After the braiding, a low buzzing remains in Memoire’s ear. It reminds her of the low buzzing she heard while they shampooed her hair. They told her she could never submerge her head in water after the braiding. No more swimming. No more drifting on her back, hair wafting around her head as clouds shift across a blue sky. No more splashing with her siblings, however long ago that was. They’re all married now, living lives rooted in their families and the houses they bought. She alone never felt quite at home, never managed to convince herself that where she stood was enough.

“Congratulations!” her older sister said on the video call. “It’s like God answered your prayers.”

A year of free accommodation in Rwanda. Paid language classes.

“One of us had to go back,” her brother said. “I’m glad it’s you.”

“I don’t get it. What will you do after?” her younger sister asked.

“I don’t know,” Memoire said. “They said I could stay in the country and get employed there. Or I could go back.”

“Yeah, but go back where? Melbourne? Montreal? Bangkok? Saskatoon?”

Pain zips through her scalp, interrupting the memory. She reaches for the newly implanted braids and finds smooth patterns where she expected rough fibres. They still pull against her scalp, causing a low pounding in her temples.

“This is her chance to find herself, remember?” Her older sister had teased. “She’ll know when she gets there.”

The sharp smell of mint and sulphur cools her scalp down. She reaches for the tub of anti-dandruff cream and applies more of the cooling stuff. It sizzles against her scalp.

Memoire went to visit her parents on a Monday morning. There was still snow clinging to lawns. She shook out her toque, wet from dripping icicles above her parents’ porch. The house was still the same as she had left it, a home bursting with books on wooden shelf space. Here and there were decorative pieces added by her parents, including orange vases shaped like kidneys and wooden statues of giraffes.

Her mother sighed into a cup of tea. The steam made her father’s nose twitch. He scratched his beard.

“I’m so proud of you,” her mother said into her cup.

“Did you talk to your cousins?” her father asked.

“Yes.” Memoire was planning to. Eventually.

“Do you know why we named you Memoire?” Her mother turned her cup in her hands. “We wanted you to be proof that the memory of a place is enough to live.”

“Do you not want me to go?”

Her mother sighed but handed Memoire a copy of her identity card. She complained about the number of pages she had to sign. The forms were all long and complicated, layers upon layers of legal text that amounted to a giant waiver: If ever something were to happen, if ever the procedure went wrong, we are not responsible.

Steam rose from all their cups, mingling with the dry heat of the space. Memoire’s scalp tickled, already dry even if the scalp ointment she’d applied should have worked to relieve the itchiness.

“I don’t want you to feel like you’re not whole. It feels like I’ve failed as a mother.” The words hung in the space, held back by her mother’s trembling lips.

The bubbling of beef stew filled the silence. Her mother had placed it on the stove as soon as Memoire had walked in. Its spiced curry fragrance grew into a sad hug.

Beef stew makes Memoire think of Ngunda, the story of a man or giant whose steps formed the hills of Rwanda and whose fall formed a lake.

Her parents say he ate too many cows and that’s why hunters sought to kill him. He would be invited to a friend’s house, eat one cow, and say, “That was a nice appetiser. Is there a main course?”

The next cow would be slaughtered. Ngunda would eat it whole. “That was a very good appetiser. Do you have a main course?”

He would eat the next cow and the next, until his host would throw him out in frustration. “You ate all my cows!”

When Memoire tells this version of the story during training in Rwanda, her teacher frowns. “That’s wrong. This is the correct version.”

They sit in an airy classroom on the fifth floor of an office building in Kigali city centre, she and five others. The windows open out to strangely humid air for February. There have been several floods. Climatology says December to February is a short dry season, followed by the long rainy season of March to May. It has been raining since December.

It seems Memoire knows many wrong versions of stories. Training is an undoing of all the wrong versions she knows. It feels like an undoing of a braid. Once the extension is off, what remains is her frizzy, dandruffed self, ugly and in need of detangling. The detangling process undoes all of her strands.

Be selfless, goes the training. A Storykeeper is a container. Leave space for our stories. Forget your past. Be our past. And our future.

In a lab set up like a hair salon they wash her hair. They condition it with creamy coconut. Memoire’s curls pop into life for the first time in her winter-filled years. She should have taken better care. Her curls feel like weightless fluff, unlike the metallic weight of the Storykeeper braids.

“Your hair is like the African Americans,” her cousins say at a café near the convention centre. In daylight the convention centre looks like a striped metal egg. Her cousins finger her hair. “It’s long and you wear it out.”

