Description
Fiction. Literature. HTML: In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace them with European Christianity. When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth. Kibogo's story is reserved for the evening's end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge. To some, Kibogo's tale is founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor's hoax. All debate the twisted roots of this story, but deep down, all secretly wonder�??can Kibogo really summon the rain?… (more)
Publication
Archipelago (2022), 152 pages
User reviews
LibraryThing member richardderus
NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION IN TRANSLATION FINALIST! Winners announced tomorrow, 16 November 2022.
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace
When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth.
Kibogo's story is reserved for the evening's end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge.
To some, Kibogo's tale is founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor's hoax. All debate the twisted roots of this story, but deep down, all secretly wonder--can Kibogo really summon the rain?
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Come and sit down. Settle in for a winter afternoon's pleasure-reading of someone else's culture's stories. This novella-in-stories is, in under 150pp or about three hours'-worth of reading, going to tell you about Rwanda. Not the country that threw itself a genocide in 1994. The foreign colony undergoing coerced christianization, the colonizers whose need for men and food to fight a war on another continent was the only thing they saw, the people of Ruanda-Urundi whose bodies and souls were the raw material and the means of production but never just themselves. What happens when Nature decides to withhold her usual munificence and deny Mankind her fecundity is always very, very educational to the mass of the people.
What Kibogo does, then, is tell you the stories of the people. They're funny, they're poignant, they're sometimes befuddlingly different from our Global Northern expectations. But they are alive, they sing on the pages of this book, they make their world felt and heard and seen through Author Scholastique Mukasonga's careful, gentle, unsparingly honest eyes. Translator Mark Polizzotti comes in for a heap of praise as well. I could hear Author Scholastique speaking to me, and he is the reason I wasn't slugging through the book with La Petite Larousse ten centimeters from my elbow at all times.
Kibogo is a god, a divine creature whose rule over Ruanda's people is challenged by the Catholic priests. If you know anything about that religion, the focus of worship is what they start with changing...Jesus, not Kibogo...while syncretizing as much of the pre-christian myth structure and storytelling architecture as possible. In the event, who's the god isn't always clear...it comes down to the name one calls when one is in extremis...and that name can surprise even the caller.
The worst part of believing in a super-natural being, a creature above the natural world we must perforce inhabit, is that there is always, always a loose end to tuck in, a wrinkled page to smooth out and make readable. When a man works to make this his life's gift to the world, he neglects the woman whose gift the world is in: No birth happens without a man and a woman agreeing to make it happen. The issues for the Ruandan god's bride and the Catholic church's groom grow urgent. Both seek a spirit, see a world for what it has and can be made into; the world, meanwhile, just Is. How can this end except in tears? Watch and learn, people without belief.
Or just follow Author Scholastique as she, seeming as bemused as the rest of us, watches the borning Rwandan African attempts to put flesh on the hollow bones of ancestral skulls. It is here that I felt the sting of tears as, not free of sarcasm, Author Scholastique offers up the flesh of a bumbling, pompous Western world in sacrifice to the simple, bright, carnivorous land we all must share. The land is the only god worth worshiping because it is the only god we can touch and who responds to us, who feeds our families and accepts our worn-out remains for its eventual reuse, recycling what can not be reduced more than it is by the myriad eating mouths and excreting guts of Life.
This was a rare, perfect reading experience for me. It came exactly when I wanted and needed it. It answered some call I made, unknowing, as I looked for a reason for winter's cold and brilliance not to weigh me down. Thank you for it, Author Scholatique, Translator Polizzotti, and Archipelago Books via Edelweiss+. Gifts of this great value come when they're most needed.
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: In four beautifully woven parts, Mukasonga spins a marvelous recounting of the clash between ancient Rwandan beliefs and the missionaries determined to replace
Show More
them with European Christianity.When a rogue priest is defrocked for fusing the gospels with the martyrdom of Kibogo, a fierce clash of cults ensues. Swirling with the heady smell of wet earth and flashes of acerbic humor, Mukasonga brings to life the vital mythologies that imbue the Rwandan spirit. In doing so, she gives us a tale of disarming simplicity and profound universal truth.
Kibogo's story is reserved for the evening's end, when women sit around a fire drinking honeyed brew, when just a few are able to stave off sleep. With heads nodding, drifting into the mist of a dream, one faithful storyteller will weave the old legends of the hillside, stories which church missionaries have done everything in their power to expunge.
