Murmurs from the Hills

For two decades Scholastique Mukasonga has traced the specters of the Rwandan genocide. “That painful History is part of Rwanda,” she writes, but “we mustn’t be hostages to that History.” With Murmurs from the Hills, Mukasonga makes a decisive turn in her work, looking to an ancient Rwanda to map and imagine renewal. Though the stories in Murmurs from the Hills read like oral histories—voices overlapping, interjecting, arabesques of shared knowledge—the collection moves restlessly across form. With a wooden amulet on a woman’s naked hip comes girlhood memories of catechism; with a vision of the river Rukarara comes the diary of a European explorer who sought colonize a land that eluded him. Stories are woven with Rwandan mythology (real and imagined), reflections on Mukasonga’s previous novels, and the hills and elders inscribing her childhood. Digging into the trunk of her mother’s tales, Mukasonga layers myth and memory like tesserae. Mark Polizzotti’s translation moves with unwavering grace, bending with a patchwork of voices as they murmur their own histories.