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Overview
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781939810793 |
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Publisher: | Steerforth Press |
Publication date: | 09/15/2020 |
Sold by: | Penguin Random House Publisher Services |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 160 |
File size: | 647 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Igifu
You were a displaced little girl like me, sent off to Nyamata for being a Tutsi, so you knew just as
I did the implacable enemy who lived deep inside us, the merciless overlord forever demanding a tribute
we couldn’t hope to scrape up, the implacable tormentor relentlessly gnawing at our bellies and dimming
our eyes, you know who I’m talking about: Igifu, Hunger, given to us at birth like a cruel guardian angel .
. . Igifu woke you long before the chattering birds announced the first light of dawn, he stretched out the
blazing afternoon hours, he stayed at your side on the mat to bedevil your sleep. He was the heartless
magician who conjured up lying mirages: the sight of a heap of steaming beans or a beautiful white ball
of manioc paste, the glorious smell of the sauce on a huge dish of bananas, the sound of roast corn
crackling over a charcoal fire, and then just when you were about to reach out for that mouthwatering
food it would all dissolve like the mist on the swamp, and then you heard Igifu cackling deep in your
stomach. Our parents—or rather our grandparents—knew how to keep Igifu quiet. Not that they were
gluttons: for a Rwandan there’s no greater sin. No, our parents had no fear of hunger because they had
milk to feed Igifu, and Igifu lapped it up in delight and kept still, sated by all the cows of Rwanda. But
our cows had been killed, and we’d been abandoned on the sterile soil of the Bugesera, Igifu’s kingdom,
and in my case Igifu led me to the gates of death. I don’t hate him for that. In fact I’m sorry those gates
didn’t open, sorry I was pulled away from death’s doorstep: the gates of death are so beautiful! All those
lights!
I must have been five or six years old. This was in Mayange, in one of those sad little huts they
forced the displaced people to live in. Papa had put up mud walls, carved out a field from the bush,
cleared the undergrowth, dug up the stumps. Mama was watching for the first rain to come so she could
plant seeds. Waiting for a faraway harvest to finally come, my parents worked in the sparse fields of the
few local inhabitants, the Bageseras. My mother set off before dawn with my youngest brother on her
back. He was lucky: mama fed him from her breast. I always wondered how that emaciated body of hers
could possibly make the milk that kept my brother full. As for Papa, when he wasn’t working in
somebody’s field he went to the community center in Nyamata, on the chance that he might get some rice
from the missionaries, which didn’t happen often, or earn a few coins for salt by writing a letter or filling
out a form for an illiterate policeman or local bigwig. My sister and I eagerly waited for them to come
home, hoping they’d bring a few sweet potatoes or a handful of rice or beans for our dinner, the one meal
of the day.
What People are Saying About This
Haunted though they are by the memory of the unspeakable atrocities visited on her family and her people, these stories by Scholastique Mukasonga breathe upon a vanished world and bring it to life in all its sparkling multifariousness.
— J.M. Coetzee
In sentences of great beauty and restraint, Mukasonga rescues a million souls from the collective noun 'genocide,' returning them to us as individual human beings, who lived, laughed, meddled in each other's affairs, worked, decorated their houses, raised children, told stories. An essential and powerful read.
— Zadie Smith
Scholastique Mukasonga's stories dart nimbly between fleeting fondness and blunt recrimination, mining recollections of a Rwanda fissured by an unconscionable and amoral scourge. In Igifu, we find the idyllic nestled alongside atrocity and tradition marred by dispossession. A dire warning and a captivating triumph.
— Justin Walls, 2020 Best Translated Book Award fiction jurist
What Scholastique Mukasonga accomplishes with this collection is nothing short of alchemy. There is scalpel-sharp precision melded with regenerative soulfulness at play here. Mukasonga is a genius and her work should be savoured again and again.
— Diriye Osman, author of Fairytales For Lost Children
A profound love of family and the Tutsi tradition infuses, suffuses, and animates Mukasonga's stories of the Rwandan genocide, the slaughter of her people. To mention "love" in the same sentence with "genocide" may appear odd, even indecent, but Mukasonga's brilliant writing encompasses the two. In Igifu, a meditation on hunger, Mukasonga's account of starvation startles and devastates; her language is both corporeal and metaphysical. "The Glorious Cow" tells of her father and his cows, his care for his beloved herd; it is revelatory. Mukasonga lived through unspeakable terror and loss, which is part of Igifu. But I believe she wants readers to know her mother, father, kin, and friends, as they were, to remember not just their massacre, but their wonderful humanity. Keeping their memory alive, keeping it vital, Mukasonga lives. This is an unforgettable book, told by an inimitable writer.
— Lynne Tillman, author of Men and Apparitions and American Genius, A Comedy