jeanne’s pregnant womb is dissected with a machete, and her perpetrators beat her with her own fetus; we assume that she bleeds to death. Pierre is imprisoned in a town hall, and for several days, his captors cut pieces of his body off, one by one. In an especially sadistic turn, his daughter, Mukasonga’s niece, is forced to bring him his daily meals. Every day, she would see another piece of her father—a finger, an arm, a leg—gone.)
Still, her quest to discover the final fate of her parents and siblings is truly brought to the fore during a visit to her old family home, now nonexistent, in Gitagata. There, she encounters her parents’ former neighbor, a Hutu, who is still living next door. At first, the neighbor does not seem to recognize Mukasonga, though her parents had once reluctantly invited him to a party to celebrate her homecoming a decade beforehand. Then, when he recalls her father’s name, he begins to ask for Mukasonga’s forgiveness, but he suddenly stops, claims that he isn’t a murderer, rejects having even witnessed the massacre, and then flatly ends with full-blown denial: “No one died here.” Here, Mukasonga’s original search for answers doubles back upon itself and ends at a juncture in this moment of senselessness and paralysis: “I’m no longer listening. Was it him who murdered my parents, who’d at least played a part? Was it someone else? I’ll never know.” The quietness of her simple desire to know what happened, so calm in its rejection of the consolations of blame or despair—she is offered only the abstention and guilt of a potential perpetrator in turn—is distinctly heartbreaking. Like many survivors, Mukasonga knows where her parents were killed, but not how they were killed or where their bones lie. The neighbor represents living access to memory but also refuses it, making clear that the demand for absent testimonies across Rwanda still remains.
What slave narratives, refugee accounts, and Holocaust and genocide memoirs have in common is that, in them, the stakes of “survival” are much higher than ever before. Each of these witness memoirs has to bear an awful burden: to stand in for the thousands of memoirs that will never be written. Cockroaches is a physically small book with a small, soft voice that whispers to us of the thousands of unnamed, unwritten memoirs, reaffirming their existence, refusing to forget: it is both witness literature and, likely against Mukasonga’s own intentions, a survival epic. (“That was the mission our parents had assigned André and me, it’s true. We were supposed to survive, and now I knew what the sorrow of survival meant.”) For Mukasonga, staying alive meant the burden of bearing witness to the event and the duty to disclose it. She has lived in France for more than two decades; she has two sons; she is a practicing social worker. (Her brother, André, with whom she escaped to Burundi, became a doctor.) By her own account, her life is marked by stability and a conviction “to keep the memory alive, so the family would go on, somewhere else.”
But what if survival is not the equivalent to redemption? In other words, with its strong narrative trajectory and straightforward themes, how is the trauma-and-redemption memoir problematized when surviving and thriving—the presupposed mission—becomes a trauma unto itself? Mukasonga’s story also teaches us that survival itself can be just at the margins of tolerable existence: “Sometimes I hear that growl in France, in the street I don’t dare turn around, I walk faster, isn’t it that same roar, forever following me?”
We are left listening for bodies slithering through tall grasses in the night.
QUOTED: "Mukasonga’s storytelling is always clear and sharp."
"how she manages to interweave the political and the personal so skillfully and to such powerful effect."
Sunday, March 19, 2017
What I’m Reading: Scholastique Mukasonga
I first encountered Scholastique Mukasonga’s work in 2013 when I was working on co-editing, with Christopher Merrill, Landmarks, the 20th anniversary issue of the Two Lines Anthology published by the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco. Translator Lara Vergnaud had submitted a short story by Mukasonga entitled “Fear,” from her 2010 collection L’Iguifou, novellas rwandaises, that was so striking (and beautifully translated) that we used it to lead off the anthology. As far as I know, this story that tells of the constant vigilance that a group of Tutsi schoolchildren learn to incorporate into their lives because of the constant threat of violence from Hutu soldiers was the first work by Mukasonga to appear in English. Then in 2014 Archipelago Books published Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile, translated by Melanie Mauthner, about Rwandan schoolgirls in a strongly Francophile Catholic boarding school catering to the daughters of country’s elite. The whimsical storytelling about the friendships and rivalries of these young girls reminded me a little of Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means. But the threat of ethnic violence hovers around the edges of Mukasonga’s novel, eventually erupting in the midst of the girlish idyll. In the world of her clear, matter-of-fact storytelling, these spheres that seem so far apart (girlish cliquishness, military violence) are shown to be intimately interlinked. The book received a fair bit of attention: it won the 2014 French Voices Award and was longlisted for the Best Translated Book Award and shortlisted for the prestigious International Dublin Literary Award.
