Watchers by Bradford Johnson. From Painting Past Photographs, a portfolio that appeared in The Paris Review issue no. 168 (Winter 2003).
“Every night the same nightmare interrupts my sleep.” With this sentence Scholastique Mukasonga begins her debut Cockroaches, a memoir that came out in French in 2006. That year, Mukasonga was fifty. She had been living in Normandy since 1992, when she moved there hoping to find employment as a social worker. She left Rwanda after a childhood marked by rising violence, shortly before the Tutsi genocide wiped out nearly her entire family. The nightmare with which she opens Cockroaches involves running away from a violent mob, not daring to look back—“I know who’s chasing me … I know they have machetes. I’m not sure how, but even without looking back I know they have machetes …”—then waking up with a start right as she is about to fall.
Especially in the cadences of its original French (“Toutes les nuits, mon sommeil est traversé du même cauchemar”), the book’s opening sentence jumps out as an allusion to the work of another famous, autobiographically minded frequenter of Normandy: Marcel Proust. Proust immortalized the Norman town of Cabourg under the fictional appellation of Balbec, and In Search of Lost Time opens with a temporally ambiguous admission of chronic sleeplessness that begins: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” Proust’s narrator goes to sleep early yet sleeps fitfully. He dreams of beautiful women but also of chimerical specters from French history that presage the imminent demise of the many worlds to which he has belonged. These worlds include the airy sphere of French aristocratic milieus but also—so troublingly that Proust’s narrator barely admits it—the French Jewish community surrounded by an ever more virulent anti-Semitism.
Mukasonga’s allusion bears a manifold, if quiet, irony. It calls out the profound inequalities that separate her from the earlier writer whose cares and pleasures are worlds apart from the stories she goes on to tell. Proust’s narrator, Marcel, wakes from dreams that riff on his recent reading—“a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V”—at least as often as they dredge up one of his “childish terrors.” Mukasonga’s dreamscapes are monotonous by comparison, the past that haunts her welded to one central catastrophe. But at the same time, the allusion highlights the improbability of the life into which she has been cast, which finds her in the bourgeois setting of a private bedroom in northern France: a setting as familiar to Proust as it would have been alien to her parents. More abstractly, she ties her narrative back to Proust’s to suggest that her prose, like his, explores the blurry interstice between memory and dreaming. Her narrators chase after the past, a rapidly vanishing specter; they also flee from its swallowing presence, which continues to fill their minds with arabesques of variations on what actually happened, almost happened, could well have happened to them.
Like her other works—including Sister Deborah, the English translation of which is forthcoming from Archipelago later this month—Cockroaches is a reckoning with history, a steadfast commemoration of a community and culture that others tried to eradicate. But even in her debut, which many early critics read as a straightforward work of testimony about the Tutsi genocide, there is a deeply self-questioning quality to that work of commemoration. The narrator always wakes from her nightmare just as she is about to perish at the hands of her pursuers, who have already killed the other Tutsi girls fleeing alongside her. She thinks, “I know I’m going to fall, I’m going to be trampled”; and yet each night she reopens her eyes and her surroundings contradict this conviction. Why was she chosen to survive, and who did the choosing?
Mukasonga’s writing obsessively tries to answer this question, to justify but also to understand the reasons for her survival. Being spared from the genocide looms over her as an unaccountable miracle and as a heavy burden of mourning. Like the biblical prophet Jonah, spewed from the stomach of a whale, Mukasonga depicts her writerly vocation as something imposed upon her from the outside. She struggles to incorporate this calling into her sense of herself as a migrant and formerly colonized subject caught between radically different cultures, worlds, and histories.
