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Igifu
L'Iguifou, c'est le ventre insatiable, la faim, qui tenaille les déplacés tutsi de Nyamata en proie à la famine et conduit Colomba aux portes lumineuses de la mort. À Nyamata, il y a aussi la peur qui accompagne les enfants jusque sur les bancs de l'école et qui, bien loin du Rwanda, s'attache encore aux pas de l'exilée comme une ombre maléfique. Quant à Héléna, elle vit la tragique malédiction de sa beauté.
Après le génocide, ne reste que la quête du deuil impossible, deuil désiré et refusé, car c'est auprès des morts qu'il faut puiser la force de survivre. L'écriture sereine de Scholastique Mukasonga, empreinte de poésie et d'humour, gravite inlassablement autour de l'indicible, l'astre noir du génocide.
Après le génocide, ne reste que la quête du deuil impossible, deuil désiré et refusé, car c'est auprès des morts qu'il faut puiser la force de survivre. L'écriture sereine de Scholastique Mukasonga, empreinte de poésie et d'humour, gravite inlassablement autour de l'indicible, l'astre noir du génocide.
1 pages, Audio CD
First published February 8, 2010
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About the author
Scholastique Mukasonga
20 books357 followersBorn in Rwanda in 1956, Scholastique Mukasonga experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced into the under-developed Nyamata. In 1973, she was forced to leave the school of social assistance in Butare and flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992. The genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda 2 years later. Mukasonga learned that 27 of her family members had been massacred. Twelve years later, Gallimard published her autobiographical account Inyenzi ou les Cafards, which marked Mukasonga's entry into literature. Her first novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, won the Ahamadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012.
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January 5, 2021
5★
“The sun was climbing in the sky, turning hotter and hotter. That sun was no friend of mine, I knew. It kept Igifu awake, kept him groaning and ripping at my stomach with all his claws.”
Rwanda, displaced Tutsis, starvation. Heart-breaking story of children scraping a pot for crumbs of dried porridge, because it’s bad luck to leave the home in the morning before eating. Hunger is always with them.
Igifu, Hunger, given to us at birth like a cruel guardian angel . . .”
Memories are still strong of ritual and tradition and plentiful milk from their cows, but even the traditions and rituals are disappearing.
“If we met any girls bringing the water home from Lake Cyohoha, my father would grumble: ‘That’s what they’ve done to us. Have you seen those calabashes they’re carrying on their heads? Back home in Rwanda, those calabashes were our butter churns. No one would have dared fill them with water. Shame be upon us! And I know what your mother does, but it’s no good, not even Ruganzu Ndori’s water can replace the milk from our cows.’”
When a neighbour gets goats, he is considered to have sunk to the “depths of degradation”.
The father continues to check pasture growth, water, and where cattle might do well in the future. Men continue to gather to talk at night, always eventually reminiscing about the cows they had, how exceptional each one was, and the cows they hoped to have again.
The second story is ”The Glorious Cow”.
Cows are the source of life, everyone depending on their milk. They are handled and treated and loved like prized pets. The men talk to them, stroke them, make sure they keep them safe from each other’s long horns.
“Once they’d drunk their fill, the cows rested and ruminated in the shadow of a grove or on a hillside out of the sun. Is there a happier time for a cowherd than the moment when he can rest his staff on the back of his neck, fold his right leg against his left thigh, and tranquilly survey his herd?”
With the absence of the cows, life is empty. Memory is everything.
“Before long my father would go off again. He always had things to do, he said, at a neighbor’s house, in Nyamata, at the mission, but I knew that most often he went back out to wander, leading his vanished cows with his staff.”
I’ve chosen these chapters to quote from because they still recall what has been lost. So much of the following chapters is what they’ve been left with.
The third story is titled “Fear”
“In Nyamata,” my mother used to say, “you must never forget: we’re Inyenzi, we’re cockroaches, snakes, vermin. Whenever you meet a soldier or a militiaman or a stranger, remember: he’s planning to kill you, and he knows he will, one day or another, him or someone else. And if not today, then soon, in fact he’s wondering why you’re still alive at all. But he’s not in a hurry. He knows you won’t get away.”
The fourth is “The Curse of Beauty”. It’s the tale of an exceptionally beautiful woman, desired by important men, and how her life goes in the city.
The last is “Grief”, which is certainly my reaction to these stories. It’s about a young woman who wants to know what happened to her family, and the stories on television just seem to accept that Africa always has massacres. It’s almost like ‘Nothing to see here – move along’, but of course she knows better.
She goes back to try to find some evidence of their fate, and she does find that some shocking discoveries have been made. An old man tells her not to look for them, graves or bones or anything.
“They’re inside you. They only survive in you, and you only survive through them.
. . .
With that strength you can do things you might not even imagine today.”
I hope that old man is right.