To some, Kibogo's tale is founding myth, celestial marvel, magic incantation, bottomless source of hope. To white priests spritzing holy water on shriveled, drought-ridden trees, it looms like red fog over the village: forbidden, satanic, a witchdoctor's hoax. All debate the twisted roots of this story, but deep down, all secretly wonder--can Kibogo really summon the rain?
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Come and sit down. Settle in for a winter afternoon's pleasure-reading of someone else's culture's stories. This novella-in-stories is, in under 150pp or about three hours'-worth of reading, going to tell you about Rwanda. Not the country that threw itself a genocide in 1994. The foreign colony undergoing coerced christianization, the colonizers whose need for men and food to fight a war on another continent was the only thing they saw, the people of Ruanda-Urundi whose bodies and souls were the raw material and the means of production but never just themselves. What happens when Nature decides to withhold her usual munificence and deny Mankind her fecundity is always very, very educational to the mass of the people.
What Kibogo does, then, is tell you the stories of the people. They're funny, they're poignant, they're sometimes befuddlingly different from our Global Northern expectations. But they are alive, they sing on the pages of this book, they make their world felt and heard and seen through Author Scholastique Mukasonga's careful, gentle, unsparingly honest eyes. Translator Mark Polizzotti comes in for a heap of praise as well. I could hear Author Scholastique speaking to me, and he is the reason I wasn't slugging through the book with La Petite Larousse ten centimeters from my elbow at all times.
Kibogo is a god, a divine creature whose rule over Ruanda's people is challenged by the Catholic priests. If you know anything about that religion, the focus of worship is what they start with changing...Jesus, not Kibogo...while syncretizing as much of the pre-christian myth structure and storytelling architecture as possible. In the event, who's the god isn't always clear...it comes down to the name one calls when one is in extremis...and that name can surprise even the caller.
The worst part of believing in a super-natural being, a creature above the natural world we must perforce inhabit, is that there is always, always a loose end to tuck in, a wrinkled page to smooth out and make readable. When a man works to make this his life's gift to the world, he neglects the woman whose gift the world is in: No birth happens without a man and a woman agreeing to make it happen. The issues for the Ruandan god's bride and the Catholic church's groom grow urgent. Both seek a spirit, see a world for what it has and can be made into; the world, meanwhile, just Is. How can this end except in tears? Watch and learn, people without belief.
Or just follow Author Scholastique as she, seeming as bemused as the rest of us, watches the borning Rwandan African attempts to put flesh on the hollow bones of ancestral skulls. It is here that I felt the sting of tears as, not free of sarcasm, Author Scholastique offers up the flesh of a bumbling, pompous Western world in sacrifice to the simple, bright, carnivorous land we all must share. The land is the only god worth worshiping because it is the only god we can touch and who responds to us, who feeds our families and accepts our worn-out remains for its eventual reuse, recycling what can not be reduced more than it is by the myriad eating mouths and excreting guts of Life.
This was a rare, perfect reading experience for me. It came exactly when I wanted and needed it. It answered some call I made, unknowing, as I looked for a reason for winter's cold and brilliance not to weigh me down. Thank you for it, Author Scholatique, Translator Polizzotti, and Archipelago Books via Edelweiss+. Gifts of this great value come when they're most needed.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Dreesie
Mukasonga writes the four stories in this book as traditional tales, the kind told by women around a fire at night's end. These stories are all connected, and are snapshots in the evolution of a community in Rwanda over a period of decades (30 years?)--from the missionaries converting the locals
This book leaves the reader with a lot to think about. I found it quite different than her book The Barefoot Woman, longlisted for the NBA for Translated Literature a few years ago. That book was memoir, while this reads as fiction with a basis in social commentary. The two books also have different translators. I liked the writing (translating?) of the previous work much more, but I think this one might end up being more memorable in the long run.
