28 Aug / Igifu by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Jordan Stump [in Shelf Awareness]
*STARRED REVIEW
A Rwandan exile living in France, Scholastique Mukasonga pulled from her extraordinary life to write two notable memoirs, Cockroaches and The Barefoot Woman (a 2019 National Book Award Translated Literature finalist). Autobiographical elements continue to haunt her exquisite collection, Igifu, through five wrenching stories. Born in 1956, Mukasonga had a tumultuous childhood marked by horrific anti-Tutsi violence that forced her family from their home village. The ongoing expulsions and persecutions culminated for Mukasonga during the 1994 genocide with the massacre of 27 family members. Two years earlier, Mukasonga had settled in France.
Her horrifying loss sparks the collection’s final – and most indelible –story, simply titled “Grief,” in which a Tutsi woman living in France learns of the personal implications of the Rwandan genocide. The piece presents an unnamed protagonist – because she could represent any survivor–who, unable to mourn the tragic magnitude from afar, travels to her home village, where she meets “the guardian of the dead” who reveals her family’s gruesome fate, yet somehow offers seeming comfort: “don’t let anyone try to tell you to get over your loss, not if that means saying goodbye to your dead. You can’t: they’ll never leave you, they stay by your side to give you the courage to live.”
Each of Mukasonga’s other stories expose raw moments of excruciating challenge. “Igifu” means “hunger,” a constant state of being for a girl and her family. Starvation nearly kills her, but she’s revived by middle-of-the-night kindness that comes almost too late. In “The Glorious Cow,” previously published as “Cattle Praise Song,” a young man recalls his pastoral childhood among a family of devoted caretakers to beloved cows, and their destruction when genocide sweeps through his homeland. That perpetual anticipation of slaughter drives “Fear,” a relentless reality that merely changes in degrees from “everyday” to “great fear.” In “The Curse of Beauty,” a Tutsi woman is punished her entire (short) life for being beautiful, by men who threaten, buy, abuse, discard, and eventually murder her.
Providing welcome continuity, French professor Jordan Stump translates the book, making Igifu the third of Mukasonga’s four English-language titles Stump has translated with graceful agility. Originally published in France in 2010, Igifu seems to serve as a bridge among Mukasonga’s oeuvre, moving from memoirs (debuting in 2006 and 2008 in France) to this short fiction, to her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile, initially published in 2012, in the U.S. in 2014. Despite the undeniable terror, Mukasonga’s storytelling proves illuminating and resilient.
Shelf Talker: National Book Award finalist Scholastique Mukasonga continues to plumb autobiographical elements from her extraordinary personal history in her haunting five-story collection.
Review: Shelf Awareness Pro, August 28, 2020
Readers: Adult
Published: 2010 (France), 2020 (United States)