It is an amazing collection, spare and cutting. I appreciate the skill and courage it must take to put these thoughts into words. This was first published in 2010 and translated from the French this year (2020)
I thank NetGalley and Archipelago for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted so liberally.
“The sun was climbing in the sky, turning hotter and hotter. That sun was no friend of mine, I knew. It kept Igifu awake, kept him groaning and ripping at my stomach with all his claws.”
Rwanda, displaced Tutsis, starvation. Heart-breaking story of children scraping a pot for crumbs of dried porridge, because it’s bad luck to leave the home in the morning before eating. Hunger is always with them.
Igifu, Hunger, given to us at birth like a cruel guardian angel . . .”
Memories are still strong of ritual and tradition and plentiful milk from their cows, but even the traditions and rituals are disappearing.
“If we met any girls bringing the water home from Lake Cyohoha, my father would grumble: ‘That’s what they’ve done to us. Have you seen those calabashes they’re carrying on their heads? Back home in Rwanda, those calabashes were our butter churns. No one would have dared fill them with water. Shame be upon us! And I know what your mother does, but it’s no good, not even Ruganzu Ndori’s water can replace the milk from our cows.’”
When a neighbour gets goats, he is considered to have sunk to the “depths of degradation”.
The father continues to check pasture growth, water, and where cattle might do well in the future. Men continue to gather to talk at night, always eventually reminiscing about the cows they had, how exceptional each one was, and the cows they hoped to have again.
The second story is ”The Glorious Cow”.
Cows are the source of life, everyone depending on their milk. They are handled and treated and loved like prized pets. The men talk to them, stroke them, make sure they keep them safe from each other’s long horns.
“Once they’d drunk their fill, the cows rested and ruminated in the shadow of a grove or on a hillside out of the sun. Is there a happier time for a cowherd than the moment when he can rest his staff on the back of his neck, fold his right leg against his left thigh, and tranquilly survey his herd?”
With the absence of the cows, life is empty. Memory is everything.
“Before long my father would go off again. He always had things to do, he said, at a neighbor’s house, in Nyamata, at the mission, but I knew that most often he went back out to wander, leading his vanished cows with his staff.”
I’ve chosen these chapters to quote from because they still recall what has been lost. So much of the following chapters is what they’ve been left with.
The third story is titled “Fear”
“In Nyamata,” my mother used to say, “you must never forget: we’re Inyenzi, we’re cockroaches, snakes, vermin. Whenever you meet a soldier or a militiaman or a stranger, remember: he’s planning to kill you, and he knows he will, one day or another, him or someone else. And if not today, then soon, in fact he’s wondering why you’re still alive at all. But he’s not in a hurry. He knows you won’t get away.”
The fourth is “The Curse of Beauty”. It’s the tale of an exceptionally beautiful woman, desired by important men, and how her life goes in the city.
The last is “Grief”, which is certainly my reaction to these stories. It’s about a young woman who wants to know what happened to her family, and the stories on television just seem to accept that Africa always has massacres. It’s almost like ‘Nothing to see here – move along’, but of course she knows better.
She goes back to try to find some evidence of their fate, and she does find that some shocking discoveries have been made. An old man tells her not to look for them, graves or bones or anything.
“They’re inside you. They only survive in you, and you only survive through them.
. . .
With that strength you can do things you might not even imagine today.”
I hope that old man is right.
It is an amazing collection, spare and cutting. I appreciate the skill and courage it must take to put these thoughts into words. This was first published in 2010 and translated from the French this year (2020)
I thank NetGalley and Archipelago for the preview copy from which I’ve quoted so liberally.
December 31, 2020
Wrenching short story collection by one of my favorite authors, whose tales of Tutsi life in Rwanda are always extraordinary, and often devastating.
September 16, 2020
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. The author left the country in the 1970s, and another story about the woman living abroad and unable to find her relatives, only to receive a list of all those who died, and her journey back to try to find closure - well, if you're read Cockroaches it is no question where that comes from. The stories are moving and personal, and they came out this week from Archipelago - I had a copy from the publisher through Edelweiss.
December 7, 2022
At the beginning of the year I chose five authors - Morrison, Mukasonga, Stanišić, Condé and du Maurier – to read at least two books from in 2022. No one is more surprised than myself that I actually followed through with that project. L'Iguifou, a short story collection by Scholastique Mukasonga, is the book to make that list complete.
Mukasonga wrote one of my favorite books from last year. Her debut memoir, Inyenzi ou les Cafards ("Cockroaches") spoke of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in a way that was not just highly moving and emotional but also educational and urgent. I loved how carefully Mukasonga took us with her through her own life, detailing what it was like to grow up Tutsi in a hostile society, facing deportation and exile with her family, being forced to attend segregated schools only to have higher education in Rwanda being completely barred from her. She spoke of the unspeakable, her feelings of despair and numbness, of being one of the few members of her large family to live abroad, and therefore being amongst the few survivors of the genocide. Of being unaffected, yet so affected by it. She spoke of her late return to Rwanda, how it took her a decade to recover from the trauma of having her entire family murdered until she could set foot on her home soil again.
