Scholastique Mukasonga
Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Jordan Stump. Archipelago Books, New York, 2016.
August is Women in Translation Month. While there are conflicting versions of how it began, my first introduction was through the book blogger Meytal Radzinski. Meytal started promoting the hashtag #WITMonth circa 2014 after writing a series of posts (in which she presented statistics, charts, etc.) showing that only 30% of books translated into English are by women writers.1 The movement, taken up by booksellers, publishers, translators, bloggers, and critics, looks to amplify women's voices and bring awareness that there is a demand for their books in English. A website was launched in 2021, womenintranslation.org, which I encourage you to visit. You can also follow those behind the Women In Translation movement on Instagram @readwit and on Twitter @Read_WIT. You can follow Meytal on Twitter @Biblibio. And you can find reviews, articles, booklists, and publishers' sales on various social media sites under the hashtag #WITMonth.
I will be writing about and reviewing books by women in translation for the newsletter all this month. My first review is not new. I wrote it back in 2017 for the now-defunct The Quarterly Conversation on the Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga's memoir Cockroaches. Since then, Archipelago has published two more of Mukasonga’s books (both tranlated by the wonderful Jordan Stump). Igafu, a collection of autobiographical short stories, and The Barefoot Woman, a tribute to her mother. Mukasonga remains one of my favorite writers, and since this review is no longer available online I thought I would share it here.
But, first, a quick story. Years ago, I sat on a panel at the PEN World Voices Festival with a group of bloggers who wrote about books in translation. A man in the audience asked us to talk about the hegemony of English and whether translating texts from other languages into English was in some way detrimental to the source language. At the time, I answered that while I understood what he was saying and his concerns, the reality was (and still is) that those books were/are inaccessible to me without translation. And, selfishly, I want to continue reading books by writers from around the world. I saw his annoyance in the look on his face. But I was being honest. I still think about that question a lot. A better response would have been that many more books are translated from English into other languages, and exchanges of literature should be reciprocal. The best way to affirming the importance of a language is by acknowledging the significance of the writers working in that language. Contemporary writers like Knaussgard (Norwegian), Ferrante (Italian), Bolano (Spanish), Murakami (Japanese), Ndiaye (French), and Hang Kang (Chinese) have attained international acclaim. Classic writers like Doestoyesky, Cervantes, even Homer are considered canon. Their writing has been translated into many different languages, of which English is just one. Of course, the work changes with each iteration. But its relevance transcends any one language.
Which is as good an introduction as any to my review of Cockroaches.
Sometimes Scholastique Mukasonga sits alone at her kitchen table late at night, writing. She is mourning her dead while seeking out their ghosts.
Over and over, I write and rewrite their names in the blue-covered notebook, trying to prove to myself that they existed; I speak their names one by one, in the dark and the silence. I have to fix a face on each name, hang some shred of memory. I don't want to cry, I feel tears running down my cheeks. I close my eyes. This will be another sleepless night. I have so many dead to sit up with.
The opening pages of Cockroaches, Mukasonga's memoir about the Rwandan genocide and the decades surrounding it, set a distinctive narrative style and framework onto the story that follows. Mukasonga creates an intimate space where she can speak. She seats us across the table and shares her memories in hushed tones. Her children are sleeping in the next room.
It begins in the late 1950s, after the Rwandan Revolution. Hutus are in power. Mukasonga and her Tutsi relatives are forcefully relocated to Nyamata, in eastern Rwanda. Then they are moved to Gitwe, a village built by the government specifically to put displaced Tutsis. They will remain there for a time but eventually will find a more permanent home in Gitagata. Gitagata is where her family will be killed.
Mukasonga scrutinizes the events leading up to and including the 1994 Rwandan genocide subjectively, focusing on specific memories of her family and childhood. She uses individual experience as a way to personalize what most of us know only from the newspaper. Some of her memories are good—time spent with her mother, ditching school to gather fruit with friends, and the community coming together to make banana wine. Others are painful—being called Inyenzi, cockroach; the threat of rape; hiding in the bush from men with machetes and spiked clubs. She speaks of the persistent state of fear, of looming danger, that she and her loved ones endured. She describes "noises, shouts, a hum like a swarm of bees, a growl filling the air." It is the sound of the pogroms (the translator's word choice). Horrors appear on these pages in the guise of normality.
