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The Barefoot Woman, by Scholastique Mukasonga
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Review
"Radiant with love... The Barefoot Woman powerfully continues the tradition of women’s work it so lovingly recounts. In Mukasonga’s village, the women were in charge of the fire. They stoked it, kept it going all night, every night. In her work — six searing books and counting — she has become the keeper of the flame." — The New York Times"A profoundly affecting memoir of a mother lost to ethnic violence. . . A loving, urgent memorial to people now "deep in the jumble of some ossuary" who might otherwise be forgotten in time." — Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)"This is an important book written for a strong and loving woman." — BOOKish (A Must Read Fiction Selection)"Mukasonga is a master of subtle shifts in register — a skill inherited, perhaps, from the Rwandan traditions of intricate courtesy and assiduous privacy that Stefania maintained. She turns everything over restlessly: In her prose, poignant reminiscences sharpen into bitter ironies, or laments reveal flashes of comedy, determination, defiance." — The New York Times Book Review"The Barefoot Woman is simultaneously a powerful work of witness and memorial, a loving act of reconstruction, and an unflinching reckoning with the Rwandan Civil War. 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"A loving tribute to a strong mother and a striking work of memoir. . . Extraordinarily, this story is at times horrifying in its content and at other times playful; lyric in its style and tender in its handling of the central character. While the reader's knowledge of the genocide to come hangs over the narrative, the everyday events often retain a quotidian feeling; Stefania and her neighbors worry over their children but also laugh and celebrate and arrange marriages. As a literary work, this establishes a rare balance. Jordan Stump's translation from the French beautifully conveys this sense of both tragedy and day-to-day joy. . . This is an adoring, gorgeously rendered memorial to a mother and testimony to a people." --Julia Kastner, librarian and blogger at pagesofjulia, in Shelf Awareness"The Barefoot Woman is a gorgeous book, elegantly written in a way that almost lets you forget how much trauma is woven into every paragraph...a piercing book about the space between fear of death and death itself, and how traditions can sustain a community between those terrible moments. And after, if only in memory." – Mark Athitakis, On the Seawall"The Barefoot Woman is lyrical but also informative and ethnographic, as much a memoir of a mother as it is of her way of life. ... Mukasonga has done far more than remembering and recognizing the human beings she grew up with; she has immortalized them." — Helen Epstein, The Arts Fuse"The Barefoot Woman is a living-record document, the voice of culture, tradition, and hope as well as a representation of the history lived by a group of Tutsi during the Rwandan genocide. It is a great performance where language has the stage, where words are revered and carefully chosen." — World Literature Today "Thirty-seven members of award-winning novelist Mukasonga’s Tutsi family were killed by Hutus in the 1994 Rwandan genocide. She was the only survivor. Her new memoir focuses on her mother Stefania, whose primary emphasis was on saving her children from those who considered Tutsis “cockroaches”, coming up with survival strategies, hiding places, paths to safety. Mukasonga describes Stefania’s daily life in Rwanda, and in various lands of exile, hoe in hand, tilling the soil, sowing, weeding, harvesting in cycles of beans, corn, and sorghum. It’s a way of life now gone. The Barefoot Woman is a tribute born of the horror of her mother’s 'poor remains dissolved into the stench of the genocide’s monstrous mass grave', crafted by a daughter who hopes that her 'sentences weave a shroud for [her] missing body.' – Jane Ciabattari, BBC Culture "Ever clear and laudable...is Mukasonga’s consistent portrayal of her mother as a guardian of the family and of Rwandan lore and customs in the deadly wake of expulsion and exile." – Angela Ajayi, The (Minneapolis) Star Tribune"The fiercest of wars are fought by so many invisible heroes. The boldest of warriors will take on hell, descend into its depths, armed with a fiery love and set it differently alight. And even though this is a threnody, it is also a soaring story of grace, of faith, family, friendship, in-betweenness, and keeping just one nightmare away from the bogeyman; of Stefania who lived beyond boundaries, including those limits defined by those who would, and did, destroy a body, but never, oh no, not ever the dauntless soul of this, the most intrepid of mothers, a woman who drank fully of life, with a love that throbs through ever word in this epigrammatic book. A daughter’s lyrical tribute, The Barefoot Woman is a resonant revelation." — Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust
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About the Author
Born in Rwanda in 1956, Scholastique Mukasonga experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced to the polluted and under-developed Bugesera district of Rwanda. Mukasonga was later forced to flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, Mukasonga learned that 37 of her family members had been massacred. Her first novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, won the Ahmadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012, as well as the 2013 Océans France Ô prize, and the 2014 French Voices Award, and was shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary award. In 2017 memoir Cockroaches was a finalist for the LA Times Charles Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose. About the translator: Jordan Stump received the 2001 French-American Foundation's Translation Prize for his translation of Le Jardin des Plantes by Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon. In 2006, Stump was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has translated the work of Eric Chevillard, Marie Redonnet, Patrick Modiano, Honoré de Balzac, and Jules Verne, among others. He is a professor of French literature at the University of Nebraska.
