Scholastique mukasonga biography of barack
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An old woman named Mukamwezi—a virgin bride turned widow after her husband, Kibogo, martyred himself to a lightning bolt so the people living on the hillside could have rain—lives in exile from her Rwandan community.
This is the gist of a salvation counternarrative secretly passed down by generations in Kibogo, the latest from French Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga. The story, considered blasphemous by the Belgian characters, is shared at night during the colonial era and kept underground until the Ruzagayura famine of the early 1940s, when the starving residents of a hillside seek a miracle that the village’s Christian priests can’t deliver.
On its own, Kibogo is powerful and playful, a book whose four parts contain four different versions of the same story, just like the Christian gospel. The renditions swell from quiet to bombastic with the ranging cadence of legend and scripture, seeded throughout with luminous poetic moments and copious Kinyarwanda vocabulary
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Notes on Craft
It was the 1994 genocide of the Tutsis that made me a writer.
Writing, being a writer, nothing like that was among my ambitions as a girl. I never dreamt of venturing onto the pathways of literature. Like my mother, inom was a good berättare. Rwandan culture is oral more than anything else. But the memory of a genocide can’t simply be carried by word of ingång. It requires another sort of telling: it needs to be written.
Writing offered itself as the surest way to preserve that memory but also the best therapy for someone who came through the genocide or lost loved ones to it. The danger, for a survivor, or for the bereaved such as I was, is hiding yourself away, walling yourself up in solitude. You go through life unable to speak, for fear the slightest word might bring back your pain, just as a skarp blade could reopen your wounds. Besides, who will listen to you? And even if someone does, who will understand you? You’re like those old veterans going on and on abo
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Your story in this week’s issue, “Cattle Praise Song,” begins with a long tribute to the central role that cows used to play in Tutsi culture in Rwanda. Was this a culture you experienced as a child?
No, I didn’t experience the era when the cow was at the peak of her glory in Rwanda, when she was a sign of wealth, prestige, and power. Because we were Tutsi, my family was deported to Nyamata, in 1960, when I was three. Of course, we lost all our cows at that point. So the inyambo cow is for me symbolic of the nostalgia for a life I didn’t know. During a recent stay in Rwanda, last September, I met and talked with some herders. Some still kept a few inyambo cows with their beautiful horns, for memory’s sake. But, to these elegant cows who produce a litre of milk, they preferred the Friesian cows that were given to them by the President, who produce twenty-five litres.
The story was published, in French, in 2010, but it takes place in three time periods much earlier than that.