Many of the boys were posted along the shoreline, as if standing guard. When we walked into the water to fill our calabashes, we saw what they were guarding: the tied up bodies of victims slowly dying in the shallows of the lake, little waves washing over them now and then. The newcomers were there to keep away the families who wanted to rescue their children or at least take home their bodies. For a long time we found little pieces of skin and rotting body parts in our calabashes when we fetched water.
When she is seventeen, her parents arrange for Mukasonga and her brother, André, to be smuggled over the border into the neighboring country of Burundi. "With no one to count on, we had to look after ourselves, so we came up with a plan. . . . As long as I was in school, André would work to support us and pay for my studies; once I finished and found a job, once I was self-sufficient, he'd go back to school. Then it would be my turn to support him. We followed our plan to the letter." The siblings worked hard to fulfill the hopes of their parents, building lives for themselves outside of Rwanda. Mukasonga became a social worker; André, a doctor. They leave Burundi to settle in France and Senegal. Both find partners, marry, and have children of their own. They sneak back into Rwanda when they can for infrequent and perilous visits. They, Mukasonga tells us, were chosen by their parents to survive. This knowledge is the crux of her memoir.
Grief is something we accept as an unavoidable part of the human experience, but what happens when you have too many people to grieve? Where do you find consolation for the simultaneous loss of not one but several family members—parents, brothers and sisters, small children, even unborn babies. How do you deal with the knowledge that they were brutally murdered? How do you look their killers, who remain free and unpunished, in the eye?
These questions are never asked out loud, but it is impossible not to infer them. Cockroaches is not about the complicated political situation in Rwanda. Nor does it go out of its way to examine the history of the ethnic tensions which led to the 1994 genocide. And, yet, using her family's experiences, she shows how the genocide was not an isolated event. Though she touches on the courts of reconciliation, Mukasonga shows no interest in exploring them as a concept or an institution. Instead, Cockroaches is a memorial to the dead, her dead. Toward the end, the narrative will unravel and become a list of names with a few brief memories attached: Joséphine Kabanene, the prettiest and proudest girl in the village; Rukorera, the man who had cows; Sekimonyo, the tall beekeeper and the school teacher Birota.
And when I close my eyes, what I see is always the same night, a night in the dry season, a night lit by the full moon. The women are busy around the three stones of the hearth. Sitting cross-legged on either side of the road, the men a gravely talking and passing around calabashes of sorghum or banana beer. Little boys are playing with a banana-leaf ball in the road; others are racing after the old bicycle wheels they use as hoops, giggling wildly. The girls have swept the yard and the road and now they're singing and dancing. And now the women are studying the moon, whose illuminated face, they believe, reveals the future. In my memories, that enormous moon is always there, hanging over the village to pour out its pale blue light.
In the bright night of my memory, they're all there.
On its surface, Cockroaches follows a linear timeline. The chapter headings often include the year or years in which their events occur. There is a concerted effort to formalize memory and to separate the facts from the emotions they inspire. But Mukasonga writes in the voice of an oral storyteller, betraying her attempts to structure her grief. Clean and conversational, the sentences are devoid of dramatic hyperbole and yet still manage to convey a deep sense of loss, subdued rage, and the survivor's guilt underlying it all. It is Mukasonga's no-nonsense tone that we hold on to when she relates, with brutal clarity, the fates of the people she loves. She guides us through tragedy, choosing her words carefully, lest they overcome her and frighten away her ghosts.
A 2015 Publishing Perspectives article states translations of foreign-language titles, mostly from English, made up approximately 25% of all books published in Spain. In comparison, only 3% of the books published in the United States that same year were translations. And of that 3%, less than half are written by women.