Mark Polizzotti launches "Sister Deborah," with Marta Figlerowicz

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“In sentences of great beauty and restraint, Mukasonga rescues a million souls from the collective noun ‘genocide,’ returning them to us as individual human beings.” — Zadie Smith
In a four-part narrative brimming with historical asides, alluring anecdotes, and murky questions left in the margins of colonial records, Sister Deborah heralds “a life that is more alive” as it explores the tensions and myths of Rwanda’s past.
When time-worn ancestral remedies fail to heal young Ikirezi’s maladies, she’s rushed to the Rwandan hillsides. From her termite perch under the coral tree, health blooms under Sister Deborah’s hands. Women bear their breasts to the rising sun as men under thatched roofs stand, “stunned and impotent before this female fury.”
Now grown, Ikirezi unearths the truth of Sister Deborah’s passage from America to 1930s Rwanda and the mystery surrounding her sudden departure. In colonial records, Sister Deborah is a “pathogen,” an “incident.” Who is the keeper of truth, Ikirezi impels us to ask, Who stands at the threshold of memory? Did we dance? Did she heal? Did we look to the sky with wonder? Ikirezi writes on, pulling Sister Deborah out from the archive, inscribing her with breath.
A beautiful novel that works in the slippages of history, Sister Deborah at its core is a story of what happens when women — black women and girls — seek the truth by any means.

Praise for Sister Deborah

“[Sister Deborah] delivers a dazzling and witty narrative of a Black Christian cult in early 20th-century Rwanda . . . as in Mukasonga’s excellent previous work, she manages to balance clear-eyed portrayals of charlatan leaders and their superstitious followers with striking depictions of spiritual visions . . . a master class in post-colonial feminist storytelling.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Award-winning French Rwandan novelist Mukasonga evokes her country’s tumultuous history in a lyrical, allegorical narrative, translated by Polizzotti, set in the 1930s, when white Catholic missionaries proselytized to a population already steeped in myths . . . A haunting tale.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Scholastique Mukasonga is not only one of the most important Francophone novelists writing today but a storyteller of rare gifts, and Sister Deborah, expertly translated by Mark Polizzotti confirms this. Trenchant in its critique of the nexus between colonialism and religion, compelling in its feminist and decolonial perspective, it marks another gift by Mukasonga for English-language readers.” —John Keene

“Female fury and the power of women are realized in Sister Deborah’s prophecy of Mother Africa’s reign, bringing satisfaction and ultimately nullifying the promises of missionaries and colonizers.” —Kelly Fojtik, Booklist

“The narrators of Sister Deborah turn and tilt the story like a prism until, by Mukansonga’s light, the versions and legends, tellings and retellings become many tiny brilliant rainbows.” —Ama Codjoe, author of Bluest Nude

“Mukasonga’s writing is as striking for the bracing clarity and directness of her sentences as for the restlessness of its experimentations with genre . . . Sister Deborah presses on questions of cultural translation, which are also Mukasonga’s own: questions of faith and syncretism but also of faithfulness to one’s origins . . . The paths lives take, Sister Deborah insists, are mysterious and unstable. And it would be disingenuous to claim that we do not yearn to explain these mysteries to ourselves, to mold these accidents and contingencies into narratives that make sense to us.” —Marta Figlerowicz, The Paris Review

Mark Polizzotti is an author, translator, and publisher living in New York. His books include Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, Highway 61 Revisited, Sympathy for the Traitor: A Translation Manifesto, and Why Surrealism Matters. His essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Apollo, ARTnews, The Nation, Parnassus, Bookforum, and elsewhere. His translations of works by Gustave Flaubert, Arthur Rimbaud, Scholastique Mukasonga, Patrick Modiano, Marguerite Duras, André Breton, Eric Vuillard, among others, have won the English PEN Award and been shortlisted for the National Book Award, the International Booker Prize, the NBCC/Gregg Barrios Prize, and the French-American Foundation Translation Prize. He is a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature. He directs the publications program at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Marta Figlerowicz is an associate professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. Working in over eight languages, in her academic writing she often returns to modernism, its genealogies, and its afterlives. Her public-facing essays for venues such as Foreign Affairs, Boston Review, The Drift, The Yale Review, and The Paris Review comment on contemporary literature, film, and politics. She is a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow.

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