Scholastique Mukasonga and translator Jordan Stump Longlist Author Interview

How does it feel to be longlisted?

            A writer is always deeply moved to be nominated for such an important prize. When an author sends a manuscript to a publisher, it’s like launching a message in a bottle, and what a sigh of relief you breathe if it touches someone who picks it up on a distant shore.  That’s what’s happened with The Barefoot Woman.  The Barefoot Woman is the shroud of words that I wove to cover my murdered mother’s absent body, which I never had a chance to drape with her pagne as she’d asked me.  I’m grateful to the judges for havingexpressed their support for that onerous, difficult mission.

How did you conduct your research?

            The only resource I had to write this book about my mother was my own memory.  What I brought together in the pages of The Barefoot Woman are memories of the childhood I lived alongside my mother Stéfania.  It was in 1960 that my family, like so many others, was deported to Nyamata.  I was three years old.  All that we were promised, day in and day out, was death.  But our mothers promised us life, they promised us a future.  Even if they themselves felt sure they wouldn’t escape the death they’d been promised,they were determined to do all they could to let their children survive.  Not only did Stéfania continually invent new hiding places for my sisters and me to take refuge from the recurring massacres; she also recreated, in our exile, a real village life made of conviviality and mutual aid among neighbors.  I can still see Stéfania sitting in the place of honor on a termite mound, presiding every Sunday over a parliament of women.     

In what ways has the 1994 genocide shaped modern Rwanda?

            After the genocide of the Tutsis in 1994 (a hundred days, a million deaths), the country had to be rebuilt, which would require both justice and reconciliation.  The first step was to abolish the ethnic identity card, inherited from the colonial era, which listed the so-called ethnic affiliation of every Rwandan.  All the people of Rwandan speak the same language, Kinyarwanda, and recognize each other as simply Rwandans.  Everyone has come together to pull the country from the ashes of the genocide.  Rwanda’s economic success is astonishing, and many of the Africans I meet in my literary peregrinations consider it a model for all of Africa.

 Rwanda’s borders were not laid out by the colonizers.  Rwanda is an ancient kingdom whose oral traditions go back to the sixteenth century at least.  The Hutu / Tutsi distinction designates not ethnic groups but social categories: farmers and cowherds.  In a country where everyone speaks the same language and lives alongside each other, there can be no communities.  Rwanda is one single nation.

Jordan Stump’s answers

How different is it translating fiction from translating non-fiction?  Do you prefer one over the other?

            In one sense there’s really no difference at all: translation seeks to capture what’s said and how it’s said, no matter the nature of the text.  But more subjectively, I have a deep love for stories, and I find invented stories much richer and realer than “true” stories.  For that reason, I never translated or thought of translating a work of non-fiction until I came across Scholastique Mukasonga’s wonderful writing. She has a way of seeing and a way of saying that find deeply affecting, and that was what made me want to translate her.  Her eye, her moments of humour, her quietly poetic voice: that’s what drew me to her work.

How does translating other people’s works compare with writing your own books?  Which one do you find more satisfying?

 I’m not a writer—I’ve written two books, but I see translating as my writing.  I translate only what I deeply love; in translation I try to recreate something I love in a form different from its own.  No small undertaking!  And the work isn’t satisfying at all, at first: it’s endlessly frustrating and crushing.  My first drafts fail miserably to convey what I love in a book, but with endless revision and lots of time, the translation very slowly begins to do what I saw in the original.  I know of nothing more satisfying than that: seeing the thing I love little by little coming to life before my eyes.