Their heads sway with freshly done fulani braids, goddess braids, knotless braids. “It’s okay we’ll find someone to braid your hair soon,” they say.

Memoire sips her masala chai. Later she throws it up. Something about the milk.

Her cousins take her through a night market in the pedestrian-only zone. There are no books on learning Kinyarwanda, but many embroidered sandals laid out on red carpets. “If you wanted to learn Kinyarwanda, you could have stayed with us for three months.”

It thunders and pours. Her cousins take shelter to preserve their edges. “Do you hate us?”

“No.” Maybe. Does she hate them or is she jealous? Her cousins know exactly where they’re from. They know exactly where they belong. That thought makes her stomach churn like the goat stew on the outdoor stove at her aunt’s house.

“Goat is for the men,” her aunt explains. “We can’t eat it.”

Goat makes her think of Ruganzu. In the version of the story she knows, Ruganzu was a great king who disguised himself as a young goatherd to take over Mt. Huye from the clutches of a witch named Nyagakecuru.

“That is wrong,” her teacher says while fanning himself. March starts off hot and dry. “It was King Rwabugili.”

And they teach her an entirely different story. Memoire braids her hair into twists, rehearsing the new story under her breath, finding it hard to wrap it around her head.

“Are you wearing dreadlocks?” Her cousins ask over dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Memoire eats too-sweet too-sour chicken adorned with pineapple cubes. They watch her over their skewers, eyebrows raised.

Her aunt fingers the twists with a frown, hand still greasy. “It’s okay, we’ll find someone to braid it soon.”

Memoire reminds them that her hair will be braided permanently soon, braided with the added memory of hundreds, thousands of stories she hasn’t memorised yet. It will supplement what she has learned of the main stories. It will make her the ultimate Storykeeper.

“You’re learning about imigani?” her cousins ask. “Isn’t that for children?”

“Well, I didn’t learn about them as a child. Do you know any?”

“Do you know Ngunda?”

“Yes, I do.” The wrong version.

They tell her the version her teacher taught her and laugh. “I can tell imigani, too.”

“Does a Storykeeper make a lot of money?”

“Why don’t you get a job back where you came from?”

Memoire doesn’t return to her cousins’ place until April. Because of the rain. The rain is a curtain that helps her focus on her studies. In May her aunt takes her to visit a grandaunt down in Huye. She frowns at Memoire’s attempts to ask about any stories she knows. Memoire frowns at the word the aunt uses to ask her what she wants to eat.

“She speaks an old Kinyarwanda,” her aunt explains. “And your accent is hard to understand.”

They eat ibigori in silence. The kernels are half-cold in the semi-darkness of the house.

The braiding process is similar to making box braids. The technician pulls against scalp and wraps a knot around the root, only there is the added process of planting nano threads into the scalp. The nano threads feed information from the memo extensions into the Storykeeper’s brain. The technician twists the extensions around the new Storykeeper’s natural hair. The extensions heat up as the information passes from strand to strand into scalp. It’s a process that can afford no breaks mid-braid, and it must be completed within the day. Because it requires more care than the average box braid, it takes twelve hours, no breaks permitted. The Storykeeper is hooked on an IV drip and has a catheter inserted to limit movement. As an added courtesy, the Storykeeper is fed a special drink via straw. The drink is an earthy meal like honeyed igikoma mixed with the tangy bitterness of banana wine to ease the pain. You know when your mother used to pull at your head to do the same. You know when she accidentally dashed some of the relaxer against your scalp. The Storykeeper feels the same pain through each individual follicle, amplified by the memory of thousands.

After the braiding, a bird calls in the darkness of the recovery ward. Memoire stirs in half-sleep. Whenever a bird calls, it is Inyamanza, come to tell another story. The story goes like this.

When Memoire unwraps gaperi, she unwraps treasure. Gaperi are like hidden jewels. Their skin is shrivelled and dry, like a withered flower bud. When Memoire unwraps gaperi, a golden fruit round like a cherry tomato shines in the golden light of afternoon. She pops the fruit in her mouth, and it explodes in sweet goodness.

When Memoire unwraps gaperi, there is a story of a friend who taught her the English name for the fruit: cape gooseberry. They sit across from each other on a table on a cobbled floor. They’re at a poutine place in Vieux-Montréal. The sky is grey with the fake promise of rain. Montreal likes to be cloudy without committing to rain. Her friend leans back on her wrought iron chair, pale arms crossed.

“I really thought you would settle here,” she says.

