Scholastique Mukasonga Sister Deborah review, recensie en informatie over de roman van de schrijfster uit Rwanda. Op 29 oktober 2024 verschijnt bij Archipelago Books de Engelse vertaling van de roman uit 2022 van Scholastique Mukasonga, de Rwandese schrijfster. Een Nederlandse vertaling van het boek is niet verkrijgbaar.
Scholastique Mukasonga Sister Deborah review en recensie
- “Mukasonga’s writing is as striking for the bracing clarity and directness of her sentences as for the restlessness of its experimentations with genre … Sister Deborah presses on questions of cultural translation, which are also Mukasonga’s own: questions of faith and syncretism but also of faithfulness to one’s origins … The paths lives take, Sister Deborah insists, are mysterious and unstable. And it would be disingenuous to claim that we do not yearn to explain these mysteries to ourselves, to mold these accidents and contingencies into narratives that make sense to us.” (Marta Figlerowicz, The Paris Review)
- “Structurally, Sister Deborah is a fascinating book, with Mukasonga hinting that we’re getting a kind of coming-of-age novel early on and then shifting gears into a very different mode. The overall effect is polyphonic, as the narrative details a series of religious conflicts over the years, contrasting the attitudes and beliefs of several characters from Rwanda and the US.” (Tobias Carroll, Words Without Borders)
- “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.” (Zadie Smith)
Sister Deborah
- Auteur: Scholastique Mukasonga (Rwanda)
- Soort boek: Rwandese roman
- Origineel: Sister Deborah (2022)
- Engelse vertaling: Mark Polizzotti
- Uitgever: Archipelago Books
- Verschijnt: 29 oktober 2024
- Omvang: 200 pagina’s
- Uitgave: paperback / ebook
- Prijs: $ 19,00 / $ 14,00
- Boek bestellen bij: Amazon / Bol / Libris
Flaptekst van de roman van de Rwandese schrijfster Scholastique Mukasonga
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.
Scholastique Mukasonga is born in 1956 in Gikongoro Province, Rwanda. From childhood on she has experienced 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 leave the school of social work in Butare and flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only 2 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. Twelve years later, Gallimard published her autobiographical account Inyenzi ou les Cafards (Cockroaches), which marked Mukasonga’s entry into literature. This was followed by the publication of La femme aux pieds nus (The Barefoot Woman) in 2008 and L’Iguifou (Igifu) in 2010, both widely praised. Her first novel, Notre dame du Nil (Our Lady of the Nile), won the Ahamadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012, as well as the Océans France Ô prize in 2013 and the French Voices Award in 2014; it was also shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award. In 2019, The Barefoot Woman was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Translated Literature. In 2019, her novel 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.