Sister Deborah
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- $249.00
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- $249.00
Descripción editorial
A sharp and playful critique of colonialism from the leading voice of French-Rwandan literature, animated by memories, archival specters, and powerful women
“In sentences of great beauty and restraint, Mukasonga rescues a million souls from the collective noun ‘genocide,’ returning them to us as individual human beings.” — Zadie Smith
In a 4-part narrative brimming with historical asides, alluring anecdotes, and murky questions left in the margins of colonial records, Sister Deborah heralds “a life that is more alive” as it explores the tensions and myths of Rwanda’s past.
When time-worn ancestral remedies fail to heal young Ikirezi’s maladies, she’s rushed to the Rwandan hillsides. From her termite perch under the coral tree, health blooms under Sister Deborah’s hands. Women bear their breasts to the rising sun as men under thatched roofs stand, “stunned and impotent before this female fury.”
Now grown, Ikirezi unearths the truth of Sister Deborah’s passage from America to 1930s Rwanda and the mystery surrounding her sudden departure. In colonial records, Sister Deborah is a “pathogen,” an “incident.” Who is the keeper of truth, Ikirezi impels us to ask, Who stands at the threshold of memory? Did we dance? Did she heal? Did we look to the sky with wonder? Ikirezi writes on, pulling Sister Deborah out from the archive, inscribing her with breath.
A beautiful novel that works in the slippages of history, Sister Deborah at its core is a story of what happens when women — black women and girls — seek the truth by any means.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rwandan French writer Mukasonga (Kibogo) delivers a dazzling and witty narrative of a Black Christian cult in early 20th-century Rwanda. Shortly after the country is captured by Belgium during WWI, a pagan chief flouts the new white Catholic clergy by granting a disused settlement to a group of American Pentecostals led by Reverend Marcus and Sister Deborah, a young woman with healing powers who speaks in tongues. According to their beliefs, Jesus, who is Black, will arrive imminently on a cloud and save the people of Rwanda from centuries of misfortune brought on by famine and war. The narrator, Ikirezi, a Rwandan American feminist scholar who grew up with a series of ailments before being healed by Sister Deborah, recounts her return to Africa to interview the healer as part of her dissertation. The novel roars to life as Sister Deborah tells her story to Ikirezi, who's tracked her down in a Nairobi shantytown. As in Mukasonga's excellent previous work, she manages to balance clear-eyed portrayals of charlatan leaders and their superstitious followers with striking depictions of spiritual visions (the leader of a new millenarian sect in Nairobi, who might be Reverend Marcus, sells parishioners "eternity insurance" against the impending rapture). It's a master class in post-colonial feminist storytelling.