Last year Archipelago published Mukasonga’s autobiographical work Cockroaches (translated by Jordan Stump), a memoir of life in Rwanda in the decades leading up the mass genocide of the Tutsi in 1994. This one is anything but an idyll: when Mukasonga is still a small child, her family is forced from their home and sent into exile in the inhospitable Bugasera district in the southeast, a wasteland of brush that the refugees clear so they can farm and survive. Eventually a makeshift life is cobbled together, even a school for the children, but always with the threat of violence from Hutu soldiers on patrol for whom these Tutsi refugees will only ever be the Inyenzi of the book’s title. Eventually Scholastique (as good in school as her name suggests) is chosen to go off on scholarship to study social work, setting her on the path that will eventually take her as far as France. It’s because she’s in France that she survives the 1994 genocide in Nyamata that takes the lives of 27 of her closest family members: her parents, sisters, brothers, nieces and nephews. The final part of the book chronicles her return to Rwanda a decade after the slaughter to find what traces remain. Most of the book, though, is devoted to the life her family leads in exile – the constant fear, the childish pleasures. Children walking to school learn what to do when soldiers arrive (dive headlong into the brush to hide) or when elephants appear on the path (walk always behind them, never in front, no matter how slowly they amble). Schoolgirls strategize how to get past military checkpoints. A long loving passage is devoted to the brewing of banana beer. Mukasonga’s storytelling is always clear and sharp. I’ve read her in three different translations now, and in all of them I hear her voice clearly. Here’s the story (from Cockroaches) of a child who, having just made the acquaintance of powdered milk, is presented with a new food as well:
Then there were the tomatoes. We were familiar with tomatoes, of course, but little ones, cherry-sized, used for making sauce and cooking bananas. The tomatoes they gave us were huge. We didn’t know what to do with them. My parents refused to eat them raw. But since there was nothing else, they forced them on the children. I wept as I ate my first tomatoes.
These tomatoes in all their alienating hugeness are emblematic of the exile’s fractured and fracturing experience. This passage is also a good example of Mukasonga’s use of short sentences to nail down an experience from several angles – well-captured here in Jordan Stump’s English that ends the paragraph on a powerful note. What I love so much about Mukasonga’s writing is how she manages to interweave the political and the personal so skillfully and to such powerful effect. Everything I’ve read by her so far has been gorgeously written and incredibly moving. I hope we’ll have more books by her in English soon.
QUOTED: "a thoughtful, sobering firsthand account of the refugee experience, a story that speaks to readers far beyond the African highlands."
COCKROACHES
by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Jordan Stump
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KIRKUS REVIEW
A child’s view of one of history’s most chilling instances of genocide.
Born in 1956 in southwestern Rwanda, Mukasonga (Our Lady of the Nile, 2014, etc.) has lived in France for most of her life, working as a social worker while writing memoirs, novels, and short stories. “I wasn’t only Tutsi,” she recalls of the ethnic turmoil that made her a refugee, “I was an Inyenzi, one of those cockroaches they’d expelled from the livable part of Rwanda, and perhaps from the human race.” Such people, she writes later, were “fit only to be crushed like cockroaches, with one stomp. But they preferred to watch us die slowly.” The “they” in question are not just the Hutus who attacked their Tutsi neighbors, but also neighboring nations, aid workers, diplomats, and others who stood by and did nothing. It may surprise readers to learn that Mukasonga is not writing of the later, infamous Rwandan genocide of the 1990s but instead of the post-colonial power struggle that precipitated it; the ingredients were the same, with long-lingering resentment over the Tutsis’ relative privileges in a stratified society. Her point of view, however, is more personal and less synoptic; she protests that her father “was not an aristocrat with vast herds of cows,” but because he could read and write and was an accountant, to say nothing of his ethnicity, he presented a target. As her story unfolds, we learn that 37 of her family members died, along with perhaps 1 million of her fellow Tutsis. It is a harrowing tale that is only the beginning of a larger story of murder and division. As she writes toward the end, Rwanda, a place of stunning beauty, “is also the land of tears, and the roads we travel take us on a long journey through horror and grief.”
A thoughtful, sobering firsthand account of the refugee experience, a story that speaks to readers far beyond the African highlands.
Pub Date: Oct. 4th, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-914671-53-4
Page count: 168pp
Publisher: Archipelago
Review Posted Online: Aug. 21st, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1st, 2016
QUOTED: "Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir of waiting for the genocide to begin takes its title from the word that the Hutus—Rwanda’s dominant tribe—called the Tutsis: cockroaches."
