Sister Deborah
I was often ill when I was a little girl, or at least more often than my brothers and sisters. Sometimes, in a moment of weariness, my mother would blame me. “How could such a sickly creature come from my womb,” she’d complain, “when all the other children I’ve produced have been healthy, robust boys, or girls beautiful as heifers who will bear beautiful children of their own?” Mama never gave in to despair, but fought tenaciously against the ailments that plagued me: recurrent fevers, intestinal worms, endless coughing fits, outbreaks of pimples, diarrhea, nosebleeds, temporary paralysis in one limb or another. My body seemed to be the plaything of every malady, and I felt as though Evil itself was spreading its symptoms.
Yet my mother almost never brought me to the clinic. For one thing, it was far away, more than ten kilometers from our house; but mainly, she had no confidence in the pills that the orderlies dispensed, seemingly at whim. To get to the clinic, you had to set off at cock’s crow, and even if you left before dawn, when you arrived there was already a crowd at the window, where a servant boy handed out overpriced tickets that would grant you access to the orderly and his pills; then, once in possession of this obligatory ticket, you had to wait some more, standing in a long line under the hot sun or in the rain. Once a week, two white nuns came to administer injections. Shots Day was like showtime, and attracted a lot of people to the clinic: not only the sick, but also those who came to jeer at the patients’ buttocks bared to the pitiless syringe, which an equally pitiless nun jabbed in with a vigor uncommon in a woman.
Rather than the white man’s medicine, my mother preferred her own remedies, the recipes passed down by her mother, who had gotten them from her mother, as her grandmother had no doubt gotten them from the ancestors themselves. And so, at the day and hour indicated by the rituals and while reciting the appropriate incantations, she picked the necessary herbs, leaves, roots, fruits, and tubers, which she ground in a mortar reserved for this use, mashed under the pestle, vigorously triturated and pulverized and administered in various forms the dosages that tradition prescribed. Certain places were considered propitious for her medicines: in front of the small hut devoted to the cult of the ancestors, at the far end of the banana plantation, or in the sacred wood where lived the python that had sprung from the mortal remains of a former king. Mama had noticed in the field a tree that managed to escape my father’s axe. At nightfall, she brought me to the foot of this medicinal tree and rubbed my entire body down with freshly plucked leaves. My mother took scrupulous care of the umucuro, my tree, whose tender green shoots were the only cure for the diverse maladies that pullulated over my skin and gnawed at my entrails. On nights when the moon was full, Mama dragged me to the broadest of the papyrus trees and offered my small naked body to all the spirits that haunted the marsh.
For my mother knew perfectly well that my recurrent ailments were not solely caused by the frailness of my child’s body. Mostly, they came from either people or spirits. The first suspect was always a jealous neighbor, but it might also have been one of those poisoners who commit evil for evil’s sake, with whom I might have carelessly crossed paths and stepped through their maleficent spell. In extreme cases, the illness could have come from farther still, I mean from the Other World, the world where resided the spirits of the dead, the many spirits that haunt the bushland and insinuate themselves at night into the dwellings and dreams of humans. Mama had the necessary ingredients to ward off those nocturnal beings, too. She slathered my body in some sort of unguent, simultaneously imploring Ryangombe, Maria, Nyabingi, and many other celestial or subterranean deities, including some it was better not to know or name, but who, since they were the ones causing the illness, were the only ones who could relieve it.
When even my mother’s remedies proved useless, when the illness persisted and my suffering grew worse, there was only one recourse: “Sister Deborah. Tomorrow we’ll go see Sister Deborah, she’ll be able to cure you. Tomorrow we’ll go to Nyabikenke, to the mission of the black padri.” If my father noticed our travel preparations, he exploded in fury. “You are not going to that devil’s mission. I forbid it! Didn’t you hear what our real padri said about it? They’re sorcerers from a country called America, a country that might not even exist because it’s the land of the dead, the land of the damned. They have not been baptized with good holy water. And they are black—all the real padri are white. I forbid you to drag my daughter there and offer her to the demon hiding in the head and belly of that witch you call Deborah. You can go to the devil if you like, but spare my daughter!”
Papa’s diatribes did not impress my mother. She didn’t listen, or answered as if she were talking to herself: “Ikirezi is my daughter, and I am her mother. You have boys, you have girls, they are our boys, our girls, but Ikirezi is my daughter, for me alone, for I know that she isn’t like the others. She’ll go far, very far, and Sister Deborah knows what is best for her.” If I was strong enough to walk, she supported me all the way down the road to Nyabikenke; otherwise she asked my older brother to carry me on his back.
In truth, it was a strange mission that had been established in Nyabikenke. For one thing, Nyabikenke was a forbidden hillside, which in the time of the pagans had been the site of unspeakable ceremonies that the initiates celebrated in the depth of night. It was said that after dark, they indulged in everything that was forbidden by day. No one, not even the first missionaries who had settled there in the time of the Germans, had dared touch the kigabiro, the sacred wood, and especially not the large coral tree whose red flowers were the blood of Ryangombe, the Master of the Spirits, or the sacred termite mound on which hunters had discovered the child-king, the first sovereign of our country, warming himself in the sun like a lion cub.
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From Sister Deborah by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated by Mark Polizzotti. Used with permission of the publisher, Archipelago Books. First published as Sister Deborah by Editions Gallimard, 2024. English translation copyright © 2024 by Mark Polizzotti.
