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A review by serendipitysbooks
Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
Our Lady of the Nile is a boarding school, high in the Rwandan mountains, run by the Catholic church to educate and empower the daughters of Rwanda’s elite. There’s lots of traditional boarding school tropes in here - different factions of girls, late night feasts of food brought from home, minor run-ins with authority figures, a young male teacher the girls crush on. But this is Rwanda, and even though the story is set fifteen years before the devastating civil war, the ethnic divisions and tensions are ever-present and ramp up alarmingly as the novel progresses. Although the girls seem to get along, it takes just one instigator to incite major ethnic divisions and a chasm soon divides them. One key incident - vandalising the nose on a statue of the Virgin Mary so it would be replaced by one more Hutu looking- may seem humorous but the chain of events consequently triggered is anything but.
The boarding school setting provides a degree of insularity, while the remote mountain location provides isolation which is compounded in the rainy season. These both contribute to the ominous tone which pervades the novel and is appropriate for its dark subject matter.
I thought the characterisation, especially of the girls, was well done. The girls were all very distinct vibrant characters, not flat stereotypes. And I couldn’t help but be frustrated and infuriated by all the adults who let them down. They had parents who are obviously spouted discriminatory and hateful rhetoric, which the girls internalised and repeated. The schools’s priest was a sexual pervert, a nun attempted to shame them about their bodies. This is only the tip of the iceberg and much of it links back to colonialism. Race, class and gender all intersect and even if the civil war and genocide has been avoided most young women, like those portrayed here, would be presented from fulfilling their potential. Yet they did occur and this book gives insight into how and why.
All in all a thought-provoking story which demonstrates on a small-scale how large scale atrocities can occur.
The boarding school setting provides a degree of insularity, while the remote mountain location provides isolation which is compounded in the rainy season. These both contribute to the ominous tone which pervades the novel and is appropriate for its dark subject matter.
I thought the characterisation, especially of the girls, was well done. The girls were all very distinct vibrant characters, not flat stereotypes. And I couldn’t help but be frustrated and infuriated by all the adults who let them down. They had parents who are obviously spouted discriminatory and hateful rhetoric, which the girls internalised and repeated. The schools’s priest was a sexual pervert, a nun attempted to shame them about their bodies. This is only the tip of the iceberg and much of it links back to colonialism. Race, class and gender all intersect and even if the civil war and genocide has been avoided most young women, like those portrayed here, would be presented from fulfilling their potential. Yet they did occur and this book gives insight into how and why.
All in all a thought-provoking story which demonstrates on a small-scale how large scale atrocities can occur.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Genocide and Sexual assault