Review: Scholastique Mukasonga’s “Cockroaches”
by Charles R. Larson
Your awareness of the genocide in Rwanda, in 1994, may initially have been shaped as much as mine by the movie Hotel Rwanda (2004). At a preview for the movie in Washington, D.C., Terry George, the director, said that the genocide could have been put down by force as small as the D.C. Police Department. Most victims were killed not by sophisticated guns or other equipment but by machetes. Years later, Bill Clinton admitted that Rwanda’s genocide against the Tutsis was one of the worst moments of his presidency, meaning his hesitancy to do anything. I’d point more directly at Susan Rice who was then undersecretary of State for African affairs. One can go even further and argue that the genocide in Rwanda made it easier for similar acts in other countries. Genocide has become a growth industry; the shouts of “never more” are as empty as they have ever been.
Scholastique Mukasonga’s memoir of waiting for the genocide to begin takes its title from the word that the Hutus—Rwanda’s dominant tribe—called the Tutsis: cockroaches. I said “waiting for the genocide” because it was obvious to the Tutsis that once Rwanda was independent, in 1961, that it would only be a matter of time until the pogrom would begin. It actually took more than thirty years, and during that time Mukasonga’s family and thousands of others were forced to live in ghetto-like areas, designated for them and set off from major cities like Kigali. Nyamata was the area chosen for her family.
Racial tensions burst forth in 1973, by which time Mukasonga, born in 1956, had proven herself a scholar. She had excelled in school and became one of the token Tutsis the government supported in elite schools. However, the cockroachesdiscrimination against her was horrendous. She fled the school and the country, into Burundi, observing, “I lived like a rat.” A little like the gruesome decision a mother makes in Sophie’s Choice, Mukasonga’s parents decided that she and an older brother, André, would both flee the country. “We’d been chosen to survive.” Imagine having to make such a decision for two of your children. The assumption was that if they all tried to flee to Burundi, they’d be apprehended. Think of the guilt for both children. The large-scale genocide didn’t begin until 1994, by which time Mukasonga had completed a degree in social work (begun in Rwanda), been hired to work for the UNICEF, and married a Frenchman named Claude, whom she met in Burundi. Eventually, the two of them, moved to France.
This is one of her initial observations about what unfolded: “Yes, we were prepared to face death, but not a death that was forced on us. We were Inyenzi, fit only to be crushed like cockroaches, with one stomp. But they preferred to watch us die slowly. They drew out the death throes with unspeakable tortures, purely for their own pleasure. They liked to cut up their victims while they were still living, they liked to disembowel the women and rip out their fetuses. And that pleasure I cannot forgive. It will be with me forever, like a vile heartless laugh.” In her own family, besides both parents, thirty-five others (her siblings, their spouses and their children) were all murdered. The total within the country was a million. ”Of the sixty thousand Tutsis recorded in the municipality of Nyamata in January 1994, there remain only five thousand survivors—5,348 to be precise.”
Scholastique and her brother (who was living in West Africa) were two of the lucky ones, and returning to Nyamata ten years after the genocide offered little comfort. Obviously, the murderers of her family were everywhere. How do you face them, move on to the rest of your life? Part of the answer to that question does not come in Mukasonga’s book but from what we know about Paul Kagame, who ended the genocide, liberated the country and has continued to serve as Rwanda’s president ever since the end of the war. If you’ve kept up with Kagame, you know that he has brought stability to the country, even turned it into one of the continent’s economic success stories. His critics argue that he has done so by being ruthless against his would-be opponents. Trade-offs often involve such terrible decisions.
Reading Cockroaches, it’s easy to conclude that Kagame did what he believes he needed to do. In too many troubled spots in Africa, when racial tensions are put down, they simply go underground, waiting to raise their ugly heads again. As for Scholastique Mukasonga herself? She’s a fabulous writer, the author of highly praised novels and her memoir, Cockroaches, published ten years ago in France. She’s been the runner-up for major international literary awards. Her talented translator, Jordan Stump, needs to get started on translating her other works.
QUOTED: "Although Our Lady of the Nile is not without its flaws—certain characters are too schematic, and dialogue and exposition are occasionally clumsy–we should nevertheless welcome the opportunity to read Mukasonga’s work in English."
"Genocide is incomprehensible, but not because it occurs in Africa. The West has indeed too often dismissed suffering in Africa, but books like Our Lady of the Nile remind us why we must not be dismissive, why we must not look away."
Scholastique Mukasonga’s
Our Lady of the Nile
September 23, 2014
by Madeleine LaRue
Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga trans. Melanie Mauthner (Archipelago Books, Sept. 2014) Reviewed by Madeleine LaRue
Our Lady of the Nile
by Scholastique Mukasonga
trans. Melanie Mauthner
(Archipelago Books, Sept. 2014)
Reviewed by Madeleine LaRue
They say that “God roams the world, all day long, but every evening He returns home to Rwanda,” where He makes his way to His chosen house, the lycée of Our Lady of the Nile. Here, at the source of the great river, Rwanda’s young female elite are groomed to be the wives of ministers, ambassadors, and businessmen. “There is no better lycée,” assert the teachers, “nor is there any higher.” At twenty-five hundred meters above the town of Nyaminombe, the lycée is high enough to make the Mother Superior whisper, “We’re so close to heaven.”
