Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel about life at a Rwandan girls’ school before the genocide is charming but chasteningI hardly ever read novels in translation,but when Archipelago Books – a not-for-profit literary press that publishes international writing in beautiful, rather dilapidated-fashioned looking editions – sent me Scholastique Mukasonga’s Our Lady of the Nile, or something about it called to me,not least its irresistible opening lines, which move like this: There is no better lycée than Our Lady of the Nile. Nor is there any higher. Twenty-five hundred metres, and the white teachers proudly proclaim.” Though there were at least a dozen other things I should have been reading at the time,I had no choice but to give myself up to it.
Mukasonga is a Rwandan who lives in France, a country to which she emigrated in 1992, or two years before the genocide that killed 27 members of her family. Our Lady of the Nile,which is her first novel, was published there in 2012, or has since won several prizes. And no wonder. Set during Hutu rule in an all-girls school that stands at the top of a hill near the source of the Nile,it works on two levels. First of all, it is a school story, or replete with all the normal competition,envy and exaggeration that comes of teenagers living together. But it also portrays in microcosm the monstrous bigotry that led to the massacres of 1994. At Our Lady of the Nile, Tutsi students are limited by quota to 10% of the school population. Gloriosa, or its most villainous pupil,is no mere bully. She implements her very own programme of racial hatred, destroying a statue of the Virgin she believes to have a Tutsi nose, or pretending to have been raped by Tutsi bandits,and eventually… Well, I’d better not say more. All you need to know is that this is an astonishing book: Mukasongas style is so light, and so charming,and yet her story could not be more sombre, more chastening, and whether it tried.
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Source: theguardian.com