„All day long God roams the world,
But every evening He returns home, to Rwanda…”
(Scholastique Mukasonga, Notre-Dame du Nil)
April 6, 1994: the plane on which Juvénal Habyarimana, the President of Rwanda is flying, is taken down near Kigali Airport and within just a few hours on the same day, in the aftermath of his unexpected death, his supporters in the Hutu ethnic group start the gory repression against the Tutsi population. Thus began the Rwandan Genocide that caused, over the course of a mere three months, an estimated number of five hundred thousand to one million victims in the Tutsi ethnic group, but also among the moderate representatives of the Hutu group. Although these tragic events did indeed mark an unprecedented exacerbation of violence in the African continent, they had been preceded, albeit indirectly, by several tense moments that had occurred in this country over a span of more than two decades.
Well acquainted with all these details and having been personally affected by the terror beset on the Tutsi population to which she belonged, in „Notre-Dame du Nil” Scholastique Mukasonga imparts to her readers not only a tough history lesson but also a heart-rending story about present-day people and about the ways in which they behave under certain circumstances.
Born in 1956 in the Gikongoro province in South-West Rwanda, Mukasonga had been, ever since her early childhood, witness to the frequent persecutions against the Tutsi ethnic group – the very first massacres having taken place in 1959 and her family being deported across the country in 1960. Admitted to the Notre-Dame Lycée in Kigali and afterwards to a social worker school, she was forced to go on exile to Burundi and later to France, in the wake of the ethnic cleansing of 1973. However, dozens of members of her family, including her parents, fell victim to the Rwandan Genocide of 1994, and it took Mukasonga ten years to return to Rwanda and devote herself to reviving the memory of her close ones by means of her books, which she has published since 2006: „Inyenzi ou les Cafards”/ transl. „Cockroaches” (2006), „La femme aux pieds nus”/ „The Barefoot Woman” – an impressive homage paid to her mother (2008), „Ce que murmurent les collines. Nouvelles rwandaises” (2014), „Coeur Tambour” (2016), „Un si beau diplôme” (2018), „Kibogo est monté au ciel” (2020), „Sister Deborah” (2022), „Julienne” (2024). For her novel „Notre-Dame du Nil” (transl. „Our Lady of the Nile”), published in 2012, she received ‘Le Prix Théophraste-Renaudot’ and ‘Le Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma’ and the book’s cinematic adaptation, in 2019, was directed by Atiq Rahimi. A special mention deserves the exquisite Romanian version of this novel, recently published by Humanitas Fiction (‘Raftul Denisei’ Collection). The translation, signed by Adina Diniţoiu, is truly outstanding and ever-ingenuous, dexterously rendering, for its Romanian readers, the entire psychological complexity of the text as well as the entire poetry, tension or, as the case may be, roughness that many pages of Scholastique Mukasonga’s novel are imbued with.
It all starts in an apparently calm atmosphere, and the author describes the – apparently serene, in its turn – life in a convent high-school in the Ikibira Mountains, at an altitude of approximately 2,500 meters, not far from the source of the Nile, where it is mainly the daughters of elite Rwandan families who study, not just to complete their education – in the proper sense of the word – but mostly in the hope of a proper marriage in the not so distant future. It is the beginning of the 1970s and, despite the fact that the people appear to be peaceful, the inter-ethnic tensions soon become only too obvious, even in this secluded establishment that seems cut off from the world (precisely for the students to remain pure and to be kept away from any temptations). Enough to mention, in this respect, the famous ‘quota law’, according to which only ten percent of the girl-students could be Tutsi ethnics. And in the senior class of Notre-Dame du Nil there are only two Tutsi girls, Virginia and Veronica. And quite predictably, they will become the favourite targets of the attacks (seemingly harmless at first but gradually turning into genuine instances of physical and psychological terror) of their colleague Gloriosa, the one who nonchalantly alights, day after day, from the luxury car owned by her father, a prominent Hutu politician. Alongside her are Immaculée, who wears her fancy clothes, Frida, who gets pregnant before her long-awaited wedding, Modesta, (half-Hutu by her father, half-Tutsi by her mother), Gloriosa’s friend by necessity rather than by choice. But what might have easily become the story of the high-school years of a group of adolescents, be they Black ones, becomes, against the backdrop of those years’ Rwanda and penned by Scholastique Mukasonga, both a ravaging account of a series of incredible incidents and a deep meditation on the roots of evil and on the perplexing manifestations of violence in this African country. Because the depiction of the beginning of the school-year and of the atmosphere in the boarding-school – with its endless (petty or major…) rivalries among the twenty adolescents living here (with their attempts at asserting their individuality, at hiding in their luggage some goodies brought from home, at voicing and attaining their goals) – is just the starting point of what is about to happen. What is remarkable is the way in which the author masters the technique of suspense, inserting, somehow in the background, the feud between the two ethnic groups, Hutu and Tutsi, to somehow choreograph the incredible events and plot-twists in this impressive book.
