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.' (Dec.The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. Ultimately, Mukasonga’s created a loving tribute to her mother: “My sentences weave a shroud for your missing body.” Despite the horrible tragedies recounted throughout, joy prevails in this beautiful and elegiac memoir. to face our misfortunes.” In telling her mother’s story, Mukasonga, who fled to France in 1992, documents the Tutsi way of life as she describes growing and harvesting sorghum for the brewing of beer, medicine and healing practices, and Tutsi beauty standards and marriage customs.

Refusing to raise her family in a cheap sheet metal shack, Stefania built a traditional inzu, “a house made of straw woven like a basket,” because “it was only in the ancestral dwelling place that she’d find the strength and courage. Driven from her lush homeland in 1960 to “the dry, dusty plain of the Bugesera” by Hutu leadership following the end of Belgian rule, Stefania focused on saving her children, including four-year-old Mukasonga, as she attempted to recreate the framework of Tutsi life. Decades after the 1994 Rwandan genocide that took the lives of the author’s parents and siblings, Mukasonga ( Cockroaches) looks back at her resilient, resourceful mother Stefania in this intense tale of an exiled Tutsi family struggling to retain their culture and dignity despite brutality and death.

Igifu by Scholastique Mukasonga