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)

Faces, Fractions and the Fate

Like Andrić's city-based chronicles, Omer Pasha Latas serves the purpose of projecting the sides than the center. The final novel by Andrić before his death and never before translated into English has renewed revelation not on history but on humanity. Impeccable translation done by Celia Hawkesworth, Omer Pasha Latas is another historical novel in the oeuvre rich in character portrayals and description of uncanny identities, in whom we may find quotidian but always green side of human nature, which is in fact dark.

People were charmed to see the extravagance of the Pasha and his entourage on their arrival, which slowly turned to disgust when they decreed Ottoman Sultan's will to reform the administration, social and moral structure. Pasha's yearlong residence and expedition leaves land-owners and non-conformists killed, chained or exiled. While Pasha's infamous court and army is busy bringing their own form of moral justice subduing whatever comes on the way, people of the city have no power to mock the degradation caused by their residence, corruption, loot, and lavish way of living. People believed this grandeur of living was not suited to a reformer.

The characters are abruptly disjunct. Everyone wants to escape the complexity of their identity and individuality, and unknowingly live their part while others are little concerned. It seems the world around Omer Pasha has been separated into individuals, who are agonized and sometimes are in ruins. Omer Pasha and his army are surrounded by elusive problem concerning their identity. Greatness is at the verge of dissatisfaction, and characters have common human problems and their internal is in ruins.

The army of the Muslim-converts is despised by the town's people, and their supreme leader Omer Pasha is hated for the way he is – arrogant and distrustful, but which has earned him favors in the middle of pandemonium in occupying and subduing pursuit. However, Omer Pasha's mere presence is enough for his foes or allies to be afraid of him. Formerly Mićo Latas, a Muslim-convert himself, originally belonging to Christian Serb family, a runaway, Omer makes himself fitted to serve the Ottoman sultan, and is highly praised for suppressing the rebellion, is enigmatic and leaves the reader to amaze to his sheen.

Personal traits of Crazy Osman, Karas – the painter, a member of Pasha's harem Saida Hanuma, an old vigil for a corpse, raped victim of imperial army, impotent blind lover and a murderer are some characters that confirm Andrić is occupied with eccentric characters. Political and purely human faces merge in the text, moral corruption is in the shadows, and what obvious is the dream to escape the fate. Also, vexed we may from sudden appearance of new characters; we soon find it adds to the sublime nature of the prose, and each one is as important as they are different.

Omer Pasha had this unrelenting skill of lying, manipulation and negotiation that always earned him what he wanted, the way he wanted it. For his brother, he is a cold-blooded man, who's lost himself in the way of finding glory and counts none, sees no one, and hears nothing but thinks the triumphal historical height for himself. Power corrupts the natural way a man is supposed to behave, and leaves waste of characters along the track, Muhsin Effendi is one such, a Yes-man to the superiors. The woe from the change in their characters many believed was due to their being in Bosnia, in this foreign territory.

Omer Pasha's carnal desires and the way he fulfills them, his desire to be painted and be hailed for generations everywhere, his love for luxury and his brutality made him infamous, and this had to be kept secret. The novel is not supposedly biography of Omer Pasha, rather through array of characters with or without seraksier's influence Andrić's portrayal is rather of faith, fate and nature of a man, and leaving behind historical context characters radiate on their own. A hailed reformer now infamous for his way of doing things looks pitiful, when victor was the subject of deceit, so Omer finds new ways of keeping his position and bearing clean. And finally, his departure is joyed by the town's people and his army is cursed on the back.

Andrić poses the history as guile to faux and brazen personas. We're surprised to see how hopelessness rise in among those close to seraksier's power, and believe that humans are only satisfied by individual desires and history plays minor role. Trying to link all characters to Omer Pasha is impossible, and it seems Andrić is talking about that specific time and the mentality of the period, but they are nothing different than today's problem of identity, corruption of power and morale. Though little is given about the town's people, we'll understand the complex of faith and beliefs among Christians and Muslims in Bosnia, and the social formation then.  "If we all had the opportunity, courage and strength to transform just a part of our imaginings and most ardent desires into reality, at just one moment of our lives, it would be immediately clear to the whole world and to ourselves who we are, what we are, what we are like and what we are capable of becoming and being. Fortunately, for most of us, that opportunity never arises and we never cross from imagination and transient irrational thoughts to deeds and actions." from the chapter And Then is self-revealing to support our fate and also to the way we are.

Novel has slack plot line, and sticks to the character description and establishment till the end and does little to conflate them and leaves them to their own world. One ardent remark is made in the introduction about Ivo Andrić “But the wise man thinks his own thoughts and does things his own way.” But same holds true for all men. A man can corrupt himself, a man can believe he's useless and his life meaningless. He can lie, cheat and still. Omer Pasha Latas manages to put forth the idea that ignoring the fatalistic and sadistic tone about life, throughout the history humans has behaved almost in similar way, they are brutal, ignorant, idiots, killers, suppressors, lecherous, but we seek the other way, and feel proud that we can see the future lies in the other way. Andrić has made a real Omer Pasha into larger than life character, and we know why when we read.

Author: Ivo Andrić

Translator: Celia Hawkesworth

Publisher: New York Review Books

Page Count: 304

Price: $10.94 (Kindle)