Our Lady of the Nile
Scholastique Mukasonga
(Author)
Melanie Mauthner
(Translator)
Description
Friendship, deceit, fear, and persecution at an elite boarding school for young women in Rwanda, fifteen years before the 1994 genocide of the Tutsi . . . "Mukasonga's masterpiece" (Julian Lucas, NYRB) Scholastique Mukasonga drops us into an elite Catholic boarding school for young women perched on the edge of the Nile. Parents send their daughters to Our Lady of the Nile to be molded into respectable citizens and to escape the dangers of the outside world. Fifteen years prior to the 1994 Rwandan genocide, we watch as these girls try on their parents' preconceptions and attitudes, transforming the lycée into a microcosm of the country's mounting racial tensions and violence. In the midst of the interminable rainy season, everything unfolds behind the closed doors of the school: friendship, curiosity, fear, deceit, prejudice, and persecution. With masterful prose that is at once subtle and penetrating, Mukasonga captures a society hurtling towards horror.Product Details
Price
$18.00
$16.74
Publisher
Archipelago Books
Publish Date
September 16, 2014
Pages
240
Dimensions
5.4 X 7.1 X 0.9 inches | 0.6 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780914671039
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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 thirty-seven of her family members had been massacred. Her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile, won the 2014 French Voices Award, the Renaudot Prize, the Ahamadou Kourouma Award, and was shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017 her memoir Cockroaches was a finalist for the LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose and later, the New York Times named it one of the "50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years." Jordan Stump's translation of her memoir, The Barefoot Woman, was named a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature. In 2019, In 2019, Our Lady of The Nile was adapted into a film by Atiq Rahimi. The film won the "Crystal Bear" at Berlinale 2020 and was part of the Official Selection for TIFF 2019. Melanie Mauthner studied Modern Languages at Wadham College, Oxford and worked as a sociology lecturer before becoming a translator. Her poems and short fiction have appeared in a variety of literary magazines and anthologies. Mauthner performs as part of the London writers' collective, Malika's Poetry Kitchen.
Reviews
A Publishers Weekly Book of the Year for 2014
Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award
feeling out the tribal tensions without being overburdened with exposition. This is a moving,
nuanced portrait of fear and survival." - Publishers Weekly "Mukasonga's masterpiece ... The novel's electricity comes from its deceptive lightness, the danse macabre of dorm intrigue on the cusp of Armageddon. But its core is a reckoning with the genocide's deep origins, an unraveling of Rwanda's colonial background that is also an allegory of its miseducation." -- New York Review of Books "We should [...] welcome the opportunity to read Mukasonga's work in English. African francophone literature, and particularly that written by women, continues to be underrepresented in English, and as a result, we are not only missing out on compelling stories, but on an important political project. Scholastique Mukasonga, and likely many of her colleagues whom we have yet to translate, is working to correct the frustratingly persistent Western narratives about Africa and its history. [...] The West has indeed too often dismissed suffering in Africa, but books like Our Lady of the Nile remind us why we must not be dismissive, why we must not look away." - Madeleine LaRue, Music & Literature
"Our Lady of the Nile swept me up with its artful bitterness [...] [Our Lady of the Nile] is buoyed by its air of foreboding consequence that imparts urgency to almost every page." - Barnes & Noble Review "Sneaky, lingering, her story evokes a sense of menace, and eventually a scene of full-blown violence, that sticks with you [...] Our Lady of the Nile, published in English twenty years after the massacre of the Tutsi people, is a political novel, addressing race, culture, gender. The brutality of the Hutu-Tutsi conflict is easily misunderstood. This book makes it human, brings it down to the level of the everyday. When the question of how such a thing could have happened is asked, the treacherous answer is here, in the mundane. By imagining the everyday lives of Rwandans, Mukasonga makes more sense of the climate leading up to the genocide than a stack of news articles does. From this slant, the novel does its work quietly and well, with its head down--the way a Tutsi student might have done at Our Lady of the Nile." - Bibi Deitz, Bookforum
"The novel reflects glimpses of a tension-filled past and slowly moves to uncover racial strife and the increase of genocidal actions against the Tutsi minority in Rwanda through the eyes of lycée girls enrolled at a Catholic boarding school that stands isolated on the Ikibira mountaintop by the river Nile, gated and guarded." -- World Literature Today
"What makes Mukasonga's novel so effective is her ability to show how daily life continues alongside the omnipresent rhetoric of racial hatred and the threat of imminent violence ... Her novel is a portrait of the slow, excruciating build-up toward violence and Rwandans' attempts to lead full, meaningful lives while contending with state-sponsored exclusion. It is both a glimpse into the particular history of Rwanda and a warning about ignoring the latent signs of violence and exclusion that are present today around the globe. Implicit in her novel are many pressing questions. What crises that will erupt in the coming decade will seem so painfully predictable in hindsight? And what, if anything, is her Western readership willing to do to prevent them?" --George S. MacLeod, Kenyon Review
"Whoever has loved Africa will be touched by this story [...] It is the very essence of Africa, an immense Africa that will absorb even this terrible genocide." - Joël Prieur, Minute
"Strangely, it is in this incredibly light novel, that one best understands the ethnic, political, and religious reasons behind the massacre of the mysterious Tutsis." - Arnaud Viviant, Regards
"[After she was awarded the Prix Renaudot] I went out and procured every work by Scholastique Mukasonga. [...] Never has a prize been more merited." - Frédéric Beigbeder, Lire "In this well-constructed novel, the grim final scenes prefigure the horrors to come." - The Arts Fuse "A quite powerful novel of Rwanda, Our Lady of the Nile gives a good sense of life and conditions there in the early 1970s -- and the longstanding ethnic strife that took such a human toll, both before and after the period described here." - complete-review.com "What makes Mukasonga's novel so effective is her ability to show how daily life continues alongside the omnipresent rhetoric of racial hatred and the threat of imminent violence ... Her novel is a portrait of the slow, excruciating build-up toward violence and Rwandans' attempts to lead full, meaningful lives while contending with state-sponsored exclusion. It is both a glimpse into the particular history of Rwanda and a warning about ignoring the latent signs of violence and exclusion that are present today around the globe. Implicit in her novel are many pressing questions. What crises that will erupt in the coming decade will seem so painfully predictable in hindsight? And what, if anything, is her Western readership willing to do to prevent them?" -- George S. MacLeod, Kenyon Review
