A Book of My Own

by Scholastique Mukasonga, Emma Ramadan (Translator, Afterword)

Genres: Nonfiction, Africa

223 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

About the author

Born in Rwanda in 1956, Scholastique Mukasonga experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced into the under-developed Nyamata. In 1973, she was forced to leave the school of social assistance in Butare and flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992. The genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda 2 years later. Mukasonga learned that 27 of her family members had been massacred. Twelve years later, Gallimard published her autobiographical account Inyenzi ou les Cafards, which marked Mukasonga's entry into literature. Her first novel, Notre-Dame du Nil, won the Ahamadou Kourouma prize and the Renaudot prize in 2012.

(from http://www.citylights.com/info/?fa=ev...)

Reviews

[Ana WJ]

Great. Just great. As expected. Mukasonga is a favorite.

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

"That's when I understood that the dead were waiting for me. I had to bear witness. Those they had called cockroaches, whom they had exterminated, henceforth would live only within me, and it was through me, thanks to my writing, that they would be resurrected."

This most recent mini-book put out by isolarii (and translated by Emma Ramadan) emotionally outweighs its physical pages by many degrees. Mukasonga blends memoir, history, anecdote, and fact to pay tribute to her native Rwanda, childhood, and those lost in the genocide. As I discovered when first reading her Our Lady of the Nile, her writing sort of charms the reader with a kind of affectionate simplicity for its subjects, which only heightens the impact of the harsh realities she reveals. As a reader, it feels like she's disarming you in a way--inviting you in to a personal space, at times waxing nostalgic about family or tradition, only to lay bare the mechanisms that enabled slaughter and, for her, displacement and the loss of 27 family members. But there is also joy and hope in her memory, a love for what has been lost burning like a candle lit to honor the dead.

"Writing presented itself as the surest means of safeguarding memory, but also as the best therapy for a survivor or for someone who had escaped death."

[Reisse Myy Fredericks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Inspired by the Western canon—Woolf, Wiesel—this entirely magnificent memoir names Europe’s eradication of oral culture while harnessing the reach of literature to disseminate the uniquely terrible events of the Rwandan genocide. Plagued by survivor’s guilt, Mukasonga grapples, even as she tells these intimate testimonies of family and childhood, with the burden of authorship: a woman set apart by her parents, gifted French as a means of escape, and forever marked by what her exile cost.

There’s a sad anthropological determinism here—an ache at the level of history itself. Mukasonga frames her Tutsi heritage inside the mindless colonial fantasies that produced her marginalization, shaping her opportunities, her rootlessness, and her coming-of-age. Her exploration of borders is deeply humanistic and wildly apt for modern times, rendered with both immediacy and context through the lens of her own life. For us, she defines hospitality by illuminating what it isn’t. Extremely emotional, both bitterly and tenderly honest.

[Evelyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a series of interlinked erudite and enlightening essays the author examines the racist and historical concepts on the part of European colonial powers that led to the dissemination of falsities, and misinformation about Tutsis. She also describes their destruction of Tutsi culture and society, and governing structures in Rwanda by those powers. These actions by the colonial rulers created the conditions that led to discrimination by the Hutu against the Tutsi, and ever escalating attacks by the Hutu on them, which eventually, but not unexpectedly, culminated in the Rwandan genocide in 1994.

Against this backdrop the author examines her guilt as a survivor and the need to record through writings the names and stories of those who died in the genocide so that the memory of the dead and the genocide will never be forgotten.

These are powerful essays that are well worth reading.

[Olivia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing read! Definitely recommend. It’s my first book by Mukasonga and I will absolutely read her others. Lovely choice of words and powerful imagery. She ties in personal life memories as she recounts the build up culminating in the genocide in Rwanda. The scale of the narrative places the reader right in the middle of life in her home country, and thus breathes life in the people, and the places she describes.

[David Macpherson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one was powerful. Looking back at the tutsi massacred inx1994 and the aspects of guilt of surviving. The book did not have cohesion. It was a lot of little pieces of writing and it almost gels but doesn't. Woth that said it had an impact. Good writing throughout

[Isabella Wordsworth · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow, just wow. The kind of story you will revisit time and time again

[Naz Kadir · Rating 4 out of 5]

"And even if they listen to you, who will understand? You are like one of those former soldiers who keeps bringing up their war that no one wants to hear about anymore,"