Thoughts on Ce que murmurent les collines: Nouvelles rwandaises by Scholastique Mukasonga

As I noted in a previous post, I started my remedial French-language reading this summer with this book because they are short stories and may lend themselves to teaching in the future. I will probably offer a survey of literature class this spring, and want to be sure to include francophone authors in the mix.

Going into this I knew nothing of Mukasonga's biography or her work. I learned quite a bit about the genocide of the 1990s from a cross-cultural persuasion course I taught in 2013, but after this much time, most of the details escape me. That means I was basically a clean slate going in to it.

My overall reaction was that I feel like a better person for reading it. The average person doesn't know much about Rwanda and like me, if they do know something, it's probably something vague related to the genocide. For today's typical college students who are between 18 and 22, they may not even have that much. While my background as a francophoniste has given me a strong foundation in West African literary traditions and to some extent their cultural, political and economic contexts, I don't want to fall into the habit that so many white Westerners do of assuming Africa is some dark, exotic, monolithic place and whatever I do know about it can be applied broadly across the whole continent. Again, reading this was one small step to making sure I personally avoid that.

Below are some of the characteristics I observed about Mukasonga's writing in this collection. These examples are from "La rivière Rukarara." The examples from this one story give a good overview of her writing in general.

oral tradition

• pg 14 le soir, à la veillée, à l'heure des contes

gender roles

• pg 11 mother = nostalgia
• pg 11 mom forbids all kids, mêmes aux garçons intrépides, from playing near the steep banks of a river (there are two different sets of rules, one for boys and another for girls)
• pg 16/122 in Rwanda there is no "nom de famille." Fathers choose names for their kids at birth and pick something that relates to it. Muka is a prefix that signals it is a feminine name. It = femme de... or celle de... so it also means women gain social status through their relationship through a male family member

education and lack of literacy

• pg 13 her mother can't read her father's bible

tension between Catholicism and indigenous religions

• pg 13 le baptême le plus efficace, ce n'était pas celui que nous avions reçu des bons pères mais celui qu'elle nous avait administré...avec l'eau...de la Rukarara (river near her home)

subtle allusions to the ethnic tensions that caused the genocide

• pg 12 her famille, like many other Tutsi were deported and were internal refugees, were exiled
• pg  14 in 1963 her family members still living near the Rukarara were almost all massacred
• pg 29 inventer des êtres tout juste sortis de la Fable, une race quasi primordiale qui réenchanterait l'Afrique avilie par des activités industrielles et mercantiles. Et les Tutsi, si grands, aux traits si fins, à l'allure si imposante, étaient justement là pour tenir le rôle...Là où il n'y avait que des Rwandais, on vit des Egyptiens issue en droite ligne des pharaons... (the language choices emphasize the artifice, the construction, the idealization behind the process of the Tutsis being set apart from the Hutus)
• pg 22 the Tutsis impressed early colonizers. "Leur physique, leur attitude corroborent le portrait qu'en a dressé le premier Européen à pénétrer au Rwanda, le comte von Goetzen..."
• pg 28 colonizers carry themselves with white superiority
• pg 28 le plus grand malheur qui soit arrivé aux Rwandais, c'est d'habiter aux sources du Nil, là où depuis l'Antiquité, s'était déposé le mythe d'une contré originelle, d'un paradis perdu et inaccessible

migration

• pg 15 refugees need mysterious permis de séjour and titres de voyages that opened doors to Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire, Belgium, France, Germany, US, above all Canada

differentiation between Rwandan culture and W. African traditions

• like griots (which are so central, even sacred, to the francophone [West] African canon).
• pg 16/122 in Rwanda there is no "nom de famille." Fathers choose names for their kids at birth and pick something that relates to it. Muka is a prefix that signals it is a feminine name. It = femme de... or celle de... so it also means women gain social status through their relationship through a male family member
• pg 26 reference to un boy

Writing Style:

• I was struck by the powerful language choices like this one, pg 17 "Comment aurais-je pu oublier la Rukarara? N'était-elle pas comme inscrite dans ma chair?"
• autobiographical-her narrator is herself. Pg 19 references her novel Notre Dame du Nil

Aller/Retour: Reflections on France 8 Years Later

I spent just over two weeks in France with a diverse group from my university. By diverse I mean an art history professor, her husband, six art history students, a retired music professor who went for fun, a 60+ year old French student, the biological mother of an art history student who also joined just for fun, and a non-traditional student originally from Guatemala who recently graduated and wanted to add more international travel to her resume. We spent the bulk of our time in Paris, bien sûr, and a few days in Aix-en-Provence and Marseille.

View from the Marseille train station. 

It had been eight years since my last trip to France. The last time I was there I was still a student working on my PhD. I was the co-chaperone to a group of high school students. We used a private bus and French guide to lead us from Paris through Normandie and Bretagne. The students stayed with French families in Rennes and I stayed with my own near Nantes.

There were many similarities between the two trips. My favorite foods haven't changed (chèvre, coconut anything, hazelnut anything, croissants aux amandes, rillettes, galettes, Muscadet, etc) and my favorite sites/activities are about the same ("owning" a table at a café for an hour or so of reading and writing, any kind of castle, the Musée d'Orsay, rue Mouffetard, boulevard St. Michel).

A lot of things were different, though. There were places I re-visited and re-appreciated.

There were things I did, tried or saw for the first time. Like this sculpture in Place Sarte/Beauvoir near St. Germain des Près in Paris.

Like this example of street art off of rue Mouffetard in Paris

Or Canal St. Martin in eastern Paris, a neighborhood gaining in popularity thanks to its reputation as a hipster enclave

And this Algerian pastry shop in the same neighborhood

I'd been to Marseille before and loved its bright, urban vibe, but I hadn't ventured to the islands just off its coast including Château d'If. My first visit there cultivated my love of Maghrébin pastries but this trip I shared them with the students and made it part of a lesson on France's diversity.

I'd long wanted to visit the Institut du monde arabe and finally made it on my last day. This is a close up of the windows along its facade. The building's architecture and position perfectly reflect its purpose and contents.

I noticed several social changes as well. For example:

• many, many people were exercising in Paris, notably by running laps in the Luxembourg garden. No one looked strangely at them as they did me when I went running in France last time
• very few people smoked
• portion sizes in restaurants were huge and several restaurants offered (unsolicited!) to give out doggie bags
• most of the students did not speak French and yet they had no trouble with shopkeepers, waiters, or customer service agents who were more than willing, and in some case eager, to speak English
• throughout Paris there were many more locals with Asian roots than I'd ever noticed before
• Maghrébins were more mainstream than ever before as evidenced in the popularity of pâtisseries, restaurants, and boutiques managed by them and located in heavily touristed areas. My favorite off of boulevard St. Michel in Paris had been renovated since my last pilgrimage. In the past I was usually the only one there. This time there were six people (French, judging from their accents) ahead of me and three more behind. The daughter of one of my students lives just down the street and attests to its popularity with the locals
• despite of, or perhaps because of, the Front National swept the elections while I was there, undoubtedly changing the makeup of the Assemblée nationale and France's representation in the EU