The Barefoot Woman E-Book

Scholastique Mukasonga

• Herausgeber: Daunt Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

It was while we were weeding the sorghum field that Mama taught me most of her memories of the Rwanda that used to be. Alas! I've forgotten so many of the secrets Stefania told me, the secrets a mother tells only her daughter.'From the author of the critically acclaimed novel Our Lady of the Nile, a haunting, delicately wrought work of non-fiction, memorialising a lost childhood, community and way of life.When Scholastique Mukasonga's family are killed in the genocide of the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda, she is unable to fulfil her mother Stefania's wish to shroud her body with pagne. So instead, she now weaves her mother's shroud with words, drawing on inherited traditions of storytelling to offer a devastating, unforgettable tribute.In beautiful, lucid prose, Mukasonga lays before us the fierce courage and strength of her mother as she fought for her children's safety, her family's exile to the Burundi border and her community's efforts to maintain ritual and tradition. Vivid, evocative and deeply moving, this is a remarkable work of art and act of love.

Leseprobe

A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

‘A powerful work of witness and memorial, a loving act of reconstruction, and an unflinching reckoning.’ Zadie Smith

‘An extraordinary work that devastates with gentleness. It resonates with love for community-in-exile, for those violently lost, and above all for the creative endurance of mother courage.’ Ruby Cowling, author of This Paradise

‘A daughter’s lyrical tribute [and] a resonant revelation.’ Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, author of Dust

‘The memories of childhood, a lost home, a mother who sacrificed herself are the pounding heart of the book … A work that anyone who might read it will remember.’ Literary Hub, Best Translated Novels of the Decade

‘The Barefoot Woman powerfully continues the tradition of women’s work it so lovingly recounts. In Mukasonga’s village, the women were in charge of the fire. They stoked it, kept it going all night, every night. In her work [Mukasonga] has become the keeper of the flame.’ New York Times

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGESAVING THE CHILDRENTHE TEARS OF THE MOONSTEFANIA’S HOUSESORGHUMMEDICINEBREADBEAUTY AND MARRIAGEANTOINE’S WEDDINGTHE LAND OF STORIESWOMEN’S AFFAIRSSELECTED WORKS BY SCHOLASTIQUE MUKASONGAABOUT THE AUTHORSCOPYRIGHT

Often, in the middle of one of those never-ending chores that fill a woman’s day (sweeping the yard, shelling and sorting beans, weeding the sorghum patch, tilling the soil, digging sweet potatoes, peeling and cooking bananas …), my mother would pause and call out to us, her three youngest daughters, not by our baptismal names, Jeanne, Julienne, Scholastique, but by our real names, the ones given us at birth by our father, names whose meaning, always open to interpretation, seemed to sketch out our future lives: ‘Umubyeyi, Uwamubyirura, Mukasonga!’ Mama would give us a lingering stare, as if she were going away for a long time, as if – she who rarely left the enclosure, who never strayed too far from her field, except on Sundays, for Mass – she were making ready for a great voyage, as if she would never again see the three of us gathered around her. And in a voice that didn’t sound like hers, that seemed like something from another world, a voice that filled us with terror, she would say: ‘When I die, when you see me lying dead before you, you’ll have to cover my body. No one must see me. A mother’s dead body is not to be seen. You’ll have to cover me, my daughters, that’s your job and no one else’s. No one must see a mother’s corpse. Otherwise it will follow you, it will chase you … it will haunt you until it’s your turn to die, when you too will need someone to cover your body.’

Those words frightened us. We didn’t understand them – even today I’m not sure I understand them – but they sent a chill down our spines. We were convinced we had to keep one eye on Mama at every moment, that we had to be ready, should death suddenly take her, to cover her with her pagne so no one could glimpse her lifeless body. And it’s true that death hovered insistently over every deportee in Nyamata, but to three little girls it seemed to threaten our mother most of all, like a silent leopard stalking its prey. All day long, our anxious thoughts stayed close by her side. Mama was always the first one up in the morning, long before the rest of us were awake, to go off for her daily walk around the village. We trembled as we waited for her to come back, relieved when we finally glimpsed her through the coffee plants, washing her feet in the dewy grass. When two of us went to fetch water or wood, we always told the third: ‘Whatever you do, keep an eye on Mama.’ And our hearts knew no peace until we came home and saw her shelling beans under the big manioc. But schooldays were the worst, when my mind filled with horrific pictures that blotted out the teacher’s lesson, pictures of Mama’s corpse lying in front of the termite mound she so loved to sit on.

I never did cover my mother’s body with her pagne. No one was there to cover her. Maybe the murderers lingered over the corpse their machetes had dismembered. Maybe blood-drunk hyenas and dogs fed on her flesh. Her poor remains dissolved into the stench of the genocide’s monstrous mass grave, and maybe now, but this too I don’t know, maybe now she’s deep in the jumble of some ossuary, bones among bones, one skull among others.