Our Lady of the Nile is the fourth book by the Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga, and her first to be translated into English. Set in an exclusive girls’ boarding school in the 1970s, this novel that begins with a celebration of height—and all the nobility and purity that implies—starts its descent immediately. In a humorous aside, the geography teacher points out that the lycée is, in fact, only two thousand four hundred ninety-three meters high. No one takes any notice, but the saintliness and perfection of the school have already been undermined, and does not cease from this point on to erode.
The lycée is a microcosm for the country that at the time was, like its students, relatively young. Rwanda had gained its independence in 1961, though the government and the church continued to maintain strong ties to the country’s former colonial rulers, Belgium and, to a lesser extent, Germany. Consequently, at the lycée Our Lady of the Nile, most of the teachers are Belgian nuns and priests. French is the only language permitted on campus, though most students speak Kinyarwanda at home. The students themselves belong to one of Rwanda’s two main ethnic groups, the Hutu and the Tutsi. Tensions between these groups had been exacerbated by colonial governors under the sway of eugenics; at the time of Our Lady of the Nile, the Hutu (the “majority people”) are in power, while the Tutsi’s participation in public life is limited by strict quotas. At the lycée, the quota is two Tutsi for twenty pupils.
Against this complex background, Mukasonga’s novel works as both a collective coming-of-age story and a prelude to genocide. Through a series of vignettes focusing on individual characters or events, Our Lady of the Nile gradually exposes the fault lines that will, in the end, tear both the lycée and the country apart. Within these fault lines is a sort of competition, a contest for survival between different ways of being—European and African, Hutu and Tutsi. The competition is deadly for most, but Mukasonga does not strand us in tragedy. She works hard to trace out an authentic, if fragile, means of survival for her protagonists, refusing to succumb, in the end, to total despair.
Mukasonga writes in French, the language of her country’s colonizers; moreover, to French readers, the original title of her novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, immediately calls to mind that pillar of French literature, Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (better known in English as The Hunchback of Notre Dame). With this nod to Hugo, Mukasonga positions herself as an heir to European literature, and encourages us to consider the parallels between her novel and her predecessor’s, and their shared intention to display the danger of demonizing the least powerful among us. But Mukasonga is a Rwandan writer, and she puts the French language to new purposes in order to describe Rwandan realities: Our Lady of the Nile, even in Melanie Mauthner’s English translation, is frequently interspersed with Kinyarwanda words. This strategy of “interrupting” a colonial language has been popular with other postcolonial authors as well; it disrupts the hegemony of the imposed language and carves out a new, hybrid literary space. (In English, Mauthner’s choice to leave the words “lycée” and “lycéenne” untranslated compounds this hybridity and adds another layer of “foreignness” to the text.)
This linguistic hybridity is a counterpart to Our Lady of the Nile’s thematic negotiation between two rationalities: the European/Christian and the Rwandan/pagan. The European rationality, in general, does not have much to recommend it. Represented by such characters as Father Herménégilde, a priest who sexually abuses his students, and Monsieur de Fontenaille, a recluse obsessed with the Tutsi and their ancient goddesses, European ways of thought seem out of touch with reality at best, sinister and insane at worst. And yet the girls of the lycée have accepted several markers of European identity, introducing themselves with sentences like, “My name is Virginia, my real name is Mutamuriza.” Adopting European names, European languages, and a European religion does not seem to cause them any great distress, but neither does it fully determine their world view. Just as Kinyarwanda words pervade the text, so do Rwandan rain goddesses and prophetic dreams fill the girls’ world alongside communion and confession. Throughout the book, several girls visit “witch doctors” to solicit spells, at times only to secure a boyfriend’s loyalty or a future baby’s gender, at other times for much higher stakes.
Rwandan culture is no more uniform nor free of internal conflict than European culture. This heterogeneity of pre-colonial Rwandan identity is evident throughout the book: the girls all smuggle Rwandan food from home at the beginning of term (“They make them eat nothing but white people’s food at the lycée,” their mothers lament) and meet secretly during the night to eat together and compare recipes from home. They argue for three pages over the proper way to cook bananas, lovingly describing the ingredients, the preparation, the final sweet or savory taste. When Virginia, a Tutsi, asserts that bananas are best eaten grilled out in the fields, a militant Hutu called Gloriosa snaps, “So what did you come to the lycée for? You should have stayed in the sticks munching bananas in the fields. You would have made room for a real Rwandan from the majority people.”