Inyenzi ou les Cafards is a truly powerful read and one I can recommend wholeheartedly. Due to being so impressed by her writing and the subject of her stories (Rwandan society and culture, and the 1994 genocide) I put her on my reading list for 2022. Unfortunately, both of the books I checked out from her this year – La Femme aux pieds nus ("The Barefoot Woman"), a memoir honoring her mother Stéphania, and L'Igioufou ("Igifu") – didn't really do it for me. They pale in comparison to her debut.
La Femme aux pieds nus wasn't as urgent, I'd even say that it was quite boring in parts. Mukasonga dwelled on the mundane, even though there would've been much more interesting things to be written about. L'Iguifou falls into the same trap. This book collects five short stories, only one of which was truly convincing. The rest were meh or downright bad, especially the second story about a young boy looking after cattle was a painfully slow and useless read.
I didn't connect to any of the characters and Mukasonga didn't manage to make me care for them... which is a feat in itself since all the stories circle the topic of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a topic I deeply care about.
The narrator of "L'Igiufou", the opening story, addresses the reader directly – as though the reader, too, were a Tutsi woman thinking back upon the chronic hunger she endured as a child. It's an interesting concept and the story is quite imaginative, but ultimately it dwindles down into nothingness. What stuck with me was Iguifou, the God of Hunger, every Tutsi's "cruel guardian angel" that they are more familiar with than they would like. Mukasonga details how the girl in her story longs for death, to be finally liberated from that feeling of insatiable hunger.
The second story, and my least favorite, "La gloire de la vache", tells of a young man looking back on his family's experience of displacement and internal exile. We learn of the importance that cows have for the Tutsi, as the narrator describes how daily milking and cow-herding serve as communal practices of self-sustenance. By the story's end, not only the boy's family's cow but his entire family has been killed in the genocide, and the narrator — the sole survivor — has been unable to fulfill his father's main wish: to protect the cow. The parallels to Mukasonga's own life are clear and yet they didn't land with me as a reader. The only thing that made my breath catch is the story's ending: Mukasonga reveals that the man is now a university professor in Kigali. Next door to him lives a Hutu with whom he sometimes shares a beer. "He’s my neighbor," says the narrator, "that’s all I want to know about him." That sentence makes a chill run down my spine because I often think about Tutsis living alongside Hutu in Rwanda today. Putting myself in their shoes, the anger, fear and resentment they must still hold (yet suppress) is something I cannot imagine.
The third story, "La peur", was my absolute favorite. It picks up on the second story insofar as the protagonist has left Rwanda but cannot strip herself of her fear and trauma that was inflicted through the genocide, that fear is a shadow that never departs. She is eloquent about the ways in which fear ruled and still reigns over the lives of Tutsis. Recalling her life in Nyamata as a constant enactment of vigilance, she speaks of the "everyday fear" (what will happen to us today?) and and intermittent outbreaks of "the great fear" (when will they extinguish all of us?).
The fourth story could've been amazing but unfortunately fell short as well. In it, Mukasonga details the plight of women in Rwanda in the late 60s and 70s. Helena, a Tutsi woman, is known for being beautiful. Having to exchange "sexual favors" with her teachers as a teenager, she becomes a prostitute as a grownup. Perhaps the most directly political story in this collection, "Le malheur d'être belle" offers piercing insights into the quota system then in place for educational opportunities for Tutsis; the myriad pernicious effects of the Hutu "social revolution"; and the rampant abuse of and violence against Tutsi women at all levels of society. Unfortunately, the appearance of real political figures, like President Mobutu, felt weird and clumsy to me. It made the story feel more gimmicky and less powerful.
The final story, "Le deuil", explores the aftermath of an unspeakable loss. Here, the Tutsi protagonist lives in France. Numbed by loss, she keeps with her at all times a list of family members killed during the genocide. She is drawn to the funerals of strangers, becoming what she calls "a parasite of their grief" as she tries to compensate for what she cannot offer her own dead: her physical presence. It's definitely one of the stronger stories in this collection. Again, it mirrors Mukasonga's own life and experiences, and this time this incorporation of auto-fiction really worked for me. I rooted for the narrator when she finally decided to return to the place of her family's murder. I wanted her to be able to deal with that chapter, even if closing it might never be possible. At the story's end, an old man articulates what the protagonist herself has come to understand: no traces of her dead family members will ever be found in any physical venue:
Mukasonga wrote one of my favorite books from last year. Her debut memoir, Inyenzi ou les Cafards ("Cockroaches") spoke of the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda in a way that was not just highly moving and emotional but also educational and urgent. I loved how carefully Mukasonga took us with her through her own life, detailing what it was like to grow up Tutsi in a hostile society, facing deportation and exile with her family, being forced to attend segregated schools only to have higher education in Rwanda being completely barred from her. She spoke of the unspeakable, her feelings of despair and numbness, of being one of the few members of her large family to live abroad, and therefore being amongst the few survivors of the genocide. Of being unaffected, yet so affected by it. She spoke of her late return to Rwanda, how it took her a decade to recover from the trauma of having her entire family murdered until she could set foot on her home soil again.
