Quiet Flows the Life

Mukasonga has given birth to her mother through The Barefoot Woman, who along with her family members was killed in Rwandan genocide. Her mother had opted to shroud her dead body by her daughters with but things turned different. While reading, a strange cloud of death hovers around us, we know the celebrated mother Stefania has been killed, and genocide has claimed little life they were trying to establish.

But she never once thought of taking that way out herself.

Neither my father nor my mother ever considered going into exile. I

think they’d made up their minds to die in Rwanda. They’d wait there

to be killed, they’d let themselves be murdered, but the children

had to survive.

The central figure Stefania was indeed everything, a mother who kept the hopes alive in the face of exile and atrocities, maintained traditional values high and taught her children a way of life. We read her devices for living, and her want for survival. Segregation has taken away their means, but she has the spirit to build and resume family and social life, like she built the inzu, even on times when people dreaded for their unborn children's lives. In her superstition we find optimism. Through her we see elements of life in different light, whether that be traditional house inzu, fire, medicinal plants, secret chants for spirits, beer making, harvesting, story-telling and all in all living life to the fullest with what you have, and can create. We follow her voice until the very end.

Mukasonga through her mother has shown us the traditional Rwandan way of living, their beliefs, and cultural values: Men, women and children working on the field, and the pleasure they derive; the hardships they follow, and the celebration that follows, but are dismayed by the fact many of them met a dark end, and are now a sad part of the history. Meanwhile, the memoir hasn't chosen to tell everything in a distressful tone, and is as lively as the people who lived their life to the fullest keeping aside the citizen value they got. We become children, adult or a community as the author dictates, and wants us to be. Rituals and festivities described are new to us, but all makes sense, as we find in them the past and Rwandan cultural connection.

However suppressed, whether accepted or mocked, we see modernization so as to speak, slowly coming to the lives of Rwandan people, and also the religious and foreign influences making way to change people's thought. Stefania's beliefs are also changing, but her effort to keep up to the tradition doesn't seem futile, because it's the only way she'd lived her many years and believed its power to hold people together, or to say made a perfect family. We see everything has learned to adapt!

They’d killed all our cows, and burned the calves in the sta

-bles. Can you still be a man if you don’t have a herd? And what

do you do with your days if you don’t lead your cows to their pastures,

In the misery and poverty of our Nyamatan exile a

good wife was expected to know how to work. To her would fall the

task of cultivating the field to keep the family fed: plowing the earth,

weeding, barefoot in the mud, hands covered with calluses from the

hoe.

Stefania is a woman with great authority and we are lulled by her presence everywhere, and the weight she induces to everything. Chapters such as Beauty and Marriage, Women's Affair give us insight into the female values among Rwandan women. There're lot of things we can quote from the text. In this powerful memoir, we celebrate life, and lives of those which ended tragic.

"Do the spirits of the dead speak to us through our dreams? I’d so like

to think they do."

Says the author, and she has awakened them with love, and they speak in this memoir.

Author: Scholastique Mukasonga

Translator: Jordan Stump

Publisher: Archipelago

Page Count: 152

Price: $10.45 (Kindle)