Even in the school perched so close to heaven, politics is never distant, and the conflict between Hutu and Tutsi increasingly dominates the events of the novel. Gloriosa, the cruelest and most fervent of the Hutu girls, bullies the two Tutsi in her class, Virginia and Veronica, and even takes it upon herself to vandalize the statue of Our Lady of the Nile (representing a black Virgin Mary, located near the source of the Nile, some distance from the school grounds). Gloriosa decides that statue bears “a Tutsi nose,” and sneaks out one night, hoping to remove the nose and replace it with a new, “majority nose” that she has molded herself. In her fervor, however, she accidentally shatters the entire head of the Virgin, and has to invent a story about Tutsi-affiliated bandits to cover her tracks. The story fuels hostility toward the Tutsi at the lycée and in the rest of the country as well: the power of Gloriosa’s like-minded Hutu extremists grows daily.
Gloriosa is the novel’s villain: she is empty inside, made of nothing but her hatred for the Tutsi. If as a character she seems less complex, less interesting than her fellow students, this is likely intentional. Manic self-righteousness and bigotry hollow out the soul; real evil, as Simone Weil wrote, is “gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring.” Gloriosa is an incarnation of real, historical evil, and we cannot hold it against Scholastique Mukasonga if she chooses not to beg sympathy for the devil. Fortunately, Gloriosa is not the only representative of the Hutu in the lycée. There is also Modesta, an intelligent but meek girl with a Hutu father and a Tutsi mother. Fearing for her safety in an increasingly anti-Tutsi environment, Modesta aligns herself with Gloriosa, who frequently threatens to abandon her. “You know I’m your friend,” Modesta protests. “Better for you, then, that you always stay my friend,” Gloriosa laughs. The only Hutu who truly stands up to Gloriosa is Immaculée, a confident rebel who, to everyone’s astonishment, leads an expedition into the jungle to visit the gorillas. Immaculée becomes one of the most thoughtful characters in the novel, and perhaps the only one to critique the entire system represented by the lycée: “I no longer want to be a part of this marketplace,” she declares, rejecting the fate ordained for her by Our Lady of the Nile, to be married off to a rich and influential man. Gloriosa teases her for talking “like a white girl in the movies” and suggests she go back to the gorillas, away from civilization. “Ah, good advice,” says Immaculée. “Perhaps I will.”
But Mukasonga’s true protagonists are the Tutsi girls, Veronica and Virginia. Both are courted by the reclusive Monsieur de Fontenaille, an artist who believes that the Tutsi are descended from the ancient Egyptians and therefore worthy of worship. Fontenaille spends his days making drawings, photographs, and sculptures of ancient Egyptian goddesses; he persuades the girls to model for him, claiming that “Even if the Tutsi were to disappear, I am the custodian of their legend.” (His phenomenal arrogance is shrugged off by the girls as further evidence of white “craziness.”) Fontenaille is particularly interested in Virginia, claiming that she is the reincarnation of “Candace,” a “Queen of the Nile.” Though Virginia, like her friend, thinks that Fontenaille is deranged, she ends up becoming intimately involved in his projects. When Fontenaille disturbs the bones of one of these ancient Candace queens on one of his amateur archaeology expeditions, Virginia goes to a Rwandan witch doctor to learn how to put the queen’s spirit to rest. As a result, she is visited by the queen in a dream and marked as her favorite in the world of the living. It is this queen, a symbol of the vitality of the pre-colonial Rwandan ways of life, who ultimately leads Virginia to the person who will save her from the Tutsi massacre.
When the violence finally erupts, Virginia is the only Tutsi to escape. She survives physically thanks to two unexpected protectors, one spiritual and one worldly, but she survives mentally because she, more than any other character in the book, has managed to forge a genuinely hybrid identity for herself. Rooted in a Rwandan spiritual tradition, she has also succeeded in the European sphere. She flees the bloodshed armed not only with an education, but with a sense of self strong enough to protect her in what we know will be difficult years to come. In this respect, Virginia is something of Mukasonga’s alter ego: Mukasonga was also a Tutsi girl who was chased out of her school in the 1970s. She was able to escape to Burundi, but twenty-six members of her family, including her mother, were killed. She has written that she sees her work as a project of remembrance; Our Lady of the Nile, she says, is a “tomb of paper” for her lost family.