Mama, I wasn’t there to cover your body, and all I have left is words – words in a language you didn’t understand – to do as you asked. And I’m all alone with my feeble words, and on the pages of my notebook, over and over, my sentences weave a shroud for your missing body.

SAVING THE CHILDREN

Maybe the Hutu authorities put in charge of the newly independent Rwanda by the Belgians and the Church were hoping the Tutsis of Nyamata would gradually be wiped out by sleeping sickness and famine. In any case, the region they chose to send them to, the Bugesera, seemed inhospitable enough to make those internal exiles’ survival more than unlikely. And yet they survived, for the most part. Their courage and solidarity let them face the hostile wilderness, farm a first little patch of land that didn’t completely spare them from hunger but at least kept them alive. And little by little the displaced families’ makeshift huts became villages – Gitwe, Gitagata, Cyohoha – where people struggled to recapture some semblance of everyday life, which of course did little to soften the crushing sorrow of exile.

But the Tutsis of Nyamata weren’t slow to realise that the tenuous survival they seemed to have been granted was only a temporary reprieve. The soldiers of the Gako Camp, built between the villages and the nearby border with Burundi, were there to remind them that they were no longer exactly human beings but inyenzi, cockroaches, insects it was only right to persecute and eventually exterminate.

I can still picture the soldiers from Gako bursting into our house, a rifle butt crumpling the piece of sheet metal we used as a door. They claimed they were looking for a photo of King Kigeri or covert letters from exiles in Burundi or Uganda. All that, of course, was pure pretext. Long before, the displaced families of Nyamata had thrown out everything that might possibly incriminate them.

I don’t know how many times the soldiers came to pillage our houses and terrorise the people inside. My memory has compressed all those acts of violence into one single scene. It’s like a film playing over and over. The same images again and again, engraved in my mind by my little-girl fear, later to return in my nightmares.

The scene that unfolds before my memory is peaceful at first. The entire family is gathered in our one room, around the three stones of the hearth. It must be July or August, the dry season, summer holidays, because André and Alexia are there too, back from their school a long way from Nyamata. Night has fallen, but the moon isn’t full, because we aren’t sitting outside behind the house, enjoying its light. Everything seems strangely calm, as if the soldiers are yet to pay us their first sudden, brutal visit. Evidently Mama has taken none of the extraordinary precautions I’ll talk about soon. I see everyone in their usual places. My mother Stefania is squatting on her mat against the outer wall. Alexia is close by the fire, maybe trying to read one of her schoolbooks by the flickering light of the flames, maybe only pretending. I can’t make out my father in the dimness at the far end of the room; I can only hear the continual, monotonous clicks of the rosary he never stops fingering. Julienne, Jeanne, and I are pressed close together near the front door that opens onto the dirt road. Mama has just set down the family plate of sweet potatoes in front of us, but we haven’t yet begun to eat. We hang on André’s every word as he sits in our one chair at the little table built specially for him – the boy, the student, the hope of the family – by our older brother Antoine. André is telling stories from school, and for us they’re like news from a distant world, an amazing, inaccessible world, and they make us laugh, laugh, laugh …

And then, all of a sudden, the clang of the sheet metal crashing down: I just have time to snatch up my little sister and roll with her off to one side, dodging the boot that grazes her face, the boot that tramples the sweet potatoes and buckles the metal plate like cardboard. I make myself as small as I can, I wish I could burrow into the ground, I hide Jeanne beneath a fold of my pagne, I stifle her sobs, and when I dare to look up again, I see three soldiers overturning our baskets and jugs, throwing the mats we’d hung from the ceiling out into the yard.

One of them has grabbed hold of André, and now he’s dragging him toward the door (I think I can see my brother’s struggling body go past, slowly, slowly, just beside my face) and my father races forward as if he could hold back the soldier, and I hear my mother and Alexia crying out. I squeeze my eyes shut as hard as I can so I won’t have to see. Everything goes dark, I want to burrow deep underground …

The silence makes me open my eyes again. My father is helping a wincing André to his feet. My mother and Alexia are cleaning up the spilled beans. Now, from next door, comes the same sound of boots, the same shrieks, the same sobs, the same crash of breaking jugs …

My mother had only one thought in her head, one single project day in and day out, one sole reason to go on surviving: saving her children. For that she tried every possible tactic, devised every conceivable stratagem. We needed some way to flee, we needed someplace to hide. The best thing, obviously, was to take cover in the dense bramble thickets that bordered our field. But for that we’d need time. Mama was forever on guard, constantly listening for noises. Ever since the day when they burned our house in Magi, when she first heard that dull roar of hatred, like a monstrous beehive’s hum racing toward us, I think she’d developed a sixth sense, the sense of an animal forever on the lookout for predators. She could make out the faintest, most faraway sound of boots on the road. ‘Listen,’ she would say, ‘they’re back.’ We listened intently. We heard only the familiar sounds of the neighbours, the usual rustles of the savannah. ‘They’re back,’ my mother said again. ‘Quick, run and hide.’ Often she only had time to give us a sign. We scrambled under the bushes, and a moment later, peering out from our hiding place, we saw the patrol at the end of the road, and we trembled as we wondered if they’d break into our house, ravage and steal our meagre belongings, our few baskets of sorghum or beans, the few ears of corn we’d been foolish enough to put by.

