Kibogo
In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity.
When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth.
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.
To some, Kibogo's tale is founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor's hoax. All debate the twisted roots of this story, but deep down, all secretly wonder--can Kibogo really summon the rain?
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Scholastique Mukasonga is an award-winning French Rwandan author of novels, memoirs, and short stories. Born in Rwanda in 1956, she 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 underdeveloped Bugesera district of Rwanda. She 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, she learned that thirty-seven of her family members had been massacred.
The stories themselves are furtively retold and altered and added to across time, subsuming even their tellers as they demonstrate a life force and lifespan that mere mortals can't compete with.
-- "Wall Street Journal"A world that is distant in both time and space, a world that is well worth visiting.
-- "Chicago Review of Books"Mukasonga's novel shows how stories can wield a power that is greater than the sword, resisting ownership by any one person or power.
-- "ABC News"Pensive and lyrical; a closely observed story of cultures in collision.
-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Mukasonga adds a new layer to the canvas containing her vanished culture. Amid destruction there's confusion and manipulation, but there's also the power of myth and human resilience.
-- "Words without Borders"Mukasonga complicates the blurry line between history and myth and critiques its relationship to colonialism. This speaks volumes to the power of storytelling.
-- "Publishers Weekly"Mukasonga breathes upon a vanished world and brings it to life in all its sparkling multifariousness.
-- "J. M. Coetzee, Booker Prize-winning author"