Mukasonga’s writing is as striking for the bracing clarity and directness of her sentences as for the restlessness of its experimentations with genre: though she almost always writes about or around the Tutsi genocide, she never writes the same kind of story twice. Cockroaches presents itself as autobiography. The Barefoot Woman, her following book, enters into the perspective of her own mother while seeking to document the lives and beliefs of Tutsi women more broadly. From this widening scope, Mukasonga moves on to ever more overtly fictional work in which the epistemic framework of Western realism gradually makes space for, and struggles against, the polytheistic world of Tutsi belief systems. In her celebrated first novel, Our Lady of the Nile, and in the later Kibogo, Mukasonga stages conflicts as well as convergences between Tutsi spirituality and the Catholicism of Belgian colonizers and missionaries to Rwanda. Her represented worlds contain, for every Belgian priest or Rwandan Catholic convert who seeks to tamp out indigenous religious practices as the stuff of “witchdoctors,” a local priest fascinated by the similarities between biblical proverbs and local oral traditions, or a community that continues to practice their forbidden rites in secret. Mukasonga’s characters oscillate between these different belief systems, and occasionally try to combine them, as they search for meaning and comfort in environments riven by irrational human passions and prejudices as well as powerful natural forces like droughts and plagues. What deity, Rwandan or Christian, has elected to protect them today, and to what end? Her novels’ worlds are riven with a spirituality whose connections to particular moral or cultural systems remain unstable, and which her characters can never translate into patterns that quite make sense to them.
Sister Deborah takes on these themes even more explicitly and boldly than Mukasonga’s prior works. A slim volume, it has the condensed force and geographical sweep of a much longer novel. Like the earlier, still untranslated Cœur tambour (Drum heart), Sister Deborah takes place between the African and North American continents. The titular Sister Deborah, one of its two narrators, is a Black American Pentecostal Christian who finds that a divine spirit speaks through her. What spirit is it, though? Deborah wonders if it is “the Holy Spirit of the pastors,” but the figure that appears in her visions is a nursing Black mother: “I saw a large black woman, like a giantess, and she took me in her arms.” The tongues in which she speaks under this deity’s influence appear to be Rwandan, so Sister Deborah and her pastor move to Rwanda to prepare for the coming of this mother figure. There, Deborah eventually sheds her Christianity and becomes Mama Nganga, an outsider whom others consider a dangerous witch. While undergoing this slow transformation, Sister Deborah miraculously heals a young girl, the novel’s other narrator. This girl grows up and goes on to trace a version of her healer’s steps backward: she leaves her Rwandan village to become educated in Europe and is finally named a professor at Howard University. From this American academic perspective, she returns to the African continent and seeks out the former Sister Deborah to interview her.
What can the two women say to each other, and how can they understand each other? Do their life stories work in unison or merely run parallel? Sister Deborah presses on these questions of cultural translation, which are also Mukasonga’s own: questions of faith and syncretism but also of faithfulness to one’s origins. “When I see myself today in Washington, D.C., in my office at Howard, the Black Harvard,” writes her younger narrator, “I sometimes wonder who I am: Ikirezi, the sickly little girl from Nyabikenke, or Miss Jewels, the eminent Africanist, heeded and esteemed by her peers? … I begin to suspect that some unknown mysterious power emanating from the hands and cane of Sister Deborah, instead of my intellectual capabilities, has led me down a path that until now was forbidden to black women.” 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.
Though Mukasonga’s explicatory frameworks are religiously inflected, she does not lay blame for the histories she has lived through at the feet of a distant god. The world was not created as vast, syncretic, and mysterious as her generation found it. Her own survival was sponsored by some of the same colonial institutions that contributed to her society’s fracture and her family’s tragedy. Her characters’ dreamlike visions limn the contours of the global networks that have forced them, like Mukasonga herself, into a violent, compulsory transculturality in which individual lives become radically unpredictable. Writing about and for the Tutsi relatives she lost, Mukasonga also speaks with shattering immediacy to her Western readers, challenging them to see her family’s fate not as a faraway tragedy but as a specter created by conditions that implicate them. The many-named deities who cast her characters’ lots might not be controllable or knowable; still, in more than one sense, they are human creations.
Marta Figlerowicz is an associate professor of comparative literature at Yale University and a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.
The Paris Review Daily recently published an essay by Scholastique Mukasonga, “The River Rukarara,” translated by Mark Polizzotti.
