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.

Scholastique Mukasonga was born in Rwanda in 1956. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. Her groundbreaking books include: the debut novel Our Lady of the Nile, Cockroaches, Igifu, and National Book Award-nominated The Barefoot Woman, expertly translated by Jordan Stump. In 2021, she won the Simone de Beauvoir Prize for Women’s Freedom.

Mark Polizzotti has translated more than sixty books from the French. His translations have won the English PEN Award and have been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the International Booker Prize, and the NBCC/Gregg Barrios Prize, among others. The author of twelve books, his essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, ARTnews, The Nation, Parnassus, Bookforum, and elsewhere.