Scholastique Mukasonga

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.… (more)

3.5 stars

This was such a difficult read, for me, on several levels. It’s taken me a week of thinking how I’d approach this and I still don’t know how to; fully expecting to flounder, and afraid that I may be wrong in certain ways.

It’s a story set in Rwanda in the 1970s, years before the 1994 genocide but clearly brings the environment of discrimination and othering of the Tutsi community there that culminated in the horrors that occurred. The histories of Rwanda and Burundi, the latter being where I was born, are too intertwined for this not to have been affecting in the way it was. I still don’t trust myself to give this book the review I think it deserves and may come back to this. I can’t imagine the amount of courage and openness it required to write this, especially as parts of this book did happen in the writer’s life, and in the kind of culture in these two countries where discretion and secrecy are valued to the degree they are. I wish I had enjoyed the story itself more, but still a brave piece of work.… (more)

This is a challenging work for an English-speaking Westerner not due to any innovation of form or use of language but because of how it submerses the reader in the context of Rwanda’s social, political, and geographical divisions as they played out in the 1970s without much in the way of direct explanations. Assuming one has just a fairly basic familiarity with Rwanda - colonization, Hutu/Tutsi divide, 1994 genocide - this creates, or at least it did in my case, a distancing effect, as unfamiliar Rwandan terms and references and history are encountered, yet by the end it seems to have rather cleverly all come together and produced a new level of understanding that, going back to the start of the book, finds one able to appreciate the earlier stories in a brighter light, knowing for instance how different characters serve as representations of different sectors of society - this one is Hutu Power politicians in the capital, this one is the northern military power base, this one represents the politically flexible financial elite, this one the historical responsibility of the Western powers for Rwanda’s ethnic divisions and that one those powers’ contemporary willful blindness, etc. (“‘We’re so close to heaven,’ whispers Mother Superior”, from the opening paragraph set at the high altitude school, has a far more sinister sound the second time of reading.)

That this is combined with the traditional coming-of-age school setting story quite successfully is a terrific achievement. Although I’ve been aware of the book’s existence for years, since its American publication in translation in 2014, it was only its shortlisting for the Republic of Consciousness 2022 prize after being published by a British small press that I got around to reading it, another reason to be glad I follow this prize.… (more)

(Read in French)

Bewitching collection of interlinked stories about the clash between tradition and modernity in colonial Rwanda. Mukasonga shows how colonialism can never be done “correctly”, no matter how you try to put a benevolent face on it. Christianity, even in its platitudes of universal love, becomes corrupted by racial hierarchy; the supposedly objective practice of scientific research becomes a conduit for the glory of academics, and turns the colonized society into a Petri dish for study. No matter what promises the colonizer makes, the system is built for their benefit, and cannot function any other way.

What makes this book more interesting is the way it portrays the colonized’s struggle for agency in a system that is designed to suck them dry - the whites that came to the area did bring with them advanced technology, education, agricultural techniques, etc. As a colonized person, is it better to fight against the colonizer, or do your best to take what you can from their system, rise in the ranks, and maybe make change from the top down? No matter how clearly this dream can be seen as the false hope that it is, it is still almost impossible not to be seduced by power, and be bought off to do power’s bidding.… (more)