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

SISTER DEBORAH, latest fiction from literary treasure Scholastique Mukasonga...Rwanda's most treasured export/expat

SISTER DEBORAH
SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA (tr. Mark Polizzotti)
Archipelago Books
$19.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: When time-worn ancestral remedies fail to heal young Ikirezi’s maladies, she is rushed to the Rwandan hillsides. From her termite perch under the coral tree, health blooms under Sister Deborah’s hands. Women bare their breasts to the rising sun as men under thatched roofs stand, “stunned and impotent before this female fury.”

Now grown, Ikirezi unearths the truth of Sister Deborah’s passage from America to 1930s Rwanda, and the mystery surrounding her sudden departure. In colonial records, Sister Deborah is a “pathogen,” an “incident.” Who is the keeper of truth, Ikirezi impels us to ask, Who stands at the threshold of memory? Did we dance? Did she heal? Did we look to the sky with wonder? Ikirezi writes on, pulling Sister Deborah out from the archive, inscribing her with breath.

A beautiful novel that works in the slippages of history, Sister Deborah at its core is a story of what happens when women—black women and girls—seek the truth by any means.

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

My Review: Patriarchy putting words in women's mouths. Colonial masters defining reality for the colonized. Big-god-industry fans denigrating anyone they can't control. Nothing new here.

Until Author Scholastique got hold of the reins. Then this buggy got movin' fast (under 150pp) and furious (women under patriarchal colonialist control got some rage). The action is, unsurprisingly for émigré Mukasonga, split between a Rwandan émigré before and after immigation to the US, and an unusual American woman healer. Ikirezi, whose encounters with African-American missionary and faith healer (of a sort) change her inside and out, leaves the suddenly-too-small world she was born into under the influence of Sister Deborah's...unconventional...take on religion. The meditation practice, the acceptance of the Divine's presence in the beliefs and actions of (especially female) Rwandans, all make Sister Deborah no sister to The Authorities.

Ikirezi maintains a deep connection to Sister Deborah's teachings even as she consumes a Western education and takes on an academic view of this experience in her past. She decides to return to Rwanda to determine the fate of the much-maligned Sister Deborah.

We then hear from that lady directly, learning about her painful, blighted past in the lead-up to an immense awakening experience: The protestant Savior is, indeed, coming back to judge the quick and the dead.

And she's a Black African.

Cat, meet pigeons. Sister Deborah is a profoundly disturbed person, in my view, claiming that a divine avatar is speaking to her; there's meds for schizophrenia now, and she really needs 'em. The one reason I'm not eviscerating this book is that Author Scholastique doesn't take sides, she simply evokes the experience (most powerfully of baptism) that Sister Deborah undergoes as well as provides for the downtrodden women she ministers to. I'm not so constituted as to feel religious awe, nor do I have a clawing need for "community" among believers. In fact, the modern religion-equivalent called "fandom" is too much for me most of the time. The story, then, wastes its lovely magical-realist prose flights on me. They're nice and all, but no gooseflesh over here.

I offer four stars to a story I'm sympathetic to, but not much moved by, because like Kibogo, my guide is a deeply knowledgable person whose experiences allow her to communicate to me both a sense of consensus reality's view of the action, and the lived experience of people deeply Other to me. I'll never not appreciate, value, and celebrate that gift when I'm offered it.

It doesn't hurt that I find all of her writing I've read so far fully worth my eyeblinks.

FAREWELL 2022. I WELCOME A NEW YEAR WITH A 6-STARS-OF-FIVE REVIEW!

It's time to get my 2023 house in order. 2022 saw me pass out 77 4.5* or higher reviews of 393 total, or 19%. Quite a good year indeed. I think the most amazing part of my reading year was the consistently good quality of my non-fiction reading, from Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America and Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China's Crackdown Reveals about Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere through to Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism and High-Risk Homosexual. I read with a slack jaw and a wildly beating heart the beautifully unconventional Before All the World, not one single thing about that read has dimmed a notch in my memory's lantern. I became misty and sad and still uplifted when I read Natasha Pulley's gorgeously wrought The Kingdoms, alternate history that has the one and the only truthful and accurate to my own experience portrayal of non-consensual heterosexual sex where the woman is the rapist. It was stunning. It was freeing to read on a page that someone else knew. I am forever in her debt for this alone, and am always eager for more like 2022's The Half Life of Valery K. There's a peak reading year in those reads alone! HOWSOMEVER....

