Winner of the 2020 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie for her first novel, the Franco-Rwandan Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse has established herself as one of the major voices of contemporary African literature. She is publishing her second novel this fall, consoledwhich tells, through the mental and physical drift of an enigmatic old lady with coppery skin, colonization and its dramatic consequences on lives.
The question of the cohabitation of languages is at the heart of the work of the Franco-Rwandan novelist Beata Umubyeyi Mayoress. This question occupies an equally important place in the life of the writer. She had told, on the occasion of the publication of her first novel All your children scattered, how during the 1994 genocide, she managed to deceive the killers who hunted down the Tutsis, by pretending not to understand Kinyarwanda, the national language of Rwanda. This lie had saved his life and allowed him to rebuild himself in France after having fled his native country.
Author today of a remarkable work, composed of collections of poetry, short stories and two novels, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse likes to say that she has repaired her lie through her writing which gives her mother tongue the founding place that comes back to him. Her work is characterized, in fact, by the author’s constant concern to fertilize her writing language, French, with the musicality and poetic luxuriance of Kinyarwanda.
With his new novel, consoled, which has just been published, the author goes even further, making the quest for the mother tongue the very issue of her romantic gesture. Kinyarwanda, lost and found, becomes here in a way a protagonist of the book, in the same way as the characters. ” You are quite rightconfirms the author. He’s a protagonist. When you’re a writer, language isn’t just a material. For me it is an everyday companion. I have two companions, French and Kinyarwanda, two friends with whom I walk on a daily basis. It is in French that I learned to read and write. It is the language through which I entered literature. It was French that chose me more than me who chose it. But on the other hand, I did not abandon, along the way, the Kinyarwanda which has always irrigated my imagination and which is one of the pillars of my identity. »
Pillar of Identity
Also for Consolée/Astrida, the eponymous character in Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s new novel, the language and mythologies of the Rwandan native land are the pillars of her identity. At 72, Consolée, known to those close to her by her European name of Astrida, is an enigmatic and beautiful old lady with coppery skin. When readers meet her, she is a widow dying in a residential facility for dependent elderly people (Ehpad), somewhere in the south-west of France. Suffering from a neurodegenerative disease, she remembers little of her recent past, but her mind is invaded by memories of her childhood.
Consolée does not have many friends among the residents of the retirement home and she spends most of her time walking in the establishment’s garden, watching the birds pass in the sky. She seems to be waiting for a sign. In another life, hadn’t his grandfather promised to send him his blessings through the Sakabaka, the totem bird of his community? The rest of the story is told by the author: This woman has Alzheimer’s disease and as her memory fades, French disappears and gives way to another language whose origin is unknown to everyone in the establishment and it is another woman who came for an internship in this institution, art therapy internship, which will slowly unearth the story of the elderly lady, Astrida. And from the history of Consolée, following it, it will arrive at the history of Belgian colonization in Africa. A time when mixed-race children were placed in orphanages although their parents were still alive. »
Endless nostalgia
Consolée was born in Ruanda-Urundi, the name of the region at the time of colonization. Told alternately with her life at the nursing home, the story of the protagonist’s origins is a poignant story, made up of abandonments, heartbreaks and endless nostalgia. Victim of the cruel laws of separation of races, Consolée had been torn from her mother at the age of seven and entrusted to the colonial orphanage for mixed-race children in Save (Rwanda), managed by nuns. At first, her mother came to see her on Sundays, as she was entitled to, before interrupting the practice, forever breaking the teenager’s heart.
One of the most poignant scenes in the novel is the one where we see the old lady clinging to a Senegalese trainee from the Ehpad who has taken a liking to her. Consolée holds her by the hips and speaks to her in Kinyarwanda, the language of her childhood. ” I want milk, mom “, she implores, confusing the black trainee in her dementia with her mother. ” She’s a child who was declared an orphan when she wasn’t, says the author. She will always grow up with the fear of being abandoned. Personally, I think she suffers from a fundamental fear of not being in her place anywhere and of being abandoned. »
Between the present and the past
consoled is a moving and poetic novel about lack, exile, old age. It is also a novel about colonial and postcolonial history resonated through the meeting of the old Consolée with Ramata, the fifty-year-old trainee from the nursing home, of African origin. The sisterhood that is born between the two women leads the Senegalese to decipher the mystery of the origins of the eldest, but also to reconcile with her own story as an immigrant, part of a continuum of struggles and dominations. Because as Nadine Gordimer’s sentence reminds us, highlighted in the cover pages of consoled : “ The present is a consequence of the past. »
The main originality of this beautiful novel is perhaps to have told the drift of its dying protagonist through the symbolism of the lost and found language. Metaphors for the wounds of the soul, these dysfunctions of speech and memory from which Consolée suffers are also symptomatic of a crisis of transmission between generations in our increasingly multicultural societies.
“ What’s going to happen, worries the authorif one day we can no longer communicate with our children because we only speak the language of our childhood and that our loved ones do not know? »
consoled, by Beata Umubyeyi Mayoress. Editions Otherwise, 376 pages, 21 euros.