Friday Book Review
In Gaile Parkin’s book, Baking Cakes in Kigali, Angel Tungaraza has become the guardian of secrets. Her gentle guidance earns her the respect and affection of her community. It also makes her privy to all the neighborhood gossip. Though she never divulges a confidence, she uses her knowledge to subtly influence the course of ordinary events. Of course, ordinary events are of great personal importance to those involved.
Angel and her husband Pius raise their grandchildren in an upper-middle-class community. Pius works at the local university while Angel bakes and decorates cakes by special order. Each cake is custom made and meticulously filled and iced. In negotiating their design, Angel and her clients have detailed conversations about the people and events involved in the celebration. The result is the perfect cake and a compassionate understanding of the person ordering it.
So far, this sounds like a pretty straightforward storyline. Who doesn’t like a book of secrets? There is a married man cheating on his wife. A single bachelor with a good job is looking for a romantic interest. A shop keeper is hoping her boyfriend will marry her. But Angel and her family live in Rwanda where the common secretes people keep are complicated by genocide, aids, and female genital mutilation. The married man works for the CIA. The bachelor declines to get involved with a woman that had been raped with a machete because she can’t have children. The shop keeper is Hutu while her Tutsi boyfriend was orphaned in the genocide. Though they were just children in 1994, her mother is in prison as a génocidaire.
This book is a strange contradiction. Kigali is like a Rwandan Mayberry in spite of it’s pain. Gaile Parkin somehow makes all this seem like ordinary complications of everyday life. For the characters in Baking Cakes in Kigali, it is everyday life.
The last secret Angel comes to terms with is her own. With the support of her friends and her husband, she faces her secret with the same compassion and tenderness that she offers others. This is Angel’s last lesson for us. To be gentle with ourselves. Truth can be a violent thing.
If you liked The Ladies’ #1 Dective Agency you will find Baking Cakes in Kigali to be just as endearing and hopeful but with more depth and realism.
Read ~ Write ~ Wander