It's my annual six-stars-of-five read! Kibogo (my book review), a beautiful tale of colonial-era Catholicism meeting, battling, and suffering defeat at the hands of Kibogo, the Rwandan folk-religion's organizing spirit. It was a finalist for the National Book Award for Literature in Translation. It was the most unforgettable book I read in a year chock-a-block with wonderful reading. It explored the many ways colonialism tries to destroy the colonized, insidious personal invasions that are masked by pious mouthings and cold, cruel hearts crossdressing to seem unthreatening. And it still told a fine and exciting tale!

In 2022, I posted 370 reviews here, and 393 on my bookish social media sites. I don't think I can sustain such a pace at my time in life, but there's no sense setting meager goals is there. In 2023, my goals are:

To post 395 reviews of all sorts here

To post at least 120 Burgoines here and on my bookish social media sites of ARCs
      and/or DRCs from before 2022

To review at least 50% female or -presenting authors across genres

To post a review every day during #PrideMonth and #WomeninTranslationMonth

If I've learned nothing else in my *hack*ty-three years, it's to keep the goals from being the focus. It's the achievements I'm after, not the check-box ticking!

Happy 2023 to all my readers, and to your friends and your families and your companion animals (unless they're cats) and your delivery providers and...everyone we've ever met in our entire lives, to misquote Maureen Stapleton.

KIBOGO, latest treat from Scholastique Mukasonga AND A FINALIST for the National Book Award—Translated Literature!

KIBOGO
SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA (tr. Mark Polizzotti)
Archipelago Books
$12.99 ebook editions, available now

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION IN TRANSLATION FINALIST!

One of LitHub's 38 Favorite Books of 2022!

Rating: 6* of five It's my annual six-stars-of-five read!

The Publisher Says: In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity.

When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth.

Kibogo's story is reserved for the evening's end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge.

To some, Kibogo's tale is founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor's hoax. All debate the twisted roots of this story, but deep down, all secretly wonder--can Kibogo really summon the rain?

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

My Review: Come and sit down. Settle in for a winter afternoon's pleasure-reading of someone else's culture's stories. This novella-in-stories is, in under 150pp or about three hours'-worth of reading, going to tell you about Rwanda. Not the country that threw itself a genocide in 1994. The foreign colony undergoing coerced christianization, the colonizers whose need for men and food to fight a war on another continent was the only thing they saw, the people of Ruanda-Urundi whose bodies and souls were the raw material and the means of production but never just themselves. What happens when Nature decides to withhold her usual munificence and deny Mankind her fecundity is always very, very educational to the mass of the people.

What Kibogo does, then, is tell you the stories of the people. They're funny, they're poignant, they're sometimes befuddlingly different from our Global Northern expectations. But they are alive, they sing on the pages of this book, they make their world felt and heard and seen through Author Scholastique Mukasonga's careful, gentle, unsparingly honest eyes. Translator Mark Polizzotti comes in for a heap of praise as well. I could hear Author Scholastique speaking to me, and he is the reason I wasn't slugging through the book with La Petite Larousse ten centimeters from my elbow at all times.

Kibogo is a god, a divine creature whose rule over Ruanda's people is challenged by the Catholic priests. If you know anything about that religion, the focus of worship is what they start with changing...Jesus, not Kibogo...while syncretizing as much of the pre-christian myth structure and storytelling architecture as possible. In the event, who's the god isn't always clear...it comes down to the name one calls when one is in extremis...and that name can surprise even the caller.

The worst part of believing in a super-natural being, a creature above the natural world we must perforce inhabit, is that there is always, always a loose end to tuck in, a wrinkled page to smooth out and make readable. When a man works to make this his life's gift to the world, he neglects the woman whose gift the world is in: No birth happens without a man and a woman agreeing to make it happen. The issues for the Ruandan god's bride and the Catholic church's groom grow urgent. Both seek a spirit, see a world for what it has and can be made into; the world, meanwhile, just Is. How can this end except in tears? Watch and learn, people without belief.

Or just follow Author Scholastique as she, seeming as bemused as the rest of us, watches the borning Rwandan African attempts to put flesh on the hollow bones of ancestral skulls. It is here that I felt the sting of tears as, not free of sarcasm, Author Scholastique offers up the flesh of a bumbling, pompous Western world in sacrifice to the simple, bright, carnivorous land we all must share. The land is the only god worth worshiping because it is the only god we can touch and who responds to us, who feeds our families and accepts our worn-out remains for its eventual reuse, recycling what can not be reduced more than it is by the myriad eating mouths and excreting guts of Life.

