You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town.
~Anne Lamott (Grace [Eventually]: Thoughts on Faith)
Fourteen years after Hutu extremists killed between 800,000 and 1 million people — mostly Tutsis — in a devastating slaughter, Rwandan women are weaving peace baskets for sale at Macy’s in the United States. Not only does the work bring them a regular salary, the business is also fostering reconciliation between victim and perpetrator.
Iphigenia Mukantabana, a master weaver, sits in front of her house in Gitarama — an hour from the capital, Kigali — making beautiful baskets with her friend Epiphania Mukanyndwi.
In 1994, Mukantabana’s husband and five of her children were hacked and clubbed to death by marauding Hutu militias. Among her family’s killers was Jean-Bosco Bizimana, Mukanyndwi’s husband.
“In my heart, the dead are dead, and they cannot come back again,” Mukantabana said of those she lost. “So I have to get on with the others and forget what has happened.”
It’s the birthday of Sandra Cisneros, (books by this author) born in Chicago (1954), the only daughter in a family of seven children, and best known as the author of The House on Mango Street (1984),a novel of vignettes based on her adolescence in a run-down Latino neighborhood Chicago. The book got hardly any attention when it was published 25 years ago, but has since sold more than 2 million copies, been translated into more than a dozen languages, and become required reading at middle schools, high schools, and colleges across the U.S.
Her father hadn’t wanted her to be a writer; he thought that in order to make it as a successful Latina, she should aim to be a television news weather girl. But her mom encouraged her to read and write, took her to the library, didn’t make her learn how to cook, and didn’t interrupt her studying or reading to make her do chores.
Cisneros majored in English at Loyola in Chicago and got accepted at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, a place where she felt totally out of place. She said, “My classmates were from the best schools in the country. They had been bred as fine hothouse flowers. I was a yellow weed among the city’s cracks.” One Iowa instructor gave them an exercise in which they were to describe their childhood homes. She said, “It was not until this moment when I separated myself, when I considered myself truly distinct, that my writing acquired a voice. … That’s when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn’t write about.”
Her 2002 novel, Caramelo, won a number of awards. She’s currently a writer-in-residence at Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas, and working on a children’s book called Bravo, Bruno and a book about writing titled Writing in My Pajamas.
Swinging Snow by Bruj (My Garden State) December 2009
…you know that at some point i am going to succumb to the urge to lie in this…