But we had to be ready for anything: sometimes the soldiers were too quick even for my mother’s sharp ear. And so, for those times when we wouldn’t be able to reach the brush, she left armloads of wild grass in the middle of the field, mounds just big enough for her three little girls to slip into when the alarm was sounded. She kept a mental catalogue of what she thought would be the safest hiding places in the bush. She discovered the deep burrows dug by the anteaters. She was convinced we could slither into them, and so with Antoine’s help she widened the tunnels and camouflaged the entrances under piles of grasses and branches. Jeanne made herself even tinier than she was to wriggle into the anteater’s lair. Sometimes, despite all my mother’s advice and encouragement, Jeanne couldn’t quite make it. A little concerned, I asked Stefania what would happen when the anteater wanted to come home. I’ve forgotten her answer.

Mama left nothing to chance. Often, as night fell, she called a dress rehearsal. And so we knew exactly how to scurry into the brambles, how to dive under the dried grasses. Even in our panic at hearing the boots on the dirt road, we scurried straight for the thickets or burrows where Mama had taught us to lie low.

The displaced families’ huts had only one door, which opened onto the road. To ease our escape, Mama cut a second way out, opening onto the field and the bush. But soon that back door, more or less concealed like the hiding places she’d made in the brambles, was of no use at all. Once (with helicopters to help them) they’d beaten back the ill-fated Inyenzi offensive launched from Burundi by Tutsi refugees, the soldiers of the Gako camp lost all fear of ambushes and attacks. No more did they keep to the dirt road they’d always carefully followed. Now their patrols tramped freely across country, all the way to the Burundi border. Now danger could just as well burst from the bush as come down the road; no more were our thorny hiding places the impregnable refuges my mother found so reassuring. And so she set about making hiding places inside the house itself. Against the mud walls she stacked big urns and baskets, almost as tall as grain bins, for Julienne and Jeanne to crawl behind if the soldiers burst in. I was already too big to squeeze into the shelter of the urns’ black bellies or the baskets’ elegant curves. My only recourse was to dive under my parents’ bed. Those hiding places were meant more to comfort us than anything else, because they never fooled anyone, least of all the soldiers, who flushed us out in no time with vigorous kicks, all the while calling us cockroaches or little snakes.

Mama was never satisfied with her survival strategies. She was forever coming up with improvements to her camouflage, forever finding new refuges for her children. But deep down she knew there was only one sanctuary, only one way we could ensure our survival: crossing the border, leaving for Burundi, as so many Tutsis already had. But she never once thought of taking that way out herself. Neither my father nor my mother ever considered going into exile. I think they’d made up their minds to die in Rwanda. They would wait there to be killed, they would let themselves be murdered, but the children had to survive. And so my mother worked out every detail of our escape to Burundi, in case of emergency. She went off alone into the bush, scouting for trails that might lead to the border. She marked out a path, and under her guidance, not quite understanding why, we played that strange game of follow-the-leader.

Everything at home sat ready for the big departure, which might be announced at any moment, set off by rumours of massacres going around Nyamata, rifle shots in the night, the local governor’s threats, a neighbour’s arrest … A few sweet potatoes, some bananas, a little calabash of sorghum beer were always left wrapped up in a piece of pagne. We girls were meant to take that bundle along when we slipped away and set out for Burundi. It would accompany us into exile. My sisters and I refused to look at it, because to us it was a dark omen of the miseries awaiting us.

But it was Alexia and André that most worried my mother. They weren’t there with the rest of us. They were at school, and wouldn’t be back until the holidays. Mama imagined the worst: one day Alexia and André would come home and find no one there. The house would have been sacked and burned, she and Cosma would have been killed, and at least one of the three girls, or so she hoped, would have managed to escape from the killers and find her way to Burundi. But then what would become of Alexia and André? They’d have to find enough strength after their long walk from school to head straight for the border and face the many dangers they’d find on the way: patrols, elephants, buffalo … And so, in prearranged places, under a stone, near a stump, she buried provisions – beans, sweet potatoes. I helped her dig the holes, line them with fine grasses, make sure some air could get in. But of course we had to change the supplies regularly, and then we ate the slightly spoilt food buried by a mother’s love.