Scholastique Mukasonga
1) Kibogo
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Description
"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. Kibogo's tale is at once an origin myth, a celestial marvel, and a source of hope. And for the white...
Author
Description
A moving, unforgettable tribute to a Tutsi woman who did everything to protect her children from the Rwandan genocide, by the daughter who refuses to let her family's story be forgottenThe Barefoot Woman is the story of the author's mother, a fierce, loving woman who for years protected her family from the violence encroaching upon them in pre-genocide Rwanda. Recording her memories of their life together in spare, wrenching prose, Mukasonga preserves...
3) Cockroaches
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Description
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...
4) Igifu
Author
Description
The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor.
Scholastique Mukasonga's five 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...
