In Rwanda, before the genocide swept through, a daughter remembers her mother Stefania — fierce, resourceful, a keeper of tradition — who devised hiding places and read omens to shield her children through years of exile and encroaching violence. A lyrical, intimate memoir of everyday survival under a shadow readers already sense is closing in.
Where violence can arrive any day, survival becomes a household routine. A mother stacks jugs and baskets so children can hide behind them, leaves mounds of grass in the fields big enough to slip into, and drills her children until they know exactly how to dive under cover. Ordinary domestic objects are rearranged into a system for staying alive.
A death rite works as a debt passed from one generation to the next. A mother tells her child that her body must be covered when she dies, or the uncovered corpse will follow and haunt the child until the child's own death, when someone must cover them in turn. When mass killing leaves too many bodies to tend, the debt grows past what any one survivor can repay.
People forced from their homes can hold their world together by keeping its customs going in the new place. Folk tales told around the hearth push back the gloom of exile, and brewing a mild sorghum beer keeps the bonds between neighbors alive. The mother who guards her children's bodies also guards the lore and manners that make them a people.
When a culture measures a man's worth by a visible possession, taking that possession attacks his identity, not just his property. Among cattle-keeping people, losing the herd raises the question of whether a man can still truly be a man. Dispossession strips status as well as livelihood.