“Maybe I will, after.”

“I really thought you would settle here.” Her friend’s eyes are like gaperi, round jewels that shine with unshed tears.

“I just need to learn Kinyarwanda.”

“So why become a Storykeeper? I’ve read articles. The process can be dangerous.”

And suspect. The company has foreign interests. After her first class, Memoire learns it’s foreign owned. Maybe jointly. French/Chinese/American/Belgian.

“It feels like I’ll finally connect to my heritage like this. No one will be able to say that I’m not Rwandan anymore, because I’ll have all its stories.” In addition to the one story they all share: that of death.

“Why do you care so much about what other people think?”

Growing up, every ground Memoire touched grew a thorn to prick her. Other people filtered around her, perfectly at ease. Only she could feel the unwelcome. Wherever she went.

“This is for me. No one has ever let me just exist as myself.”

“I have.” Her friend throws her arms up. “Your other friends have. Why do you want to prove yourself to people who don’t matter?”

“Because I want to make sense to myself.” Memoire lowers her voice, aware of their distinct use of English in a Francophone space. “I don’t make sense to myself.”

Her friend shakes her head. The poutine arrives and Memoire digs in with the hunger of nostalgia. The poutine shines gold like gaperi, explodes with flavour like gaperi, rich and homey. This is her last poutine for a while. A goodbye to the familiar.

After eating, they walk along the riverside, heading towards the lighthouse. The sun is a white blob against the grey clouds. Her friend adds to the heavy humidity with a sigh. “You make sense to me. To everyone that loves you. Why isn’t that enough for you? I feel like you’re taking my friendship for granted. We’ve known each other for how long?”

A seagull cries in the wind. Like Inyamanza, the storytelling bird, signalling the end of the story.

“I’ll be back,” Memoire says.

“To visit or to stay?”

The seagull flaps its white, grey wings, streaked with black. The colours merge and meld. Is it a magpie now? Is it Inyamanza?

She turns to her friend, but she is gone. In Memoire’s palm is a single gaperi, wrapped tight.

There’s something wrong with the stories Memoire tells as a Storykeeper. She adds things. She mixes things.

Her stage is a penthouse terrace in Musanze where she and two other research subjects give regular performances as part of the trials. She gets paid an honorarium for each storytelling. The verdant rooftop is adorned with fairy lights and features panoramic views of the great volcanoes of the north: Sabyinyo, Muhabura, Karisimbi.

The event is sponsored by French, Chinese, American, Belgian companies. On the first night a company representative talks about the future of nanotech but doesn’t address a question on the inefficiency of braiding information into one’s head.

“It’s all an experiment, blue sky, exploration beyond the limits of our imaginations,” the representative says.

And these bodies are disposable. Three of her classmates have gone home, one of whom suffered a mild rejection to the braids. Memoire’s eye twitches. It’s a side effect of the braiding, temporary, meant to last a week. It’s been a week.

She tries to name the shadowy peaks visible from the verdant rooftop. The one with teeth is Sabyinyo. The one whose peak disappears beyond the cloud cover is Karisimbi.

Memoire breathes the cool northern air, spreading her arms wide to sink into her telling. Maybe it’s the full realisation that her body is no longer her own that settles the way she concludes the tale. “Karisimbi is a story I love to tell because the woman has agency. She finds out her husband is cursed to be a snake raging inside a volcano during the day. She steals his snakeskin and refuses to budge until he breaks free of his own enchantment. He becomes a man again, and they rule their underground kingdom together. She manages to convince him to let her see her mother as a reward. She’s brave and smart in a world where men control her life.”

She shouldn’t add things, especially not her interpretation of a story.

“Rushyoza was pretty was she not?” Memoire tells as an aside to the tale of Rushyoza. “Even as they pulverized her to wood pulp. Her beauty was such that men obsessed over the one woman, and the others became witches in their jealousy.”

She shouldn’t mix things, especially not several stories and her interpretation of them all.

“Senges only curse their brothers’ daughters. Nyagakecuru is conquered by a crush. Gahinda marries up because her beauty saves her from her sorrow. To name patriarchy is to become western in your feminism.”

She should simply tell their stories as recorded in the braids. But it’s her hair the braids are mixing with.

In June Memoire sits in the training classroom back in Kigali, eye twitching. It’s a side effect of the braiding. The last technician who checked her claimed it was temporary, but it’s been weeks.

“Why don’t you tell the stories the way they’ve been stored in your head?” The teacher asks.

