Reviews

Our Lady of the Nile takes place in a Catholic girl's boarding school, isolated atop a mountain, in 1970s Rwanda. This school is, as the book's description says, a microcosm of "a society hurtling toward horror." There is the leader and militant defender of the revolution, Gloriosa; the Tutsi girls ever aware of their precarious position and the growing racism around them; the ones who choose sides to preserve themselves or their families. A worldbuilding fantasy couldn't be more perfectly set up, but this one is real.

I wish the book was set up in a more novel-style narrative, rather than the literary-style anecdotal flow it has most of the time. I might have been more engrossed in the characters lives that way, though the narrative does all flow together in the end.

Still, the book is masterful in its setup. It shows us life for the privileged girls in Rwanda - days at the boarding school, pastoral life in the villages where the scholarship girls come from, minor happenings and anecdotes... while slowly building up to the inevitable - culminating in an incident with echoes of the genocide to come and cutting away there, like a horror movie trailer.

This is a great book to help understand the origins of the Rwandan genocide of the 90s (especially if you are sensitive and don't want to read details about the genocide itself). While it is fiction and I can't speak for the total accuracy (not my expertise), the author sympathetically portrays all sides and also does not leave blameless the white colonizers who favored races and created rifts with their "anthropology" studies.

The text is very readable and I came away with a deeper understanding of this tiny country.

Content Warnings

bergenslabben's review against another edition

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dark informative reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

iris_sel's review against another edition

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dark tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

this book put into words something that I’ve been thinking for quite some time.

an unfortunate part of human nature is that we hate to admit any sort of culpability in literally anything. thus, when something as horrific as a genocide happens, the first thing we want to do is find a scapegoat, a single person to blame. but it’s never quite so simple.

this book, which takes place 15 years before the Rwandan genocide shows how the seeds of the eventual genocide were sown much before it actually took place. it touches on the insistent and consistent dehumanization of the minority Tutsi people by the Hutu majority (as well as on the arbitrary nature of this very distinction that was, at the end of the day, created by white colonizers with the one and only goal of causing havoc in Rwanda).

reading this book and knowing what proceeds it, historically, was physically painful. because it was all there!! all of it!! and Mukasonga does such a fantastic job of depicting it through such a deceptively light lens; a group of high school girls entrenched in the usual high school girl drama were used to.

my own gripe with this book was in the language, which felt quite a bit clunky at times. however, since I read the translation, I can’t rlly say whether it was a choice the author made, or just an unfortunate side effect of translation…

raulbime's review against another edition

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3.0

3.5 stars

This was such a difficult read, for me, on several levels. It’s taken me a week of thinking how I’d approach this and I still don’t know how to; fully expecting to flounder, and afraid that I may be wrong in certain ways.

It’s a story set in Rwanda in the 1970s, years before the 1994 genocide but clearly brings the environment of discrimination and othering of the Tutsi community there that culminated in the horrors that occurred. The histories of Rwanda and Burundi, the latter being where I was born, are too intertwined for this not to have been affecting in the way it was. I still don’t trust myself to give this book the review I think it deserves and may come back to this. I can’t imagine the amount of courage and openness it required to write this, especially as parts of this book did happen in the writer’s life, and in the kind of culture in these two countries where discretion and secrecy are valued to the degree they are. I wish I had enjoyed the story itself more, but still a brave piece of work.

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