Right after the book was published, certain exegetes claimed that some dialogues were rather schematic or that some accents were (quite…) pointedly pedagogical, as were some of the suggestions made by the author from behind the scene in order to underscore the age-long rivalry between the Hutu and the Tutsi and its consequences. But Mukasonga needed those details precisely in order to help her readers, the Western ones in particular (perhaps unacquainted with such manifestations or types of behaviour, perhaps less informed about the olden or more recent history of Africa – of Rwanda in particular – or about the relations between this country and the Germans and the Belgians who had overrun it for centuries on end, with the – by no means disinterested – help of the Catholic Church…), have a better grasp of the way in which things had evolved up to that point of no return; because, in a short while, the narrative touches will turn from light to sombre and darkness will descend upon Notre-Dame du Nil, under the placid gaze of Mother Superior, who will not intervene, or of that of Father Herménégilde, who will only encourage the bullying and whose interest in most of the girls in the boarding-school is far from pedagogical.
The question that lingers in the subtext throughout this novel is how people of different ethnicities or religious denominations can live together in a given space. And what it is that makes the same people get to hate, threaten or even kill one another in particular historical moments. Many fiction writings by authors from the ex-Yugoslav space (the wars of which took place approximately in the same period in which the Rwandan Genocide and the persecutions that marked the years preceding it occurred) implied that the only ones who were responsible for the terror inflicted upon the people were the politicians of the time, who were keen on remaining in power, or on reaching power by any means, and who unhesitatingly resorted to hate-speech in order to antagonize people who were otherwise peaceful or who had somehow managed to find a way of living together. And at least partly, this opinion proves true in the case of Africa too, and it is substantiated by the present novel. Here, at Notre-Dame du Nil, the aggressive Gloriosa concocts a plan to terrorize her colleagues, Virginia and Veronica; she manages to transform the people around her (and, more drastically, the girls around her!) into mere puppets whom she manipulates at will, accusing Virginia and Veronica (as well as some of their alleged accomplices) of having destroyed the statue of the Virgin Mary – Our Lady of the Nile – in the school precinct (the idea of ‘embellishing’ the face of the Virgin Mary having been, in fact, exclusively her own, as the well-off girl had intimated that the nose of the statue resembled that of a Tutsi girl). If Gloriosa had not been there, at Notre-Dame du Nil, none of the ensuing events would have taken place. But she was there, just like numerous Hutu extremists would be there after things got tense in Rwanda in the aftermath of President Juvénal Habyarimana’s death in 1994.
Thus, Mukasonga manages to render the downright biblical enmity between the two main ethnic groups in Rwanda – the Hutu and the Tutsi, one fuelled by the foreign interests in this country (it is a matter of common knowledge that colonial domination had privileged the Tutsi for a long while, as governance had been maintained with their very assistance, which had made the Hutu ethnics deem the respective co-nationals treacherous foreigners who would have to be shunned when the time came – and those moments would not be sparse after the country’s independence was proclaimed in 1962). And, in the Catholic lycée high up in the mountains, the instances on the brink of violence are not sparse either. Because the group of girls, be they of good breeding and having – at least theoretically – a better education than the majority of the population, will only turn into a smaller-scale Rwanda, with its ensuing tensions and conflicts. So that, besides their shared passion for expensive cosmetics (mainly skin-whitening creams), for food and for Kinyarwanda, the language of their home, for expensive cars (and for the men who drive them…), apart from their fervent Catholic faith displayed in festive moments, from the French language spoken in public and from the Christian behaviour exhibited most often with ostentation, these girls carry with them, all along the way, the ideas that enliven the members of their families and ethnic groups. And horror and terror will shortly betide the best lycée in the country, the one so close to the sky, as Mother Superior oftentimes likes to call it.
Obviously, Gloriosa is the quintessence of the negative character par excellence. And, even if many of the moments in which she is portrayed are rather sketchy and not devoid of grotesque or burlesque touches, this detail is not in the least a shortcoming of the present novel. Mukasonga did not intend to render this young woman humane, nor did she try to find excuses for her behaviour – and she would not have had any reason to do so whatsoever. And the self-righteousness of the rich Hutu girl who, at the beginning of the school-year unhesitatingly gives a warm embrace to her Tutsi colleagues (with the sole purpose of keeping them close and of controlling their every move), proves, in time, to be the mask that (inadequately, mention should be made) hides her hideous character and her real criminal intents. And the lycée, apparently located so close to the sky and so far from all the provocations of the ‘madding crowd’, is nothing but the epitome of human degradation, of progressive decay, of involution, from all points of view; in other words, of the path towards the violence, terror and death down which all of Rwanda chose to walk in a fateful moment of its contemporary history. Because, as Simone Weil asserted, evil is the total darkness, the waste-land, the utter devastation, like Gloriosa’s hollow soul, devoid of any trace of mercy or compassion. The embodiment of the historic(al) evil befallen on Rwanda, the teenage-girl who inflicts terror on her school mates is psychologically and behaviourally inferior to the likes of her: even to the shy Modesta, let alone to Immaculée, the rebel of the group and in fact the only one who ventures to speak openly about the incidents in the lycée and about the attitude of the majority of the students.
