![]() ![]() As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved. Her writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. This elixir courses through each story, a balm to soothe the pains of those so ferociously fighting for survival. In a desperate act of preservation, Colomba's mother gathers enough sorghum to whip up a nourishing porridge, bringing Colomba back to life. Igifu becomes a dizzying hole in her stomach, a plunging abyss into which she falls. She searches for sap at the bud of a flower, scraps of sweet potato at the foot of her parent's bed, or a few grains of sorghum in the floor sweepings. In the title story, five-year-old Colomba tells of a merciless overlord, hunger or igifu, gnawing away at her belly. Scholastique Mukasonga's autobiographical stories rend a glorious Rwanda from the obliterating force of recent history, conjuring the noble cows of her home or the dew-swollen grass they graze on. ![]() ![]() From the National Book Award finalist who Zadie Smith says, "rescues a million souls from the collective noun genocide." The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. ![]()
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