Inyenzi ou les Cafards is a truly powerful read and one I can recommend wholeheartedly. Due to being so impressed by her writing and the subject of her stories (Rwandan society and culture, and the 1994 genocide) I put her on my reading list for 2022. Unfortunately, both of the books I checked out from her this year – La Femme aux pieds nus ("The Barefoot Woman"), a memoir honoring her mother Stéphania, and L'Igioufou ("Igifu") – didn't really do it for me. They pale in comparison to her debut.
La Femme aux pieds nus wasn't as urgent, I'd even say that it was quite boring in parts. Mukasonga dwelled on the mundane, even though there would've been much more interesting things to be written about. L'Iguifou falls into the same trap. This book collects five short stories, only one of which was truly convincing. The rest were meh or downright bad, especially the second story about a young boy looking after cattle was a painfully slow and useless read.
I didn't connect to any of the characters and Mukasonga didn't manage to make me care for them... which is a feat in itself since all the stories circle the topic of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, a topic I deeply care about.
The narrator of "L'Igiufou", the opening story, addresses the reader directly – as though the reader, too, were a Tutsi woman thinking back upon the chronic hunger she endured as a child. It's an interesting concept and the story is quite imaginative, but ultimately it dwindles down into nothingness. What stuck with me was Iguifou, the God of Hunger, every Tutsi's "cruel guardian angel" that they are more familiar with than they would like. Mukasonga details how the girl in her story longs for death, to be finally liberated from that feeling of insatiable hunger.
The second story, and my least favorite, "La gloire de la vache", tells of a young man looking back on his family's experience of displacement and internal exile. We learn of the importance that cows have for the Tutsi, as the narrator describes how daily milking and cow-herding serve as communal practices of self-sustenance. By the story's end, not only the boy's family's cow but his entire family has been killed in the genocide, and the narrator — the sole survivor — has been unable to fulfill his father's main wish: to protect the cow. The parallels to Mukasonga's own life are clear and yet they didn't land with me as a reader. The only thing that made my breath catch is the story's ending: Mukasonga reveals that the man is now a university professor in Kigali. Next door to him lives a Hutu with whom he sometimes shares a beer. "He’s my neighbor," says the narrator, "that’s all I want to know about him." That sentence makes a chill run down my spine because I often think about Tutsis living alongside Hutu in Rwanda today. Putting myself in their shoes, the anger, fear and resentment they must still hold (yet suppress) is something I cannot imagine.
The third story, "La peur", was my absolute favorite. It picks up on the second story insofar as the protagonist has left Rwanda but cannot strip herself of her fear and trauma that was inflicted through the genocide, that fear is a shadow that never departs. She is eloquent about the ways in which fear ruled and still reigns over the lives of Tutsis. Recalling her life in Nyamata as a constant enactment of vigilance, she speaks of the "everyday fear" (what will happen to us today?) and and intermittent outbreaks of "the great fear" (when will they extinguish all of us?).
The fourth story could've been amazing but unfortunately fell short as well. In it, Mukasonga details the plight of women in Rwanda in the late 60s and 70s. Helena, a Tutsi woman, is known for being beautiful. Having to exchange "sexual favors" with her teachers as a teenager, she becomes a prostitute as a grownup. Perhaps the most directly political story in this collection, "Le malheur d'être belle" offers piercing insights into the quota system then in place for educational opportunities for Tutsis; the myriad pernicious effects of the Hutu "social revolution"; and the rampant abuse of and violence against Tutsi women at all levels of society. Unfortunately, the appearance of real political figures, like President Mobutu, felt weird and clumsy to me. It made the story feel more gimmicky and less powerful.
The final story, "Le deuil", explores the aftermath of an unspeakable loss. Here, the Tutsi protagonist lives in France. Numbed by loss, she keeps with her at all times a list of family members killed during the genocide. She is drawn to the funerals of strangers, becoming what she calls "a parasite of their grief" as she tries to compensate for what she cannot offer her own dead: her physical presence. It's definitely one of the stronger stories in this collection. Again, it mirrors Mukasonga's own life and experiences, and this time this incorporation of auto-fiction really worked for me. I rooted for the narrator when she finally decided to return to the place of her family's murder. I wanted her to be able to deal with that chapter, even if closing it might never be possible. At the story's end, an old man articulates what the protagonist herself has come to understand: no traces of her dead family members will ever be found in any physical venue:
"You won’t find your dead in the graves or the bones or the latrine. That’s not where they’re waiting for you. They’re inside you. They only survive in you, and you only survive through them."Writing this review and flipping through my copy of the book made me realize that I might not be done with this book just yet. I just now realised that the five stories form a linear progression from living before the genocide, going through it and dealing with it afterwards. I can definitely see myself rereading this short story collection in the future ... and I have an inkling that I might appreciate it more the second time around. We shall see!