This was a rare, perfect reading experience for me. It came exactly when I wanted and needed it. It answered some call I made, unknowing, as I looked for a reason for winter's cold and brilliance not to weigh me down. Thank you for it, Author Scholatique, Translator Polizzotti, and Archipelago Books via Edelweiss+. Gifts of this great value come when they're most needed.

COCKROACHES, a truly terrible tale told in perfect, sharp-edged sentences

COCKROACHES
SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGA (tr. Jordan Stump)
Archipelago Books
$16.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Imagine being born into a world where everything about you—the shape of your nose, the look of your hair, the place of your birth—designates you as an undesirable, an inferior, a menace, no better than a cockroach, something to be driven away and ultimately exterminated. Imagine being thousands of miles away while your family and friends are brutally and methodically slaughtered. Imagine being entrusted by your parents with the mission of leaving everything you know and finding some way to survive, in the name of your family and your people.

Scholastique Mukasonga's Cockroaches is the story of growing up a Tutsi in Hutu-dominated Rwanda—the story of a happy child, a loving family, all wiped out in the genocide of 1994. A vivid, bitterwsweet depiction of family life and bond in a time of immense hardship, it is also a story of incredible endurance, and the duty to remember that loss and those lost while somehow carrying on. Sweet, funny, wrenching, and deeply moving, Cockroaches is a window onto an unforgettable world of love, grief, and horror.

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

My Review: Each and every time you try to explain away hateful, horrible things someone you love says, you bring the fate of the ones they're spreading hate for a small step closer to Scholastique Mukasonga's family's fate. She is not dead because she was away at boarding school, by a lucky chance, when the Tutsi people she was born among were once again displaced by the Hutu.

The soldiers demanded that President Kayibanda’s portrait be hung in every house. The missionaries made sure the image of Mary was put up beside him. We lived our lives under the twin portraits of the President who’d vowed to exterminate us and Mary who was waiting for us in heaven.

The boarding school in Kigali, thank goodness, was close enough to Burundi that her Hutu classmates, who called her "inyenzi" (the cockroaches of the title), weren't successful in eliminating her after the school no longer taught Tutsi students in 1973. Her family, driven out of the place she was born during the 1959 pogrom by Hutu against Tutsi, made the horrible decision to save Scholastique and her also-educated brother André. Their time in Burundi led Scholastique to marry a French man in 1992. She was in France when the genocide occurred.

But, in all honesty, she makes it plain that the genocide was set in motion when the Belgians divided the Hutu majority from the Tutsi, and placed the taller, straighter-nosed Tutsi in power over the Hutu. The country's independence was always going to be a starting bell for a race war after that. Incidents; laws backing them up; and those "harmless" socially acceptable slurs made 1994 a slow-motion cataclysm.

The last chapter of this book is so painful to read that it took me a month to finish it.

What the hell, I hear the voices mutter as they click away, this is supposed to be the recommended-reading season on this blog! And it is. I recommend you read it as our neighbors, our families, even (perish forbid) our friends fall into the hateful, ignorant, yet addictive rage-mind that we're seeing "populist" authority figures promote around the world. We in the US are primed for it by the existence of vaccine refusers, Holocaust deniers, CRT scare-mongers, gay-baiters, and all the "socially conservative" religious liars and hate-mongers. Conservative my ass! They're radical right-wing dictatorship-building under decent (or at least not actively evil) people's very noses. They're gerrymadering something as close to permanent power as they can; packing the courts with their vile minions; and it won't take that long, well under forty years, for the Rwandan genocide to come true here, as well.

All I have of my loved ones' deaths are black holes and fragments of horror. What hurts the worst? Not knowing how they died or knowing how they were killed? The fear they felt, the cruelty they endured, sometimes it seems I now have to endure it in turn, flee it in turn. All I have left is the terrible guilt of living on amid so many dead. But what is my pain next to everything they suffered before their tormentors granted them the death that was their only escape?

Do not wait until it's too late. Buy and read this uncomfortable, disquieting tale of a country that lost its mind and then threw its soul away. We in the US should not be forced to endure this, when we still can head it off.

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 a 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.

I survived the AIDS years. I relate to what Author Mukasonga is telling us in this book with, perhaps because I am a survivor, a great deal of urgency. I do not want some young gay man's sister to write these words after the next Kyle Rittenhouse gets his jollification from opening fire on a group of gay protestors. I live in dread of the #BlackLivesMatter moms and dads writing these words for their sons, dead at the hands of murderous bigots.

Learn from the past. At long last, look. Learn. Do not allow the whole country to sleepwalk down the tracks to another Auschwitz.