Show More
and eliminating their "pagan" ways and rites, but enough people know of the traditional methods of calling on Kibogo to bring the rains during a horrible famine. By the end of the book, some decades later (the last surviving elders of the first story are now old men) when the knowledge is essentially lost. And now a European anthropologist has arrived who wants to know about old ways--though, predictably, he has his own agenda.This book leaves the reader with a lot to think about. I found it quite different than her book The Barefoot Woman, longlisted for the NBA for Translated Literature a few years ago. That book was memoir, while this reads as fiction with a basis in social commentary. The two books also have different translators. I liked the writing (translating?) of the previous work much more, but I think this one might end up being more memorable in the long run.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Castlelass
This is a story of Rwanda in the 1940s when it was a part of German East Africa under the control of Belgium. It explores colonial exploitation and the introduction of the Christian religion into Rwandan culture. It is based around the Rwandan myth of Kibogo, who is said to have sacrificed himself
Show More
while summoning rain to save the people from famine and drought. It is told in four parts, which form different perspectives of the same narrative. Storytelling is a recurring theme. It is a critique of colonialism and the damage done through imposing external beliefs. I appreciated it but did not find it particularly engaging. Show Less
LibraryThing member quondame
In colonial Rwanda a drought has driven the elders to seek the help of the outcast bride of Kibogo despite the hold the Catholic church has on the rest of the hillside population and indeed the country. The ravages of colonialism continue to warp and elaborate the Kibogo myth and the lives of the
Show More
locals through out the book. Show Less
LibraryThing member amanda4242
Kibogo tells of the conflict between native Rwandan religious beliefs and the Christian religion brought by European colonizers. This short book is divided into four parts, with each part revealing a little more of the legend of Kibogo, and how his worship is suppressed by the missionaries who
Received via NetGalley.
Show More
twist their own religion to further their agenda. A very well-told and thought-provoking tale.Received via NetGalley.
Show Less
LibraryThing member MilksopQuidnunc
Religions, especially Catholicism or Christianity, are so vague and absorbent that all phenomena can find themselves subsumed within them. Any tragedy is God's plan and any windfall is God's grace. Missionaries are playing a game of God-loving Katamari Damacy, where you roll around the world
The middle of the book, the Akayezu & Mukamwezi chapters, display the bizarre syncretism between Rwandan folklore and Christian colonialism. The conversion from the former to the latter occurs more so out of necessity than desire - Rwandan villagers are wracked by drought and poverty, and all the other maladies that follow in the footsteps of drought & poverty. The Belgian missionaries have resources, but only at the cost of conversion and obedience. One of the recurring themes in this book is playing on the perception of Rwandan (and Africans) as savages who know not what they do. The Rwandans share a distance from these white missionaries who always arrive in a cloud of dust from their expensive vehicles. The Rwandans listen to their spiels perfunctorily, sometimes with obvious exasperation, until they leave again. They're entertaining these religious diatribes until the food & money comes out. However from the perspective of the missionaries, they're hanging on every word and depending on them for more than just necessities.
"We know what prayers are needed to bring back the rain. But we, the benevolent priests, we will not hide them from you, as the witchdoctors do their maledictions. You shall learn them at catechism and we shall recite them and we shall sing them together, every day of the week." This grants the priests the cozy position to attribute any rain to their prayers and the lack of rain to lack of praying. It's a win-win. However, "Everyone was used to [the priest's] reprimands," and "everyone knew perfectly well that those who consulted witchdoctors would still go see them, that those who were initiated into Kubandwa would still get up in the small hours of the night to celebrate their worship." Despite this continuing belief in their own religion, the Rwandans follow the missionary's "directives" the way you knock on wood when discussing a possibly bad outcome. It's a free & harmless way of hedging your bets. I'm not superstitious, but if there is such a thing I'm covered.
The survival of Rwandan religion is a nocturnal one. The preservation of a people's history must occur at night when the colonialist gaze is obscured by restful eyelids. The villagers continue seeking guidance from elders and spiritual leaders when it's only the Rwandans who are still awake. Yet even so, there's moments throughout the story where elders talk over each other and claim they're telling the stories wrong. The reader sees the folklore of Rwanda drying up and falling apart the way their crops do in the drought. It's when they need their land again do they water the roots of their beliefs, but in a way that makes clear they're out of practice.
Ultimately, the spirituality is a means to an end, but the beauty of this book is exploring how regardless of their motivation, the use of ancestry and folklore as a perennial crutch guarantees its survival all the same. When the Belgian professor arrives to seek examples of human sacrifice in Rwandan culture (a search that's actually willing a racist fable into existence for the sake of academic prestige), he uses a local boy's knowledge (and body) as a figurative & literal crutch. He depends on the boy to dredge his village's history for evidence of fictional practices. The boy's belief is clearly real, but he depends on his importance to the professor to secure his future (enrollment in a white school, marriage to a white woman, property outside Africa). Both are selfishly motivated, but one is decidedly more parasitic. The boy appears to leverage his heritage to abandon it, but his motivations are irrelevant when his actions and existence enable Rwandan history to experience another breath.
