IGIFU...five out of five stars. No notes.

IGIFU
SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA (tr. Jordan Stump)
Archipelago Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. From the National Book Award finalist who Zadie Smith says, "rescues a million souls from the collective noun genocide."

Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba's mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival.

Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I don't have much to say except the banners and the stupidifiers are right: Reading is very dangerous, ideas are existentially threatening. To "Them." Good, says I.

Igifu, the personification of hunger. The viciousness of it. The endlessness of it. The demands of the body...unmet...the demands of the child, unmeetable...the demands of the future, just not your future, that you must meet. 5*

The Glorious Cow here's the way it sounds:

If we met any girls bringing the water home from Lake Cyohoha, my father would grumble: "That’s what they’ve done to us. Have you seen those calabashes they’re carrying on their heads? Back home in Rwanda, those calabashes were our butter churns. No one would have dared fill them with water. Shame be upon us! And I know what your mother does, but it’s no good, not even Ruganzu Ndori’s water can replace the milk from our cows."

Never think your inability to release the past, to move forward, to leave the dead in their graves, will ever do a single shred of good in, for, or to the world, the family, or yourself. 5*

Fear sounds like this:

"In Nyamata," my mother used to say, "you must never forget: we’re Inyenzi, we’re cockroaches, snakes, vermin. Whenever you meet a soldier or a militiaman or a stranger, remember: he’s planning to kill you, and he knows he will, one day or another, him or someone else. And if not today, then soon, in fact he’s wondering why you’re still alive at all. But he’s not in a hurry. He knows you won’t get away."

I feel physically ill typing this. A mother addressing her daughter with these words. What the actual fuck happened to my country to make it possible for me to hear this in my head, only in Spanish? 5*

The Curse of Beauty continues the abusiveness of the Othering, the cruelty of the powerful. There's a curse in being found beautiful by those who see first your powerlessness, after that your face, and then stop looking at you at all but seeing only themselves as warped reflections of smallness magnified. 4*

Grief exists for this line alone: "They’re inside you. They only survive in you, and you only survive through them."

Keep alive until you're forced not to be; you're now a vessel for the vanished, the only vessel for some (too many) to exist, to have existed. Any survivor will understand that, feel its massive, invisible weight, know its unshareable spiky penetration into your core. 5*

#ReadingIsResistance