“Grief”
by Scholastique Mukasonga
from the June 22, 2020 issue of The New Yorker
It’s great to see another story from Scholastique Mukasonga in The New Yorker. I first got to know some of her work a few years ago when Archipelago published Our Lady of the Nile and Cockroaches. Her work is powerful and important as she looks, usually from a very personal perspective, at her family’s history in Rwanda. She was a young girl when her family was driven out of her home village and moved to a refugee camp. Truly, there is no way for me to put into words, let alone for a brief introductory post like this, what she and her family went through over the next several decades. It looks like this particular piece concerns what happened to her family in Rwanda in the 1990s, after she herself had managed to get to France. Here are the first few paragraphs:
On TV, on the radio, they never called it genocide. As if that word were reserved. Too serious. Too serious for Africa. Yes, there were massacres, but there were always massacres in Africa. And these massacres were happening in a country that no one had ever heard of. A country that no one could find on a map. Tribal hatred, primitive, atavistic hatred: nothing to understand there. “Weird stuff goes on where you come from,” people would tell her.
She herself didn’t know the word, but in Kinyarwanda there was a very old term for what was happening in her homeland: gutsembatsemba, a verb, used when talking about parasites or mad dogs, things that had to be eradicated, and about Tutsis, also known as inyenzi—cockroaches—something else to be wiped out. She remembered the story her Hutu schoolmates at high school in Kigali had told her, laughing: “Someday a child will ask his mother, ‘Mama, who were those Tutsis I keep hearing about? What did they look like?,’ and the mother will answer, ‘They were nothing at all, my son. Those are just stories.’ ”
Nevertheless, she hadn’t lost hope. She wanted to know. Her father, her mother, her brothers, her sisters, her whole family back in Rwanda—some of them might still be alive. Maybe the slaughter had spared them for now? Maybe they’d managed to escape into exile, as she had? Her parents, on the hill, had no telephone, of course, but she called one of her brothers, who taught in Ruhengeri. The phone rang and rang. No one answered. She called her sister, who’d married a shopkeeper in Butare. A voice she’d never heard before told her, “There’s nobody here.” She called her brother in Canada. He was the eldest. If their parents were dead, then he’d be the head of the family. Perhaps he had news, perhaps he had advice, perhaps he could help her begin to face her terror. They spoke, and then they fell silent. What was there to say? From now on, they were alone.
This is heart-breaking. I’m glad that she has been willing and able to write. This looks to be part of Igifu, a collection that is coming out from Archipelago in September. That’s definitely a book to have on your radar.
Please share your thoughts below.
Scholasticism Mukasonga’s “Grief” is difficult to read because the subject is the deaths of the protagonist’s family in Rwanda and the overwhelming loss she continues to feel after having escaped to France. But Mukasonga has a subtle way of making death offer the odd spiritual gain of guiding one towards endeavoring to live a larger more fulfilling life instead of the bare indifferent ordinary existence the loved one’s death usually is perceived to have left to the survivor. The essence of the dead loved one within oneself fuels the surviving family member toward living a larger more accomplished existence like a star shining brightly in the sky and one wonders where it obtains all the raw energy to achieve such an overwhelming radiance. Most people have trouble seeing it that way because deriving a higher sense of cause and effect out of death can’t be done very easily. Excellent writing affirms the unseen for those who might suspect it still might exist. Another thing she does is formulate how the otherness of racism, the otherness of black from white is an artificial concept. The protagonist seeing her own black father’s body in the completely unfamiliar white father’s body in a coffin affirms the interracial interweaving of our souls even if the bodies physically look different or if one overvalues the differences (which is a huge sin) rather than the similarities. Death makes everyone almost exactly similar to everyone else. So this story can be uncomfortable to read in how it looks at death and in particular the horrific death of family in a genocide which the brain has immense difficulty in either processing or accepting. But when you finish reading it, there is tiny bit of transcendence or affirmation to have been offered which is a rarely attained aspect of the best writing.
It seems like so much of what the New Yorker prints of late seems either like reportage (Kunzru’s story “A Transparent Woman) or thinly veiled memoir (Hemingway’s story a month back). This definitely falls into the latter category. But…unlike her earlier “Cattle Praise Song” which I couldn’t finish, this is powerful. She sort of takes the reader on a Kubler-Ross like journey through the stages of grief and some interesting sublimations practiced on the way to a full acceptance.
I had been putting off reading this story after a quick glance at the title and subject matter—a story called “Grief” just didn’t seem very alluring in 2020–but I finally dug it out of my stack of unread New Yorkers and was seized. Mukasonga imbues the story with grim and gripping imagery: the bags of bones and skulls, the face in the latrine, the list of names which is the closest thing the protagonist will ever have to a grave marker. A cursory glance at the author’s biography might suggest a hint of autofiction, yet the power of the story elevates it above the “navel-gazing” found in other contemporary stories. The theme of grief in exile resonates and, while I’d hesitate to equate genocide with the pandemic, seems relevant in light of current realities. And yet, we are given an ending that, if anything, is hopeful. Definitely in my top 5 stories of 2020.