September 15, 2020
Igifu is the omnipresent state of hunger, as experienced by Scholastique Mukasonga, starting from her life at the age of five with her family in exile from native Rwanda. Beautifully written and devastating in content, thanks to a lovely translation by Jordan Stump who has worked on her previous semi-autobiographical books. Many thanks to Archipelago for making works of amazing depth and interest available for English speaking readers.
June 30, 2021
I have been reading these 5 stories over the past couple weeks. Ms Mukasonga, born and raised in Rwanda during the genocide of her Tutsi people, now lives in France where she writes and is a social worker. I have not read fiction set in Rwanda before; I don't know of other Rwandan writers, so if you do let me know.
The stories range from childhood life to the grief of a woman losing all but one of her family members. When I read, I was there, experiencing a kind of life I knew little about but also immersed in the universal depth of family and community life humans do create. I felt so much gratitude for the writing.
This is a perfect example of why we write and why we read.
The stories range from childhood life to the grief of a woman losing all but one of her family members. When I read, I was there, experiencing a kind of life I knew little about but also immersed in the universal depth of family and community life humans do create. I felt so much gratitude for the writing.
This is a perfect example of why we write and why we read.
June 29, 2025
This french translatation is a collection of 5 stories about life and people in Rawanda. It's very hard hitting. That first story is unbearable. Igifu means Hunger in Rawanda language so it can be gauged. Very well written and translated. The most endearing thing was to see how their culture is very similar to ours (Indian). Loved it with all its pain and trauma
August 19, 2020
Set mostly in Mukasonga’s homeland of Rwanda, this collection of short stories explores the various hardships faced by the Tutsi people during the Rwandan genocide.
Though the threat of a brutal execution lingers in the background throughout most of the stories, this overt violence is never the focus. Instead, the author tends to home in beyond the wider context of civil war and focus on the ripple effects that national unrest and persecution can have – like poverty, cultural erasure, displacement, and exploitation. I thought this was really effective, showing us the often-forgotten impact beyond the senseless killings, as those who survived attempted to carry on with or rebuild their lives.
The strongest entries for me were definitely the collection’s opening and closing stories. The former, the title story, personifies the debilitating hunger of those facing severe poverty, while the latter follows a woman’s return to Rwanda (after previously escaping as a refugee) when she receives word that her entire family has been killed in the massacre. These are definitely the ones that will stick with me.
Mukasonga’s prose is simple yet effective, capturing the richness of the Tutsi people’s culture, and the sadness of their plight. Aside from the two previously mentioned stories, however, I thought there was a homogenous nature to the collection as a whole. I believe they are semi- autobiographical, which may explain the uniformity of pace, tone, and narrative voice, but as fictional pieces following different characters, I think the collection would have benefitted from more variety within the writing itself; allowing each piece to land with greater emotional punch.
In this respect, Igifu is a collection I will remember for its overall feel more than I will for its specific characters and plots. Still, it’s a very worthwhile piece of own voice literature from a perspective western audiences don’t engage with enough.
Thank you to the publisher for a free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
Though the threat of a brutal execution lingers in the background throughout most of the stories, this overt violence is never the focus. Instead, the author tends to home in beyond the wider context of civil war and focus on the ripple effects that national unrest and persecution can have – like poverty, cultural erasure, displacement, and exploitation. I thought this was really effective, showing us the often-forgotten impact beyond the senseless killings, as those who survived attempted to carry on with or rebuild their lives.
The strongest entries for me were definitely the collection’s opening and closing stories. The former, the title story, personifies the debilitating hunger of those facing severe poverty, while the latter follows a woman’s return to Rwanda (after previously escaping as a refugee) when she receives word that her entire family has been killed in the massacre. These are definitely the ones that will stick with me.
Mukasonga’s prose is simple yet effective, capturing the richness of the Tutsi people’s culture, and the sadness of their plight. Aside from the two previously mentioned stories, however, I thought there was a homogenous nature to the collection as a whole. I believe they are semi- autobiographical, which may explain the uniformity of pace, tone, and narrative voice, but as fictional pieces following different characters, I think the collection would have benefitted from more variety within the writing itself; allowing each piece to land with greater emotional punch.
In this respect, Igifu is a collection I will remember for its overall feel more than I will for its specific characters and plots. Still, it’s a very worthwhile piece of own voice literature from a perspective western audiences don’t engage with enough.
