One String Guitar

Ten years after the 1994 Rwandan genocide, a Tutsi named Francine tries to rebuild her life in Upstate New York where she befriends Elbe, the medical interpreter assigned to her--an adoptee in search of biological family on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. Against the backdrop of the harrowing 100-day massacres of one million lives in Kigali and the revolution of the Lakota peoples in 1972 on the res, One-String Guitar weaves a narrative of resilience, healing and ultimately, love. The UN Commission on Human Rights recently announced that 230,000 in Burundi have sought refuge in other countries due to the killings, tortures, rapes and enforced disappearances in the last year. "When I wrote One-String Guitar, I never thought ethnic cleansing would be taking place again so soon," said de Vestel the author One-String Guitar. The novel's title--a reference to August Wilson's Seven Guitars in which Hedley plucks a single string instrument to connect with the memory of his mother--urges us all to remain connected to the wisdom of our ancestors in order to avoid repeating the worst chapters of our history. "But the reality is that there is always a genocide going on somewhere on our planet at any given moment," de Vestel added.Of mixed Belgian and African descent, Mona grew up in Brussels and later moved to the United States where she taught writing at the State University of New York (Oswego & Utica). Her work explores the role of the 'other' in the marginalized voices of our world. She is now a writing coach and ghostwriter and currently at work on Trail of Light, a memoir about her experience with shamanism and her recovery from the consequences of colonialism on her family. Mona now lives in Southern California with her family

• | Author: Mona De Vestel
• | Publisher: Harvard Square Editions
• | Publication Date: Nov 14, 2016
• | Number of Pages: 358 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 1941861296
• | ISBN-13: 9781941861295