“I am. I’m telling them in a way that makes sense to me.”

“Tell them as you were taught. From the top, Sebwugugu and his wife.”

“Sebwugugu was a greedy and foolish man whose greed got him killed by the lord of the forest. His wife was smart and cunning and sought to avenge him. When she confronts the beast that killed him, he explains what her husband did to deserve death. She marries the lord of the forest.”

“Good enough.”

“But why? Why did she marry her husband’s killer? She was so ready to kill him for revenge. What made her change her mind? Was it self-preservation?”

“Wrong! Tell the umugani as you were told.”

“There’s more than one version of these stories.” Her scalp is hot. Sweat slinks down her temples. “Why do the files in my head claim that there’s only one? Whose stories am I keeping if not my own?”

The teacher sighs. “Go home for today.”

In her mind Karisimbi is erupting. The cursed snake king terrorises the world again. It’s hot. Her sweat pours down her chest. “Forgive me, mbabarira,” she says, hanging her head. “I know I should keep stories. Not retell them. It’s so hot in here.” Memoire reaches for the fan and collapses.

Memoire wakes up in July. Blue birds in white coats flit around her. They chatter in medical jargon. “Do you understand, Memoire?”

“Joyeuse Saint-Jean-Baptiste,” she mumbles.

La Saint-Jean-Baptiste is in June. She always seems to miss it.

She dreams of Fujisan in winter, a grey mound enshrined in fog. Staring at Fujisan makes her think of Karisimbi. Karisimbi’s story contains the warmth of a volcano. In a land of hills like Rwanda, all stories contain the warmth of volcanoes.

In a land of volcanoes, a girl once sought to find herself. She spoke to a rock, who told her to go home.

“Where is home?”

“It’s where the eruption places you.” The volcano erupted and she tumbled onto a flat plain next to a forest.

She spoke to a tree in the forest, who told her to go home.

“Where is home?”

“Home is where you put your roots.”

The girl reached through the ground, but it was thorny. She traveled for years and years in search of thorn-free ground and reached a river, who told her to go home.

“Where is home?”

“Home is wherever you flow to.”

So she jumped into the river, and she flowed for years and years until she reached the ocean. The ocean tossed and tumbled her around, until the girl’s spirit sank, and her body floated forever.

Inyamanza watched on and told the story to whoever would listen. “This is why women need to marry,” he said. “If they don’t, they will die with no home.”

Wrong! Her teacher cries. Tell the stories we told you to keep. Why can’t you belong even now?

Memoire wakes up in August. “Mbabarira,” she pleads, tears in her eyes. “I’ll do better. I’m Inyamanza’s messenger, a bird of a messenger bird, messenger to bird of messages, messages to birds who are Inyamanza.”

“The rejection is severe,” a blue bird in a white coat says.

It’s hot. And dry. Summer is so hot. Her nose is so dry. Memoire sniffs and tastes blood.

The bird sighs like her gaperi friend. “There’s nothing more we can do. Send her home.”

In the end it’s always winter. You know that smell of sharp cold and smoke? That garage smell just before you exhale, and your breath comes out as steam? Memoire knows winter is coming by the smell. Then it comes. Then it refuses to go. Then heat sweeps it away. Spring explodes. Summer riots. Then autumn falls, whispering winter. Winter will always come in the end.

In winter Memoire likes eating plums. Their skin is plump, the juice delightfully sweet and sour. She bites and the skin easily falls away, firm yet easy to chew. A plum usually bounces. Memoire has dropped many plums since coming home and they’ve only rolled.

A bird calls in the whiteness of the landscape outside. Is it Inyamanza? No. Red flashes by a birch tree. It’s a cardinal, red like the blood Memoire’s mother wipes from her nose.

“I am failing as a storyteller,” Memoire says.

“Shh, ceceka.”

“This isn’t the story I wanted to tell.”

Memoire should have found what she wanted. Memoire should have felt complete. Mbabarira. Mbabarira. Mbabarira. Mbabarira…

“The file is corrupt.” The gaperi-eyed scientist runs his hands over his face. The audio file continues to ramble in mbabarira’s.

His plum-faced PhD student resists the urge to roll her eyes. “No, it’s complete. It stops at some point. With your permission I’ll add it to the archive.”

The file’s name is MemoireImbabazi_SK_Trial_Fail.

The student’s fingers hover over the reductive name. She creates a copy of the file and saves it to her own research folder.

MemoireImbabazi_SK_Imigani.

© 2026 Aline-Mwezi Niyonsenga