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

Doctors, titles, and identity politics

My husband received a thoughtful gift-a subscription to a magazine called The Week. It is an aggregate of sorts that gives a concise overview of the week's major events as covered by numerous news sources from around the world, liberal and conservative alike. In the May 10, 2013 edition it gave a snapshot of an opinion piece by Charles C.W. Cooke from The National Review, "Too many doctors in the house." In it, Cooke argues that only people with a medical degree should use the title "doctor" in everyday contexts. The Week's editors give three examples from Cooke's original piece: Dr. Jill Biden, wife of Vice President Joe Biden, Dr. Cornel West, a philosopher at Princeton, and Dr. Maya Angelou, the recipient of 30 honorary degrees.* The piece focuses on the first, Dr. Biden, whose doctorate is in educational leadership.

I am struck by a couple of things. First, he says he doesn't use MA after his name, even though he earned one, because no one else is really interested in his "non-vocational education." That's his choice. Dr. Biden ostensibly feels that on some level it is important to use her title to share her credentials, perhaps because it makes her expertise more credible.

Cooke's primary gripe about Dr. Biden is she consistently uses the title Dr. across multiple contexts, even those outside her professional scope. He thinks when she's outside her professional context she should use a different title, presumably Mrs. or Ms. My feeling is that as the wife of a prominent political figure who is himself often in the media and whose title is regularly cited, her name is regularly used in formal contexts where titles are frequently used. Perhaps the regular use of "Dr. Biden" reflects the formality of much of her life. I wouldn't want to be constantly referred to as Ms. Bartlett (or worse Mrs. Bartlett) when I had worked hard to achieve the degree I had. Medical doctors are allowed and encouraged to be addressed as Dr. across numerous contexts. Why is it different for PhD holders and the other variants of doctoral degrees?

Second, he writes it is by chance that those who have doctorates can call themselves doctors. He provides the origins of the word. I wonder when the term "physician" arose and why we don't refer to medical doctors as "Physician Angelou" instead of Dr. Why is one group more deserving of the term than another?

Third, he quotes J. Frank Dobie who argues that the average PhD thesis is nothing but "a transference of bones from one graveyard to another" and adds he doesn't argue with that. Medical, scientific, social and cultural advances would not be where they currently are without the skills and insights discovered in seemingly useless PhD theses. I wonder why Cooke is so quick to paint all advanced degree work with the same negative brushstrokes.

Finally, I am most perplexed by the primary examples Cooke has chosen: a white woman (Dr. Biden), a black man (Dr. West), and a black woman (Dr. Angelou). It is likely each has had to surmount considerably more obstacles to earn their degrees than their white, male counterparts. There's a subtle suggestion that those with "real" degrees look like this man, Sir Raymond Firth (an ethnologist with a PhD)

There are numerous examples of other PhD holders who are men. For example: Bill Cosby, Ed.D in education; David Brin, PhD in physics; Jack Williamson, PhD in English; Brian May, PhD astrophysics. After doing a quick google search of each one it appears that Bill Cosby is most often discussed in conjunction with the title "Dr." Are men like him exempt from Cooke's contempt because they do not appear to use the title "Dr." to the widespread degree Dr. Biden and Dr. West do? It begs the question: whose choice is it, the person's or the source describing that person. For example, in this piece Bill Cosby is presented with his title. Does this violate Cooke's code?

I don't mean to suggest that Cooke has been deliberately sexist or racist in his opinion piece. I suspect the examples that came to his mind did so because there is a broader social issue at work that goes largely unnoticed much of the time. As a society, we tend not to question the credentials and marks of prestige of white men. We are much more likely to question those markers when they are possessed by minorities such as women and people of color. NPR did a story a week or two ago on a physician from a minority background whose approach to his patients has had to change because they initially perceive him as unqualified because of his race. He invests greater time in them than his white colleagues because he has to set himself apart and find a way to connect to them. This is but one example. My overall point is to raise awareness of the inadvertent assumptions we make about people's backgrounds. Let's remember that professors also look like these women, Emma Perry Carr (PhD in chemistry) and Chien-Shiung Wu (PhD in physics).

(For thought-provoking discussions of some of these same issues I highly recommend NPR's new blog on code switching.)

*For the record, I generally agree that whatever title a person chooses to adopt it should be grounded in an actively earned achievement. In the case of Maya Angelou, since she is the recipient of honorary degrees bestowed upon her for the contributions she's made to literature and society, not coursework completed, I am personally uncomfortable using the term Dr. with her. However, it's not up to me. It's up to her and the institutions who granted her those degrees. If I am ever lucky enough to meet her I will happily greet her by whatever title she prefers!

Images from Flickr The Commons which have no known copyright. 

Female vs male authors-is there a difference?

About two weeks ago a Nobel laureate publicly asserted that no woman writer could be his equal. Below is just one article on his comments.

"VS Naipaul finds no woman writer his literary match-not even Jane Austen"
By Amy Fallon
The Guardian
Thursday June 2, 2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jun/02/vs-naipaul-jane-austen-women-writers

Jane Austen

This story made me think about all the great writers out there and whether or not you can discern simply from reading their work if the author is a man or a woman. I'd like to offer a few examples from the French and Francophone literary world that contradict Mr. Naipaul's key assertions that 
1) women's writing is overly sentimental and 
2) women have a narrow world-view due to the fact they are not true masters of their homes.

• Yasmina Khadra's Les Agneaux du Seigneur (In the Name of God) brilliantly complicates the question. Athough "Yasmina" is a female first name, it is actually the pseudonym of a former Algerian military officer. This novel depicts an Algerian village in the 1990s torn apart by civil conflicts over the appropriate role of religion in daily life. There are few female characters and even less sentimentality. It shocked many readers who were unaware of the author's pseudonym because women were supposed to be isolated from the brutalities he described.

• Yasmina Khadra's The Attack goes in the other direction. In this novel an Arab Muslim living in Israel discovers his wife (also an Arab Muslim) was a suicide bomber who caused the deaths of numerous innocent people. He was not particularly religious and didn't realize how important her faith was to her. While grieving her loss, he must also comes to terms with the terrible act she has committed. Virtually every page drips with heart-wrenching sentimentality.

• Chateaubriand's novels René and Atala capture the Romantic angst of early 19th century French literature. In these novels, and many others of the time authored by both men and women, reflect the "mal du siècle" or melancholy that came with the new century. The main characters are consumed by sentimentality and the struggle to find a meaningful path through life.

Chateaubriand

If sentimentality is the mark of women's writing, Mr. Naipaul should check out these examples. 

His comments also raise some excellent questions:

• Is there automatically a correlation between the author's identity and the topics he/she describes?

• If so, how much must a reader know about the author's background in order to understand his/her text?

• Can a reader "feel" the identity of the author bleeding through his/her writing? If not, why not?

• What do we make of texts that we think were authored by someone of one sex, only to find out we were wrong?

• Hélène Cixous theorized that there is such a thing as "écriture féminine" but what exactly characterizes "feminine writing"? Can a male writer adopt those characteristics? (She thought a few could.)

• VS Naipaul won the Nobel prize for literature, but he's also been criticized for his opinions on race and women. Should his talent absolve him of his shortcomings? Should Nobel prize winners be held to higher standards of conduct?