Scholastique Mukasonga’s slim memoir, 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. Born in 1956, Mukasonga grew up in a Tutsi family in Rwanda that was violently relocated within the country in 1960. She left the country for France two years before the genocide in 1994 that killed 27 members of her family in Rwanda. (Her debut memoir, Cockroaches (2016), tells that story in more detail.) Among those killed was her mother, Stefania, who gives this book its title and animating force. “My sentences weave a shroud for your missing body,” Mukasonga writes.
Yet it feels a little deceptive, here at the start of a review, to quote such a nakedly mournful line. It risks mischaracterizing the book as elegiac or mournful in the way so many memoirs are. Books about the Rwandan genocide — most famously Philip Gourevitch’s We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (1998) — framed how wrenching and senseless the violence was. And the contemporary memoir has established its own frame for how an individual is expected write about such violence: The piercing opening that gives us a moment of the tragedy, the backstory for that moment, the tragedy itself, and the closing redemption. Sentences weaving shrouds seems a perfect metaphor for such writing.
But if the familiar narrative structure is Freytag’s Pyramid, with its rising and falling action, Mukasonga’s book is arranged more like a spiral, taking the moment of her mother’s murder and circling around it, creating distance from it yet encompassing it, the better to understand all the influences in her community that made her. That the book doesn’t climb steadily toward crisis doesn’t deny it forward movement; rather, the form leaves room for observation and humor that make its drama feel less machined and manipulative than a conventional memoir. Chapters are arranged not in terms of events but of folkways — maintaining a household, cooking, marriage, birth, medicine, storytelling. Sorghum is the subject of an entire chapter because it’s not just a crop but a critical marker of identity. “There was a whole ceremony to farming it, and even to eating it, rituals that Stefania performed with loving piety, because sorghum was a plant of good omen,” she writes. It’s harvested, used in baking and brewing, part of new-year rituals, central to the gender divide, an identifier literally impressed on their bodies: “When we emerged from among the towering sorghum plants, the black streaks on our lips and tongues showed everyone that the hunting was good.”
More than any one role she plays in the book — certainly more important than that of victim — Stefania is the keeper of these traditions. Mukasonga recalls her as a cook, matchmaker, concocter of beauty treatments and home remedies. She describes in detail a ritual called ubunyano, which effectively involves an enema given to a newborn infant in celebration of its healthy arrival. Ritually (if not actually), the meal involves consuming some of the feces, also called ubunyano. “To taste the new arrival’s ubunyano was to welcome him into our midst, to recognize him as a brother we had to protect, and help to grow up, and teach how to escape all the mortal dangers hanging over him because like us he was unlucky enough to have been born a Tutsi.”
Such rituals, including Stefania harsh cross-examination of potential brides, have a retrospective cast — Mukasonga writes about them as absences, because they no longer were available in the same way in exile, and now not at all. Cow’s milk, for nourishment and beauty treatments, is unavailable because “they’d killed all our cows, and burned the calves in the stables.” Instead of their familiar homes, families were forced into shacks exposed to the sunlight. “We can’t even eat without strangers walking past and looking straight into our mouths!” Stefania exclaims, and her daughter adds: “For her, as for all Rwandans, that was the height of obscenity.”
And yet Mukasonga is alert to the kind of condescending exoticism that her descriptions might provoke in her new home in France (and no doubt among American readers, too). The term for her former shelter, she notes, is an inzu, and she explains that “I’ll keep its name in Kinyarwanda, because the only words French gives me to describe it sound contemptuous: hut, shanty, shack.” Having been enchanted by a hair straightening hot comb when growing up, she absorbs a small humiliation in the safety of France: “‘Is that for a poodle?’ the cashier asked me.” Describing her sex education process, she writes, “I’m writing words that no Rwandan woman must ever write or speak. But after all, they’re French words, so maybe they’re not forbidden.”
Those observations are reminders that the story she’s telling is a product of ill consequences, that wouldn’t be told at all from a place of safety, and that the disruption she and her community experienced can never be communicated in full. Mukasonga describes the violence her family experienced, but glancingly — partly to convey her repulsion and sorrow, but also to avoid exploiting it, to giving it the space to be only mere narrative. “Never again do I want to see the image of my Hutu friends, boys from public school, coming after me to kill me, me and my Tutsi schoolmates,” he writes, then shifts immediately shifts gears: “But I’ve already written about that …” She has, but not much.
Still, trauma is central to the story of The Barefoot Woman — or, in the context of Mukasonga’s metaphor, a scrim that is laid over every piece of this story. In the book’s introduction, she writes of the fear she carried in exile of losing her mother: “School days were the worst, when my mind filled with horrific pictures that blotted out the teacher’s lesson, pictures of Mama’s corpse lying in front of the termite mound she so loved to sit on.” Then she abruptly shifts to her mother’s actual death, the confirmation of her fears. “Her poor remains dissolved into the stench of the genocide’s monstrous mass grave, and maybe now, but this too I don’t know, maybe now that she’s deep in the jumble of some ossuary, bones among bones, one skull among others.”
The Barefoot Woman is 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.
[Published by Archipelago Books on December 18, 2018. 152 pages, $16.00 paperback]