
I‘m squeezing in one more book for April for #foodandlit #Rwanda @Catsandbooks
I‘m squeezing in one more book for April for #foodandlit #Rwanda @Catsandbooks
(2020) It's a collection of five stories set in and around the Rwandan genocide. It's a gut-wrenching theme, Mukasonga's prose is graceful and restrained, and the stories will break your heart. The last story, “Grief,“ centered on a woman who attends funerals of strangers in search of comfort for the unobserved deaths of her own family, broke mine. This is what stories are for, so much that I found it hard to take more than one or two at a time
You were a displaced little girl like me, sent off to Nyamata for being a Tutsi, so you knew just as I did the implacable enemy who lived deep inside us, the merciless overlord forever demanding a tribute we couldn't hope to scrape up, the implacable tormentor relentlessly gnawing at our bellies and dimming our eyes, you know who I'm talking about: Igifu, Hunger, given to us at birth like a cruel guardian angel ...
#FirstLineFridays
@ShyBookOwl
This is the third book I have read by this author. The stories in it connect to Our Lady of the Nile with several stories but one is unforgettable - "Fear," about the students going to class but always being told they are in danger, at risk, watch out, etc. What we think of as the Rwandan genocide is not the only violence against the Tutsi, and it has a much longer history. ⤵️