Thank you to the publisher for a free advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.
February 14, 2021
A wonderful collection of short stories by a Rwanda genocide survivor. She gives us various points of view into Tutsi life over the last few decades of the 20th century, and brings them to life with a very immediate and beautiful prose (originally translated from French). The importance of cows in their culture... cows with big white horns that looked like “a forest of horns” when they moved in a large group. The story of the impossibly beautiful Helena is so sad and tragic. The final story is the most affecting, the story of a woman very much like the author who decides to go back to Rwanda years after all her family has been massacred, to face her grief.
October 26, 2020
detailed short stories (autobiographical too) of living on the edge in rwanda, before and after the 1970s upheaval and the 1990s massacres. my favorites talked about the importance of of cows to the tutsis compared to hutus
September 7, 2020
A rich collection that reads more like a cohesive look at a people in turmoil than a set of stories. Each one is a beautiful and angst-evoking glimpse into the refugee experience. Artfully paced and skillfully balanced, they draw a reader in with both the cultural detail and the archetypal human experience and leave us with a shared sense of loss while avoiding despair. A worthwhile and rewarding read.
Thank you to Archipelago and NetGalley for an Advance Release Copy in exchange for an honest review.
Thank you to Archipelago and NetGalley for an Advance Release Copy in exchange for an honest review.
December 13, 2020
Such a fine collection of stories from an author I MUST read more from (she also has one of the best names I've ever come across). There are no weak stories in this collection but a few of them stand out as masterful (The Curse of Beauty and Fear, for me).
One of the aspects that really impressed me about this collection is Mukasonga's use of narrator. At times her narrators are kept at a distance from the protagonist and at other times up close and terrified but they always feel like the voice of a community. It is an interesting mix of memoir and witness. I'm not sure how much of these stories are autobiographical but they use all the tools and striking details of memory to create a compelling narrative.
Highly recommended!
One of the aspects that really impressed me about this collection is Mukasonga's use of narrator. At times her narrators are kept at a distance from the protagonist and at other times up close and terrified but they always feel like the voice of a community. It is an interesting mix of memoir and witness. I'm not sure how much of these stories are autobiographical but they use all the tools and striking details of memory to create a compelling narrative.
Highly recommended!
September 22, 2020
A vivid, brief, and dark glimpse into Rwanda.
January 18, 2021
Books like this are the reason I read. Books that expand or enlarge my experience. Igifu is a well-written collection of short stories by a Rwandan author. To be continued...
December 6, 2023
“On the TV, and on the radio, they never called it genocide. As if that word were reserved ‘too serious’ for Africa.”
August 6, 2020
“In Nyamata,’ my mother used to say, ‘you must never forget: we’re Inyenzi, we’re cockroaches, snakes, vermin. Whenever you meet a soldier or a militiaman or a stranger, remember: he’s planning to kill you, and he knows he will, one day or another, him or someone else.”
Igifu, or hunger, is a collection of autobiographical stories by the French-Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga and is translated from the French to English by Jordan Stump. In the centre of these stories is the collective grief and predicament of Tutsis -the living, the dead and the exiled – before and after the Rawandan genocide. Each story is heartwrenchingly beautiful, visceral and permeates through all yours senses.
The first story in the book is called ‘Igifu’, where the author takes us through a literary experience of hunger- of what it means to have this implacable tormentor within and what it does to the human body and mind. They knew how to satiate Igifu when they had their cows but the cows were taken away and killed, and the Tutsis were abandoned on the sterile soil of the Bugesera, Igifu’s kingdom. (“Igifu woke you long before the chattering birds announced the first light of dawn, he stretched out the blazing afternoon hours, he stayed at your side on the mat to bedevil your sleep. He was the heartless magician who conjured up lying mirages: the sight of a heap of steaming beans or a beautiful white ball of manioc paste, the glorious smell of the sauce on a huge dish of bananas, the sound of roast corn crackling over a charcoal fire, and then just when you were about to reach out for that mouthwatering food it would all dissolve like the mist on the swamp, and then you heard Igifu cackling deep in your stomach.”)
The second story is called “The Glorious Cow” where the author reminisces the halcyon days of when they had a lot of cows. The cows were given names, looked after and were the most important members in the family. Here, we learn the cultural and agricultural importance of the cow in Tutsi families. Milk after all, helped keep Igifu away. The third story, which almost had me in tears is called “Fear”- the fear of the sound of boots, of soldiers planning to kill, where you have to be quicker than death. Fear is their guardian angel, it helps them stay alert and awake for when death knocks, you have to run faster than death. The fourth story is called “The Curse of Beauty”- of how beauty was the greatest sorrow in the life of a Tutsi woman that extricated her from her husband, her son and herself. The last story in the book is “Grief”- here, the author writes about what it is like to lose people to a genocide and what it takes to come to terms with it (“That strength lives in you too, don’t let anyone try to tell you to get over your loss, not if that means saying goodbye to your dead. You can’t: they’ll never leave you, they stay by your side to give you the courage to live, to triumph over obstacles, whether here in Rwanda or abroad, if you go back. They’re always beside you, and you can always depend on them.”)
