Publisher's Weekly Review
Decades after the 1994 Rwandan genocide that took the lives of the author's parents and siblings, Mukasonga (Cockroaches) looks back at her resilient, resourceful mother Stefania in this intense tale of an exiled Tutsi family struggling to retain their culture and dignity despite brutality and death. Driven from her lush homeland in 1960 to "the dry, dusty plain of the Bugesera" by Hutu leadership following the end of Belgian rule, Stefania focused on saving her children, including four-year-old Mukasonga, as she attempted to recreate the framework of Tutsi life. Refusing to raise her family in a cheap sheet metal shack, Stefania built a traditional inzu, "a house made of straw woven like a basket," because "it was only in the ancestral dwelling place that she'd find the strength and courage... to face our misfortunes." In telling her mother's story, Mukasonga, who fled to France in 1992, documents the Tutsi way of life as she describes growing and harvesting sorghum for the brewing of beer, medicine and healing practices, and Tutsi beauty standards and marriage customs. Ultimately, Mukasonga's created a loving tribute to her mother: "My sentences weave a shroud for your missing body." Despite the horrible tragedies recounted throughout, joy prevails in this beautiful and elegiac memoir. (Dec.)
Guardian Review
Scholastique Mukasonga's tender paean to motherhood and community (originally published in French in 2008 and seamlessly translated by Jordan Stump) explores how exile robs people of their traditions and identity. Born in Rwanda in 1956, Mukasonga experienced early on the ethnic conflict that has scarred her country. In 1960, her Tutsi family was exiled to the "dry, dusty plain of the Bugesera", close to the Burundi border. They left behind their beloved mountains and the cows they had once proudly herded, forced to scrape together a living from growing sorghum, beans and vegetables. Mukasonga pays homage to her mother, Stefania, and the women in the refugee villages who "fed, protected, counselled and consoled" them all. The author recalls the rituals that shaped her formative years and nurtured her family. The arranging of marriages, the imbibing of sorghum beer, the reward of bread and the women's love of pipe-smoking are related with a deft touch. And the threat of sudden violence from Hutu soldiers is ever-present. A reverence for learning is at the heart of her memoir. "Progress" was celebrated and her parents recognised that education was key to giving their children the opportunity to join "the evolved". Sadly, Mukasonga had to leave her school in Butare and flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, two years before the Tutsi genocide; 37 members of her family were massacred. This bloodshed haunts and propels the narrative. At the start, Mukasonga writes: "Mama, I wasn't there to cover your body and all I have left is words¿ over and over, my sentences weave a shroud for your missing body." In her heartbreaking conclusion, she describes a nightmare about those she left behind. The shadow of her friend Candida asks her: "Do you have a pagne [cloth wrap] big enough to cover them all, every one of them¿ every one¿ every one?" The Barefoot Woman is an extraordinary tribute to "Mother Courage", as well as a timely reminder of war's devastation.
Kirkus Review
A profoundly affecting memoir of a mother lost to ethnic violence.Mukasonga (Cockroaches, 2016, etc.) left her birth country of Rwanda to work in France before the genocide began, but she was well familiar with the events preceding it. As a child, she recounts, her mother informed her that her duty was to cover her body with a colorful pagne when she died: "No one must see a mother's corpse," she said portentously. "Otherwise it will follow you, it will chase youit will haunt you until it's your turn to die, when you too will need someone to cover your body." When she was still young, Mukasonga and her family were herded off to an inhospitable region where, she imagines, the Hutu rulers hoped that "the Tutsis of Nyamata would gradually be wiped out by sleeping sickness and famine." Instead, long before the genocide began, they were steadily victimized: beaten, raped, looted, murdered. The author's mother, a reader of signs and omens, held drills so that her children could escape: "And so we knew exactly how to scurry into the brambles, how to dive under the dried grasses." Mukasonga's account of village life can be charming, as when she writes of the importance of growing sorghum for, among other reasons, making a mild beer that served as a social bond. But then it can become harrowing on the same page, as when she considers whether a man can truly be a man if robbed of his cattle, a visible sign of wealth and status. Finally, in the spasm of civil war and genocide that swept across Rwanda in the early 1990s, her mother and dozens of other family members were killed. The author closes with a haunting vision in which the ghost of a friend asks her whether she has brought "a pagne big enough to cover them all, every one of them."A loving, urgent memorial to people now "deep in the jumble of some ossuary" who might otherwise be forgotten in time. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