Although Our Lady of the Nile is not without its flaws—certain characters are too schematic, and dialogue and exposition are occasionally clumsy—we should nevertheless welcome the opportunity to read Mukasonga’s work in English. African francophone literature, and particularly that written by women, continues to be underrepresented in English, and as a result, we are not only missing out on compelling stories, but on an important political project. Scholastique Mukasonga, and likely many of her colleagues whom we have yet to translate, is working to correct the frustratingly persistent Western narratives about Africa and its history. “When the killers fall upon us,” Veronica says in Our Lady of the Nile, “some will say: it’s always been like that in Africa, savages killing each other for reasons no one understands.”
Genocide is incomprehensible, but not because it occurs in Africa. The West has indeed too often dismissed suffering in Africa, but books like Our Lady of the Nile remind us why we must not be dismissive, why we must not look away. “God roams the world, all day long, but every evening He returns home to Rwanda,” Immaculée says to Virginia in the novel’s final pages. “Well, while God was traveling, Death took his place, and when He returned, She slammed the door in his face.” With Our Lady of the Nile, Mukasonga pries the door open again, and asks us to look inside.
Madeleine LaRue is Associate Editor and Director of Publicity of Music & Literature. Her criticism has appeared in The Quarterly Conversation, Asymptote, and Tweed’s. She lives in Berlin.
QUOTED: "Without falling into pathos or excessive sentimentality, Mukasonga makes palpable the complex social fabric that was already beginning to crack and which the genocide would completely tear apart."
Coming of Age in the Shadow of Genocide: Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile
George S. MacLeod
Translated from the French by Melanie Mauthner. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2014. 244 pages. $18.00.
(Click on cover image to purchase)
Archipelago Press’s publication of Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel Our Lady of the Nile (in French Notre Dame du Nil; English translation by Melanie Mauthner) marks only the second time that a Rwandan novelist has been translated into English. Mukasonga is one of a small group of Rwandans—along with Gilbert Gatore, whose The Past Ahead appeared in English in 2012, Benjamin Sehene, and Vénuste Kayimahe—who have produced fiction that references the 1994 Tutsi genocide, as opposed to the dozens of first-person testimonial accounts that have emerged in the last twenty years. Our Lady of the Nile, Mukasonga’s first full-length novel, was awarded the 2012 Prix Renaudot, one of France’s most prestigious literary prizes, making her arguably the most high-profile Rwandan writer in France and the first to achieve substantial recognition from both the French literary establishment and the mainstream press. Set in 1970s Rwanda in an elite all-girls boarding school, her novel portrays how the anti-Tutsi hate speech of the time infiltrates the life of the school, poisoning the relationships between Hutu and Tutsi classmates, and finally erupting into the kind of anti-Tutsi massacres that would engulf Rwanda completely during the 1994 genocide.
Born in 1956 in Gikongoro, Rwanda, Mukasonga lived through decades of state violence against the Tutsis, which she recounts in her memoir Inyenzi ou les Cafards (“Inyenzi or the Cockroaches”—Inyenzi is a pejorative term for the Tutsi). She emigrated to France in 1992, two years before the genocide in which Hutus murdered twenty-seven members of her family, including her parents. Thus while she is not an eyewitness to the genocide herself, her works—which include memoirs and several short story collections—give frank and devastating accounts of the hate speech and massacres that laid the groundwork for the mass violence of 1994.
The title Our Lady of the Nile refers both to the Catholic girls’ boarding school where the novel is set and to a statue of the Virgin Mary associated with the school. There is also a darker connotation, however, as this phrase references the myth that Rwanda’s Tutsis were invaders from Egypt who had enslaved the Hutu—the supposedly “real” Rwandans—hundreds of years prior. During the genocide, Hutu politicians would exhort Rwandans to send the Tutsi back up the Nile where they had come from. This origin story was false. What had once been social categories—Hutu were those who tilled the land, while Tutsi were cattle-owners—were reified by the Belgian colonists into racial categories, complete with this myth of Tutsi feudal domination. When Rwanda became independent in the 1950s, Hutu politicians continued to use this myth to consolidate power and justify brutal anti-Tutsi repression. The 1994 genocide—in which 800,000 to 1,000,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu were murdered—was thus not a spontaneous manifestation of centuries of interethnic conflict, as it is erroneously and often portrayed, but rather the culmination of decades of politically sponsored othering and violence.
In 1970s Rwanda, where Mukasonga’s novel is set, this climate of impending violence was rapidly becoming a fact of life. The school Our Lady of the Nile, based on Mukasonga’s alma mater the real-life Notre Dame des Citeaux, serves as a microcosm of Rwanda, and the novel follows the lives of girls from a range of geographic and demographic backgrounds. There is Gloriosa, daughter of the hardline Hutu president; Modesta, who is of mixed Hutu and Tutsi parentage; Immaculée, a Hutu who befriends her Tutsi classmates; and finally Veronica and Virginia, two Tutsi girls, who are the closest the novel comes to main characters.