Igifu was my first read for Women in Translation month. WITMonth started in response to literary blogger Meytal Radzinski’s observation that only around 30% of books published in translation were by women. The purpose is to support women writers in translations and to bridge the gap through reading, reviewing and discussing books by women writers in translations.
Igifu, or hunger, is a collection of autobiographical stories by the French-Rwandan author Scholastique Mukasonga and is translated from the French to English by Jordan Stump. In the centre of these stories is the collective grief and predicament of Tutsis -the living, the dead and the exiled – before and after the Rawandan genocide. Each story is heartwrenchingly beautiful, visceral and permeates through all yours senses.
The first story in the book is called ‘Igifu’, where the author takes us through a literary experience of hunger- of what it means to have this implacable tormentor within and what it does to the human body and mind. They knew how to satiate Igifu when they had their cows but the cows were taken away and killed, and the Tutsis were abandoned on the sterile soil of the Bugesera, Igifu’s kingdom. (“Igifu woke you long before the chattering birds announced the first light of dawn, he stretched out the blazing afternoon hours, he stayed at your side on the mat to bedevil your sleep. He was the heartless magician who conjured up lying mirages: the sight of a heap of steaming beans or a beautiful white ball of manioc paste, the glorious smell of the sauce on a huge dish of bananas, the sound of roast corn crackling over a charcoal fire, and then just when you were about to reach out for that mouthwatering food it would all dissolve like the mist on the swamp, and then you heard Igifu cackling deep in your stomach.”)
The second story is called “The Glorious Cow” where the author reminisces the halcyon days of when they had a lot of cows. The cows were given names, looked after and were the most important members in the family. Here, we learn the cultural and agricultural importance of the cow in Tutsi families. Milk after all, helped keep Igifu away. The third story, which almost had me in tears is called “Fear”- the fear of the sound of boots, of soldiers planning to kill, where you have to be quicker than death. Fear is their guardian angel, it helps them stay alert and awake for when death knocks, you have to run faster than death. The fourth story is called “The Curse of Beauty”- of how beauty was the greatest sorrow in the life of a Tutsi woman that extricated her from her husband, her son and herself. The last story in the book is “Grief”- here, the author writes about what it is like to lose people to a genocide and what it takes to come to terms with it (“That strength lives in you too, don’t let anyone try to tell you to get over your loss, not if that means saying goodbye to your dead. You can’t: they’ll never leave you, they stay by your side to give you the courage to live, to triumph over obstacles, whether here in Rwanda or abroad, if you go back. They’re always beside you, and you can always depend on them.”)
Igifu was my first read for Women in Translation month. WITMonth started in response to literary blogger Meytal Radzinski’s observation that only around 30% of books published in translation were by women. The purpose is to support women writers in translations and to bridge the gap through reading, reviewing and discussing books by women writers in translations.
July 12, 2021
Recommended by Lorrie. Check our catalog: https://encore.cooklib.org/iii/encore...
November 8, 2021
What a beautiful and tragic group of stories, the first one, about hunger, made me ashamed to be in such a privileged country as I am. The others were so full of description of simple things, again I was ashamed not to be overjoyed with what I have, and to work to make others happier. The Tutsis situation is inexcusable to any human being aware of it, the tragic demoralization and murder of people must stop there, as it must everywhere.
December 18, 2023
Read Around the World: Rwanda
February 3, 2021
Translated from the French Igifu is a short story collection by Scholastique Mukasonga. Throughout the stories Mukasonga makes you feel the hunger, the poverty, the resilience of survival and her words are like a dagger to your heart. It is a collection that is powerfully raw and heart-wrenching.
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My favorite story is "Igifu" where we meet a child called Colomba in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Through Colomba's eyes, we see the life of the Tutsi refugees, the squalor, and the hardships they have to grapple with. Colomba clasped my heart in her tiny frail hands and never let go. It is a collection I highly recommend.
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~ #fridayinaprilbookreviews
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My favorite story is "Igifu" where we meet a child called Colomba in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. Through Colomba's eyes, we see the life of the Tutsi refugees, the squalor, and the hardships they have to grapple with. Colomba clasped my heart in her tiny frail hands and never let go. It is a collection I highly recommend.
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~ #fridayinaprilbookreviews
March 20, 2021
A gem of a book, not a wasted word in that spare and almost ascetic prose. And yet the author paints such rich, vivid, full and multi dimensional pictures of her people through decades. It is so important to also read about what was going on prior to the Rwandan genocide.
