Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse was born in Rwanda in 1979. She arrived in France after surviving the genocide of the Tutsi. Her first novel All your children scattered received the Prix des cinq continents de la Francophonie. She is also the author of a collection entitled Ejo, followed by Lézardes, and other short stories. Her second novel titled consoled has just been published by Otherwise.
“1954. In Rwanda under Belgian guardianship, Consolée, daughter of a white man and a Rwandan woman, is taken from her black family and placed in an institution for “mulatto children”.
Sixty-five years later, Ramata, a 50-year-old of Senegalese origin, is doing an art therapy internship in an nursing home in southwestern France. There she meets Madame Astrida, an old Métis woman suffering from Alzheimer’s disease who has lost the use of French and expresses herself in an unknown language.
By trying to piece together the puzzle of this woman’s life, Ramata will find herself confronted with her own family destiny and the difficulties of being black today in France.
A story of symbolic repair and a rediscovered language, Consolée is a poetic, moving novel that resonates with the colonial past and the condition of the children of immigrants. (Presentation of otherwise editions)