An atmosphere of anti-Tutsi menace pervades the book, led by the power-hungry Gloriosa, who parrots her father the president’s racially based fear-mongering rhetoric and eventually organizes the beatings and executions of some of her classmates as the French and Belgian teachers stand idly by: “My father says we must repeat, again and again, that the Inyenzi are still there, that they’re almost ready to return, that some do still get out and are among us, that the Tutsi who stayed behind eagerly await them. . . . My father says never forget to frighten people.” Complicit in this is the Belgian priest Father Herménégilde, who, in a reference to the Belgian priests who facilitated the Hutu rise to power, delivers sermons that rail against the Tutsi as foreign invaders and feudal oppressors of the Hutu.
What makes Mukasonga’s novel so effective is her ability to show how daily life continues alongside the omnipresent rhetoric of racial hatred and the threat of imminent violence. Much of the book consists of vignettes that mirror Western coming-of-age narratives. Veronica sneaks around with a boyfriend on a big motorcycle and asks a witch doctor for a potion to guarantee his fidelity. The girls swap stories about getting their first periods. Body image is a constant source of stress, and students use skin-whitening creams to try to look like the European musicians and film stars they idolize. There are schoolgirl crushes on a French math teacher with long hair. In one especially touching scene, four girls of various backgrounds discuss their favorite banana recipes, elaborate banana preparations being an important national dish. In these moments of fellowship, Mukasonga shows how the racial discord fades into the background, further underscoring that the Tutsi/Hutu divide was a politically manufactured conflict. This emphasis on friendship and community works to counter homogenizing portraits of Rwanda in Western media and film, showing the distinctive aspects of Rwandan society that are generally subsumed by the media’s voyeuristic and sensationalist coverage of death and bloodshed, which is so often devoid of substantive historical or cultural context.
Mukasonga also has a deft comic sensibility and at times the novel resembles a comedy of manners. In one of the most enjoyable moments, the glamorous Belgian Queen Fabiola makes a state visit to Our Lady of the Nile. The sycophantic, simpering Belgian priest Father Herménégilde is oblivious to the queen’s barely concealed indifference, as are the girls, for whom this brief visit is the highlight of the year. Mukasonga’s wry descriptions have a Jane Austen touch: “Fabiola lingered a few extra minutes in Sister Lydwine’s class, as planned, allowed the teacher to ask her three questions, then, satisfied with the answers, asked the pupils what they wanted to be: nurses? social workers? midwives? To avoid disappointing her, the girls she had questioned chose, somewhat randomly, one of the three suggested professions.”
These comic moments are short-lived, however. The climax of the novel occurs when the president’s daughter, Gloriosa, falsely claims to have been raped by a gang of marauding Tutsi. An innocent Tutsi shopkeeper is wrongly imprisoned and Gloriosa all but takes over the school, bringing in youth militias to savagely beat and to terrorize her classmates.
Amidst the violence exist moments of selflessness and grace. Immaculée, a Hutu, saves Virginia, a Tutsi, from the youth militias. While thanking her friend, Virginia expresses disgust with what her home country has become: “I no longer want to stay in this country. Rwanda is the land of Death. You remember what they used to tell us in catechism: God roams the world, all day long, but every evening He returns home to Rwanda. Well, while God was travelling, Death took his place, and when He returned, She slammed the door in his face. Death established her reign over our poor Rwanda.” This scene takes place twenty years before the genocide, and the reader begins to understand how the seeds of violence had been planted many years beforehand.
As a novel, Mukasonga’s work is not flawless. Her characters rarely transcend their status as archetypes of their particular racial background or social status. The description of high school girls’ lives—schoolgirl crushes, obsessions with body image—often borders uncomfortably on caricature. The novel’s structure is at times meandering, reading more like a series of short stories than a fully plotted novel. Nonetheless, taken as a whole, Our Lady of the Nile is a powerful and important attempt to give non-Rwandan readers insight into Rwandan culture. Indeed, it is important to note that for a variety of economic and cultural reasons, reading fiction—in both European and African languages—is not a common practice amongst the vast majority of Africans. Mukasonga is thus writing almost exclusively for a European, French-speaking audience; in other words, those who have both the habit of reading fiction and the means to purchase her book (the prohibitive cost of books being a major reason for low readership in Africa). It is unlikely any Rwandans, beyond a limited circle of expatriates and highly educated cultural elites, will have read her works. What Mauthner’s translation offers the Anglophone reader is thus not a glimpse into any particular indigenous Rwandan literary tradition. It is in many respects a retranslation of what was already an act of cultural translation—Mukasonga’s attempt to make comprehensible her experience of Rwandan history and culture to the Westerners who constitute her readership.