A coming-of-age story, a painful rite of passage into the ways of the world – which is only seemingly miles away from the school-girls at Notre-Dame du Nil, Mukasonga’s novel was also an ominous forbearing of the Rwandan Genocide fifteen years later. Because the fault lines that are barely sensed at the beginning of the novel will keep deepening, turning the school, and the world by extension, into an inferno from which few will actually find salvage. Veronica and Virginia, the round characters in the Notre-Dame du Nil group of girls, will try to save themselves, but only Virginia will actually be able to do it. Only she has had an innate sense of how she might find a balance between the opposing forces that were ripping apart her soul and world, forever torn between her African descent and her European education, between the habitual height of the Tutsi and the power of the ‘hoe-people’ in the Hutu ethnic group, between the Christianity of the Belgian or German rulers and the Rwandan beliefs, between white and black, light and darkness. She does assume the Christian- European name Virginia, but not the identity it entails, insisting that her real name is Mutamuriza. Close for a short while, just like Veronica, to Monsieur de Fontenaille, the white man who is convinced that the Tutsi are the descendants of the ancient Egyptians and who is obsessed with painting their portraits, Virginia is nevertheless able to remain rational and to listen to his words with an adequate amount of detachment. Similarly, her French is dotted with words of her ancestors and her prayers to the Virgin Mary often blend with her conjuring up of the African rain deities and with prophetic dreams – not haphazardly, Virginia’s salvation appertains both to human and to divine intervention and her dreams are a hallmark in this sense, too. Much like the writer herself, who resorted to the French language in order to tell the tragic story of her kin, yet without ever becoming completely estranged from it in thus doing, Virginia (regarded by many critics as a partial alter-ego of the author, considering the limit-situations described here) has the chance to find a middle-ground and that privileged means of overcoming all the conditionings of the enclosed universe that she was bound to be part of.
The text of the novel has a rough flow and unexpected cliff-hangers, yet it does not lack touches of human warmth, evincing the author’s artistry and equally so her first-hand knowledge of many of the events depicted in it (certainly, autobiographical elements do exist and are recognizable here and there throughout the novel). And what the text also evinces is the author’s remarkable poetic insight, apparent mainly in landscape descriptions, in the depiction of the downpours that sometimes flood the African continent – all of which substantiate the author’s love of the country that she had been forced to leave years before, as well as her dismay at the thought that horrors such as the ones she herself described had been possible not far from the spring of the mythical Nile: “How many days, how many weeks had it been since it had been raining? As if on the first or on the last day of the world, the mountains and the clouds were nothing but a joint menacing chaos. […] Rain is what they all wait for, beg for, the one that will determine famine or abundance, the first rain at the end of the drought season, which makes the little children dance while they raise their little faces up to the sky to welcome the big, long-awaited raindrops, the immodest rain that unveils, behind their wet garments, the irresolute figures of the young girls, the violent, manic and capricious Mistress…”
Moreover, by entitling her book „Notre-Dame du Nil”, Scholastique Mukasonga suggestively presents herself not only as an iconic voice of contemporary Rwandan culture but also as an inheritor and promoter of the European (French in particular) literary tradition, as what the title brings to mind is Victor Hugo’s famous novel „Notre-Dame de Paris”. Certainly, Mukasonga’s sub-textual suggestion, along the lines of Hugo’s text, is also meant to highlight the danger of demonizing the powerless: an issue that is enduringly topical beyond the timeframe of the events depicted and experienced by the hunchback of Notre-Dame… The writer’s daring undertaking is a fully successful one, as she has managed to recast this book into a symbolical paper-grave dedicated to her family and, by extension, to all of Rwanda, so harrowed during those particular years and during the upcoming ones. And if indeed, as one will read in the last pages of this book, “while God was travelling, Death took his place and when He returned it slammed the door in his face”, Scholastique Mukasonga found the inner strength to open that door again, ask her readers in and have them look at the real face of Rwanda – for what happened there to never be possible again.
Scholastique Mukasonga, „Notre-Dame du Nil”/ „Our Lady of the Nile”, translation into Romanian and notes by Adina Diniţoiu, Humanitas Fiction Publishing House, 2024
Translated into English by Mirela Petraşcu
Geo Dumitrescu – 105 ani de la naștere
Ana Barton: „Mi-aș fi dorit să fi scris «Gnozele dualiste ale Occidentului» de Ioan Petru Culianu”
Michael Haulică: „Povestirile lui William Gibson m-au dus spre și m-au făcut să rămîn în SF”
Studies and Essays on Romance Literatures: A Labyrinth of Interpretations (fragment)
In the Maze of Fiction
Irina Georgescu Groza: „Primul roman pe care l-am citit, într-o vacanță de vară, a fost „La Medeleni” de Ionel Teodoreanu”
Petre Barbu: „Să nu-mi treacă anul fără Cehov!”
„Camping” de Lavinia Braniște – un roman al migrației românești în postcomunism
„James. Doar James”
„Abisul” de Marguerite Yourcenar
The Game of Identities
„Aluna găunoasă” de Colette
Poeme de Paul Verlaine (pentru Lucien Létinois) (VII)
Aparența vieții și iluzia teatrală
„Lanuri de flori zburătoare” de Gerald Durrell
Drumuri printre amintiri
Scrie un comentariu