Igifu
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The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor.
Scholastique Mukasonga’s five autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on.
In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or “igifu,” gnawing away at her belly. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent’s bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba’s mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival.
The writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk, and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Mukasonga sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.
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Scholastique Mukasonga was born in Rwanda in 1956 and experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. Her first novel, Our Lady of the Nile, won the Ahamadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012 and was shortlisted for the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award.
Jordan Stump received the 2001 French-American Foundation’s Translation Prize for his translation of Le Jardin des Plantes by Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon. In 2006, Stump was named Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has translated the work of Eric Chevillard, Marie Redonnet, Patrick Modiano, Honoré de Balzac, and Jules Verne, among others. He is a professor of French literature at the University of Nebraska.