When the professor's plane crashes into a mountain range on his return trip, the nocturnal storytellers maintain "Kibogo struck with his Thunder-Spear the thieves of bones, the thieves of memory." Whether this is true or not is just as irrelevant, because this book is not about the facticity of Rwandan religion over Western religion. It's about the survival of a people in the face of erasure, and the stubborn persistence of belief. It's about the way words and stories trudge through time even in bastardized forms, to imbue the new with the shade of history, which always looms large so long as someone's there to tell the stories.
Show More
crushing & collecting people, belongings, landmarks, and really whatever you're large enough to dominate. Since God is above all, other religions are pagan superstitions or temptations created by the Devil. In Kibogo, Mukasonga describes that religious colonialism across generations, from skeptical introduction to Christianity to stalwart belief, but with the underflowing belief in Rwanda as it is and has always been.The middle of the book, the Akayezu & Mukamwezi chapters, display the bizarre syncretism between Rwandan folklore and Christian colonialism. The conversion from the former to the latter occurs more so out of necessity than desire - Rwandan villagers are wracked by drought and poverty, and all the other maladies that follow in the footsteps of drought & poverty. The Belgian missionaries have resources, but only at the cost of conversion and obedience. One of the recurring themes in this book is playing on the perception of Rwandan (and Africans) as savages who know not what they do. The Rwandans share a distance from these white missionaries who always arrive in a cloud of dust from their expensive vehicles. The Rwandans listen to their spiels perfunctorily, sometimes with obvious exasperation, until they leave again. They're entertaining these religious diatribes until the food & money comes out. However from the perspective of the missionaries, they're hanging on every word and depending on them for more than just necessities.
"We know what prayers are needed to bring back the rain. But we, the benevolent priests, we will not hide them from you, as the witchdoctors do their maledictions. You shall learn them at catechism and we shall recite them and we shall sing them together, every day of the week." This grants the priests the cozy position to attribute any rain to their prayers and the lack of rain to lack of praying. It's a win-win. However, "Everyone was used to [the priest's] reprimands," and "everyone knew perfectly well that those who consulted witchdoctors would still go see them, that those who were initiated into Kubandwa would still get up in the small hours of the night to celebrate their worship." Despite this continuing belief in their own religion, the Rwandans follow the missionary's "directives" the way you knock on wood when discussing a possibly bad outcome. It's a free & harmless way of hedging your bets. I'm not superstitious, but if there is such a thing I'm covered.
The survival of Rwandan religion is a nocturnal one. The preservation of a people's history must occur at night when the colonialist gaze is obscured by restful eyelids. The villagers continue seeking guidance from elders and spiritual leaders when it's only the Rwandans who are still awake. Yet even so, there's moments throughout the story where elders talk over each other and claim they're telling the stories wrong. The reader sees the folklore of Rwanda drying up and falling apart the way their crops do in the drought. It's when they need their land again do they water the roots of their beliefs, but in a way that makes clear they're out of practice.
Ultimately, the spirituality is a means to an end, but the beauty of this book is exploring how regardless of their motivation, the use of ancestry and folklore as a perennial crutch guarantees its survival all the same. When the Belgian professor arrives to seek examples of human sacrifice in Rwandan culture (a search that's actually willing a racist fable into existence for the sake of academic prestige), he uses a local boy's knowledge (and body) as a figurative & literal crutch. He depends on the boy to dredge his village's history for evidence of fictional practices. The boy's belief is clearly real, but he depends on his importance to the professor to secure his future (enrollment in a white school, marriage to a white woman, property outside Africa). Both are selfishly motivated, but one is decidedly more parasitic. The boy appears to leverage his heritage to abandon it, but his motivations are irrelevant when his actions and existence enable Rwandan history to experience another breath.
When the professor's plane crashes into a mountain range on his return trip, the nocturnal storytellers maintain "Kibogo struck with his Thunder-Spear the thieves of bones, the thieves of memory." Whether this is true or not is just as irrelevant, because this book is not about the facticity of Rwandan religion over Western religion. It's about the survival of a people in the face of erasure, and the stubborn persistence of belief. It's about the way words and stories trudge through time even in bastardized forms, to imbue the new with the shade of history, which always looms large so long as someone's there to tell the stories.
Show Less
Awards
National Book Award (Finalist — Translated Literature — 2022)
Language
Original language
French
Original publication date
2020
Physical description
152 p.; 6.76 inches
ISBN
1953861369 / 9781953861368
Other editions
Kibogo by Scholastique Mukasonga (Paperback)
Similar in this library
Dawn by Sevgi Soysal