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Product details
Paperback: 152 pages
Publisher: Archipelago (December 18, 2018)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1939810043
ISBN-13: 978-1939810045
Product Dimensions:
5.4 x 0.4 x 6.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.8 out of 5 stars
6 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#513,999 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
I thought this book would be all about war and killing and famine or the like. Yes, there's some mention of that, but this book is mostly about culture. The author describes life as a refugee. What was it like to grow up a Tutsi? What were the traditions in Rawanda? How was it in the settlements? What changed? I would not think of this as a children's book. Not that children can't read it. I just wouldn't recommend it for young children. There is mention of violence and rape, but nothing graphic. The translation from French was excellent.The only thing I found odd was the Amazon book description did not mesh with what I read in that it is not from the point of view from the mother. It is from that of the child. It is the child's voice. Even though she reveres her mother, it is mostly about her observations about the world around her.
It started in 1963, long before most of us in the West had probably even heard of Rwanda, but Scholastique Mukasonga's family was forced out from their traditional villages after "the bloody reprisals." She was just a a young girl at the time, but her memories are clear in telling of what life was like in this new place they had all been removed to. Just as vivid are the details of that life "back in Rwanda" (even though they remained in the country, just "on the other side of the river), a life that she was really never a part of, because her mother told and retold the stories and traditions that were now forever lost.Here is life where bread is so scarce it is seen as a medicine, to be purchased when nothing else will help cure a sick child. Here is the interweaving of the white cultures new ways and devices with the traditions that included chants and herbs and a long history of a much simpler life. The author shares with us some of the details of this refugee life, writing beautifully of what it is like to not even know what you look like because there are no mirrors. "Your only mirror was other people: your mother's admiring glances or sighs of distress, your big sister's or schoolmates' observations and appraisals, and then the village chatter. which would inevitably end up finding its way to you: who's beautiful? who's not?"There are a few places where there is a foreshadowing of the horrors to come, brief comments like this reference: "these were the beneficent Mothers, the benevolent Mothers, the ones who fed, protected, counseled, and consoled, the guardians of the family and the community, the ones the killers slaughtered as if to wipe out the very soruces of life." Beyond this, however, The Barefoot Woman is entirely a picture of life in a struggling community of families stripped of their traditional homes and finding a way to build lives for their families as best they could.It is impossible to read this without holding in the back of one's mind the fearful killings that were to come after the time period covered in this slim volume, but perhaps that is for the best. This is a gentle tale, a fond rememberance of growing up even in terribly difficult circumstances, making the horrific outcomes (that we know only from reading the comments on the back cover) even more troubling because now we know these people. They are not just horrifying statistics, they are individual human beings. Helping us recognize this is reason enough to read The Barefoot Woman, but it is also valuable to learn of a culture that seems to have been largely wiped out. Definitely a must read.
This book is not quite what I expected, in a good way. I've read multiple memoirs from survivors of the Rwanda genocide and figured this would be in that similar vein. It's not.Instead, Mukasonga gives a very short (146 pages, but very small pages--4"x6" instead of the standard book size pages) tribute to her mother and her mother's devotion to Rwanda and Rwanda traditions and customs. It's not a traditional narrative with a standard plot. Rather it's a collection of vignettes and stories from Mukasonga's life growing up that focus on her mother and illustrate traditions she grew up with. Also, most of the book takes place in the mid-1960s, though she never gives a specific year. There is one mention of the genocide of the 90s in the book (in a small section on coming to terms with rape, and a few mentions of specific violence to come (the massacres of 1967). Despite the lack of specific historic event, and even while focusing on general life, Muskasonga makes the constant fear and threat of violence her family and all the Tutsis in their village lived with known.I enjoyed the book on several levels. First, I found it interesting to learn about Rwandan customs and traditions-- the reverence for the cow, the importance of medicinal plants, the communal importance, the definitions/standards of beauty. Mukasonga details all of this, and her mother's reverence and respect for these traditions, in fact, it seems the point of the book.Second, I thought it was very interesting how the book is set in 1960s. I think for most people unfamiliar with Rwanda, people only know of the genocide of '94, not the violent history that permeated much of the 20th century. In this book, Mukasonga and her family are "refugees" driven from their homes in the verdant hills to a dry, arid part of the country. (I only put refugees in quotes because the author and the characters in the book refer to the family as refugees. Technically, "internally displaced people," since they didn't cross an international border. Not that being an IDP is any easier than being a refugee, frankly. Mukasonga's mother does not refer to their new home as a part of Rwanda, always referring to their past life "in Rwanda".) In their new home with other displaced Tutsis they are often harassed by soldiers and an encampment of Hutu political party young men nearby. Near the end there is a small section on rape and dealing with the aftermath. It seems in this one area is where tradition lost out, as traditionally raped women were shunned and any child of rape considered unlucky. With the increase in attacks from the soldiers and Hutu encampment, the people of the village devised a new tradition after the rape and resulting pregnancy of a young virtuous Tutsi girl.The events of the near past are never dealt with head on (except in the chapter the talks about rape. There Mukasonga directly talks about how rape was used as a weapon against the Tutsis.) There are few times when Mukasonga mentions the death that was to come (the most memorable for me was when she talked about her brother Antoine having 9 children, 7 sons and 2 daughters, and her mother was happy that with "so many sons, some will live to carry on the family name," and Mukasonga simply writes after that, "She was wrong." Very stark and simple, but it really got the point across. At the end, again, the references to the dead are oblique--she provides no list of friends and family lost, though she specifically mentions her friend, Candida, and her mother. Unlike other memoirs, there is no rumination on why the author survived and others didn't. No gruesome details on the atrocities. But it provides a perspective different from most of the other books I've read. In it's own way it's a very powerful little book.
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