The Barefoot Woman is a short, spare memoir of the author's childhood in Rwanda, just prior to the devastating genocide in the 1990s. But even prior to that, her life as a Tutsi made her family and neighbors outcasts, refugees who were uprooted from their mountain home and forced to move to an area of the country that was inhospitable. Yet, thanks to the tenacity of her mother, Stefania, the family survived and rebuilt new lives while never forgetting both what they'd lost and the threat that still existed.
This book doesn't go into the details of the actual genocide, other than brief references to it. The author left Rwanda in 1992, just two years before the killing began, and she ended up in France. But she lost 27 family members to that devastation.
But what she does in this book is show us what life was like before the killing, in all its beauty, fear, and daily routines and beliefs. Some of her anecdotes are funny, some are moving, and on occasion, after telling us of some event, she notes who ended up dead. Instead of showing us all the killing, she shows us what was lost. And that gives the book its emotional depth. Why were these people killed? These people, who loved their children and wanted the best for them. People who cared for and watched out for their neighbors, and yes, gossiped about them behind their backs (let he who is without sin throw the first stone...). People who toiled at brutally hard labor to earn a living. People who brewed beer out of sorghum and celebrated when good things happened. People who took pride in their rituals and way of life. People who ended up dead.
I've read other books about the Rwandan genocide, and it's always hard to read about. But this book seemed even more devastating. In the nonprofit world, there's a train of thought that telling a story about specific people and places is far more effective than giving statistics that don't have a face on them. You can read that somewhere between half a million and a million Rwandans were slaughtered. Or you can read about Scholastique Mukasonga's mother, toiling in the fields to be able to send her children to school, carefully allotting bread to be sure all her children got a bit of that treat while eating none herself, acting as the village matchmaker, telling stories to her children by firelight each night, and then know that this tough, shrewd, loving mother died in the genocide. This book is her daughter's loving memorial to her mother. Which is the more moving story?