Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga

"Gloriosa," said Imaculee, "do you think it's already time for you to give us one of your politician-type speeches? Like we were at a rally? Women's advancement, well let's talk about that! The reason most of us are here is for our family's advancement, not for our future but that of the clan. We were already fine merchandise, since nearly all of us are daughters of rich and powerful people, daughters of parents who know how to trade us for the highest price, and a diploma will inflate our worth even more. I know that a lot of girls here enjoy this game--it's the only game in town, after all--and it's even the source of their pride. But I no longer want to be a part of this marketplace."

"Just listen to her," jeered Gloriosa, "she's talking like a white girl in the movies, or in those books the French teacher makes us read. Where would you be, Imaculee, without your father and his money? Do you think a woman can survive in Rwanda without her family, first her father's then her husband's? You've just come from the gorillas. I suggest you go back there."

"Ah, good advice," said Immaculee. "Maybe I will."

Our Lady of the Nile is the most prestigious lycee in all of Rwanda. Perched high on a mountain, not far from the source of the Nile river, the lycee trains young Rwandan women--mostly Hutu, but with a couple Tutsi thrown in for quota purposes--to speak French, cultivate good manners, and be ashamed of the sin of menstruation. The students there are the daughters of some of the country's most prominent politicians and businessmen, and their education will contribute to making them marriageable. Inside the lycee, the girls do what girls do, sneaking off to ride their boyfriends' motorcycles, cutting pictures of the Beatles out of magazines, and getting in petty squabbles. But the lycee is not immune to the political instability emerging outside its doors. One girl in particular, a Hutu named Gloriosa, rules over the school's social scene by parroting the anti-Tutsi language that will soon lead to genocide.

Our Lady of the Nile is a kind of microcosm of Rwandan life: Hutu and Tutsi, living uneasily together, under the watchful eye of teachers and nuns, some Rwandan, but others white French or Belgian. When Queen Fabiola of Belgium comes to visit, the school puts on a great show, but no one is sure exactly how attentive they're supposed to be to the queen, who, after all, is no longer part of the new republic's political order. Our Lady of the Nile shows the cultural pressure white colonizers still have on the Rwandan imagination: Veronica, one of the school's two Tutsi girls, is summoned by a "crazy" Frenchman named Fontenaille, who believes her to be the reincarnation of an Egyptian queen. (Though the Hutus and Tutsis are ethnically very similar, European colonizers apparently spread the myth that the Tutsi are "Cushite" people with roots in northern Africa; these myths seem to have played a vital role in the cultural tensions that exploded in the 1990's.) But it's the other Tutsi girl, Virginia, who connects by dreams with the ancient African queen whose bones the Frenchman has disturbed--a touch of spiritual in an otherwise realist novel.

At first, Gloriosa's needling words seem to be without importance, the cruelty of a teenage girl, limited to verbal insults and humiliation. But as the book progresses, Gloriosa becomes more bold, breaking the icon of the Virgin Mary that gives the school its name and blaming it on Tutsi gangs. Her stories become larger and larger in scope, until they are taken up by the national press, and unleash a wave of anti-Tutsi violence that will not leave the school unscathed. What might be most shocking about Gloriosa is that at no point does she ever have the realization that things have gone too far, the violence is what she wants--she really does want to kill her schoolmates. While Our Lady of the Nile is a novel about a specific place, with a specific and unique history of ethnic bloodshed, there's something universally recognizable in it about the way that bullying and boasting escape the confines of sarcasm and irony to become true violence.

Mukasonga is one of those names being fashionably thrown out for the Nobel Prize in Literature; by tomorrow morning that will either look prescient or dated. But it's easy to see what makes her one of the most celebrated voices in modern African fiction: Our Lady of the Nile has elements of humor, magical realism, and the picaresque; at times it has fablelike qualities and at other times it seems frighteningly naturalistic. Ultimately, in the lycee, Mukasonga finds (what I can only assume is) a perfect symbol of a country stuck in a vise, where no one notices the screws turning until it's too late.

I miscounted before, but with the addition of Rwanda, my "countries read" list is up to 70!