December 17, 2024
Pour le challenge de Fabienne, je retrouve les mots de Scholastique Mukasonga à travers cinq nouvelles qui racontent les années de terreur, la peur.
September 28, 2020
This collection of short stories from a Rwandan author humbled and challenged me, and will not soon be forgotten.
Each story is told from the perspective of a young person, and focuses on various ways that people experience emotions like fear, grief, starvation, and shame in the face of civil unrest, racial tension, and genocide. The stories are deeply human and moving, rich in details of Tutsi culture and Rwandan history, following not the larger sociopolitical context or the details of the horrors surrounding the settings, but on the experiences and psyches of those who lived through it all.
Each story is told from the perspective of a young person, and focuses on various ways that people experience emotions like fear, grief, starvation, and shame in the face of civil unrest, racial tension, and genocide. The stories are deeply human and moving, rich in details of Tutsi culture and Rwandan history, following not the larger sociopolitical context or the details of the horrors surrounding the settings, but on the experiences and psyches of those who lived through it all.
October 12, 2020
I'm not sure I have the words to describe these stories. I need to read up on the history of the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. It's not something I remember learning about in history classes other than a quick and vague oh it happened at some point thing. The writing is beautiful. I will probably buy this book at some point.
October 20, 2020
Mukasonga crafts five short stories. Most are portraits or landscapes of a time and place—often about survival and identity. The story Grief is poignant and moving. Fear is haunting in a visceral way.
Beauty as a stand alone short story is interesting. She takes the metaphors of classical and biblical myth and inverts them in a way that shows layered exploitation.
Beauty as a stand alone short story is interesting. She takes the metaphors of classical and biblical myth and inverts them in a way that shows layered exploitation.
May 10, 2020
[...] these things she'd been doing weren't what her dead wanted at all. They weren't here, in this land of exile, in these foreign churches, they were waiting back home, in the land of the dead that Rwanda had become.
August 15, 2020
Igifu, translated by Jordan Stump, is a collection of largely autobiographical short stories which draw on her childhood in Rwanda and recollections of the genocide. Igifu means hunger, and the titular story talks about the all-encompassing hunger which permeated childhood for Tutsis growing up before the Rwandan genocide but when oppression was well and truly in progress. It’s one of the most powerful stories in the collection – what’s most striking for me is how normal it seems to the characters to get one meagre meal a day, but equally how the hunger pervades their entire lives.
Another highlight is The Glorious Cow, which centres around the relationship between Tutsis and their cows. In this story, we see through the eyes of the protagonist’s father how cows are central to a Tutsi’s identity and status, and the pain felt when they have been taken away by their oppressors. A neighbour has managed to hang onto their cow in exile – and the community gathers round to see the cow being milked with an almost religious reverence.
The stories in this collection are different from her previous autobiographical writing, Cockroaches, because the focus moves away from the violence of the genocide itself and towards stories of everyday life, filled with grief, hunger, love, longing and memory. They’re no less powerful for this and can be difficult to read at times, because they’re simply stories of ordinary people in extraordinary situations, at least in the eyes of a Western reader. Mukasonga’s prose is as beautiful as I have come to expect in Stump’s excellent translation, and would make a worthy addition to any bookshelf
Igifu is published by Archipelago Books on September 15th 2020. Thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for the review copy.
Another highlight is The Glorious Cow, which centres around the relationship between Tutsis and their cows. In this story, we see through the eyes of the protagonist’s father how cows are central to a Tutsi’s identity and status, and the pain felt when they have been taken away by their oppressors. A neighbour has managed to hang onto their cow in exile – and the community gathers round to see the cow being milked with an almost religious reverence.
The stories in this collection are different from her previous autobiographical writing, Cockroaches, because the focus moves away from the violence of the genocide itself and towards stories of everyday life, filled with grief, hunger, love, longing and memory. They’re no less powerful for this and can be difficult to read at times, because they’re simply stories of ordinary people in extraordinary situations, at least in the eyes of a Western reader. Mukasonga’s prose is as beautiful as I have come to expect in Stump’s excellent translation, and would make a worthy addition to any bookshelf
Igifu is published by Archipelago Books on September 15th 2020. Thanks to the publisher and to Netgalley for the review copy.
April 3, 2023
Los últimos dos relatos son extraordinarios. ¿Cómo describir lo que, de tan inhumano, parece no tener palabras para ser descrito?
April 2, 2022
A very interesting, thought provoking, heart grabbing collection of stories told so beautifully.
January 4, 2026
Iguifou est un recueil de nouvelles puissant et profondément marquant. Chaque texte frappe par sa justesse, sa force émotionnelle et la lucidité du regard porté sur l’histoire, la mémoire. L’écriture de Scholastique Mukasonga est à la fois sobre et bouleversante, laissant une impression durable bien après la lecture. Un livre fort.
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