African short story

Interesting and unusual short story - cattle praise song, by Rwandan/French writer Scholastique Mukasonga- not so much because any fantastic literary innovations or excellence of style and narrative but because SM provides insight into a culture and way of life that is on the periphery if anywhere at all for most western readers. SM describes in what I would call three "movements" the uprooting of the Rwandan Tutsi population during the territorial wars of - when? The 80s perhaps? - and the complete disruption of families, communities, and a way of life that had been intact for centuries. At the outset we see a community centered on the raising of cattle and built upon a worship of the cows and thei dairy produce - the story told by a man recalling his youth tending the family herd. In an abrupt break to the 2nd movement the family and its community are scratching out a living is a refugee settlement - now deprived of their herds yet retaining an ancestral reverence for the years of prosperity - completely scornful for ex of the family that has taken to raising goats for milk. In a short third and concluding movement the narrator gives a rapid-fire account of his life in exile - learning French, beginning a teaching career, sending home money to help his father buy a cow - and the sorrow that he lives w as one who has escaped the tormenting life of his childhood , the mixture of guilt and pride. As noted the story is not a great work of art in itself but CM does accomplish one of the key tenets of literature: giving us access to the mind and the experience of others. The story is bedecked w many phrases and words in the Tutsi language, I assume, which can seem a bit mannered and willfully exotic but the story will bring almost all New Yorker readers to a place they've never been and, as we see by the end of the narrative, to a vanished place and way of life where they will never go except through art.

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