Scholastique Mukasonga’s work is powerful and painful and so important. We did a full podcast episode devoted to her work a year or two ago, and reading all of her work available then remains a very special reading experience for me. Archipelago Books has continued to release her work, and we recently got a new one, her 2022 novel Sister Deborah, translated by Mark Polizzotti.

Mukasonga has published both memoirs and fiction. Sister Deborah is one of Mukasonga’s fictional works, like Our Lady of the Nile and Kibogo, and I think this might be my favorite of them (my favorite of her books remains her memoirs: Cockroaches, The Barefoot Woman, and Igifu).

In the first section of Sister Deborah, a woman, Ikirezi, is looking back on her childhood in Rwanda in the 1930s. She recalls often being sick, and no one was able to help. Then one day, over the protests of her husband, Ikirezi’s mother takes Ikirezi to Sister Deborah for healing.

Sister Deborah, we learn, is a Black woman from America who has come to set things right in Rwanda. It doesn’t go as planned, and years later Ikirezi is sifting through the historical record, trying to figure out just what happened to Sister Deborah and her movement.

Over the following pages we learn some of what is said to have happened as well as what Sister Deborah herself, speaking to Ikirezi somehow later in time, says happened. And then we get a short final section that, for me, made the book incredibly impactful. If you have not read anything by Mukasonga, you should, and Sister Deborah is a good place to start.