While Mauthner’s style is for the most part rigorously faithful to the original, some important subtleties of Mukasonga’s French are lost. Mukasonga’s style is characterized by short, clipped sentences. This brevity, as she explores such fraught explosive subject matter as violence and grief, contributes to the atmosphere of tension and menace. There is something chilling about her stoical restraint. While Mauthner respects this direct, unadorned style when translating scenes of graphic violence, elsewhere she frequently combines sentences that were distinct in the original, erasing the subtle ways in which Mukasonga inscribes questions of exclusion and latent political violence in her prose. To give just one example, a literal translation from a passage in the original French would read, “For Virginia, sugar had a horrible, bitter taste. Sugar was rare in the hills” (46-47) [translation mine].[1] Mauthner’s translation reads: “Sugar, a rare commodity in the hills, tasted horribly bitter to Virginia” (39-40). The passive voice of “Sugar was rare in the hills” in the original French suggests the coded language needed to publicly express the discriminatory policies of the Hutu government that kept Tutsi families such as Virginia’s marginalized and in poverty, hence the scarcity of certain commodities. The passive voice reflects the passive posture that Tutsi were expected to adopt despite their many material privations. Such subtlety, a hallmark of Mukasonga’s style, is elided in Mauthner’s translation.
What Mauthner’s translation does capture quite admirably is the slow slide toward violence that characterized Rwanda in the decades leading up to 1994. The genocide, Mukasonga shows again and again, was not an isolated incident but the result of almost a century of colonial misrule and postcolonial political greed that begot state-sanctioned violence. While the book’s political and historical message at times comes at the expense of plot structure or character development, Our Lady of the Nile is far from a heavy-handed roman à clef. The social life of the boarding school is vividly constructed, and the reader is drawn into the daily concerns of the girls as they navigate the social minefield that is high school. Without falling into pathos or excessive sentimentality, Mukasonga makes palpable the complex social fabric that was already beginning to crack and which the genocide would completely tear apart. Her novel is a portrait of the slow, excruciating build-up toward violence and Rwandans’ attempts to lead full, meaningful lives while contending with state-sponsored exclusion. It is both a glimpse into the particular history of Rwanda and a warning about ignoring the latent signs of violence and exclusion that are present today around the globe. Implicit in her novel are many pressing questions. What crises that will erupt in the coming decade will seem so painfully predictable in hindsight? And what, if anything, is her Western readership willing to do to prevent them?
QUOTED: "This is an astonishing book: Mukasonga’s style is so light, so charming, and yet her story could not be more sombre, more chastening, if it tried."
Schoolgirls’ chronicle of a massacre foretold
Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel about life at a Rwandan girls’ school before the genocide is charming but chastening
FRANCE-RWANDA-CULTURE-LITERATURE-PRIZE-RENAUDOT
Scholastique Mukasonga: ‘astonishing’. Photograph: Patrick Kovarik/AFP/Getty Images
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Rachel Cooke
@msrachelcooke
Monday 19 October 2015 11.00 BST
Last modified on Tuesday 2 May 2017 19.23 BST
I hardly ever read novels in translation, but when Archipelago Books – a not-for-profit literary press that publishes international writing in beautiful, rather old-fashioned looking editions – sent me Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile, translated by Melanie Mauthner, something about it called to me. Not least its irresistible opening lines, which go like this: “There is no better lycée than Our Lady of the Nile. Nor is there any higher. Twenty-five hundred metres, the white teachers proudly proclaim.” Though there were at least a dozen other things I should have been reading at the time, I had no choice but to give myself up to it.
Mukasonga is a Rwandan who lives in France, a country to which she emigrated in 1992, two years before the genocide that killed 27 members of her family. Our Lady of the Nile, which is her first novel, was published there in 2012, and has since won several prizes. And no wonder. Set during Hutu rule in an all-girls school that stands at the top of a hill near the source of the Nile, it works on two levels. First of all, it is a school story, replete with all the usual competition, envy and exaggeration that comes of teenagers living together. But it also portrays in microcosm the monstrous bigotry that led to the massacres of 1994. At Our Lady of the Nile, Tutsi students are limited by quota to 10% of the school population. Gloriosa, its most villainous pupil, is no mere bully. She implements her very own programme of racial hatred, destroying a statue of the Virgin she believes to have a Tutsi nose, pretending to have been raped by Tutsi bandits, and eventually… Well, I’d better not say more. All you need to know is that this is an astonishing book: Mukasonga’s style is so light, so charming, and yet her story could not be more sombre, more chastening, if it tried.