Baratas

by Scholastique Mukasonga

Imagine being born into a world where everything about you--the shape of your nose, the look of your hair, the place of your birth--designates you as an undesirable, an inferior, a menace, no better than a cockroach, something to be driven away and ultimately exterminated. Imagine being thousands of miles away while your family and friends are brutally and methodically slaughtered. Imagine being entrusted by your parents with the mission of leaving everything you know and finding some way to survive, in the name of your family and your people.

Scholastique Mukasonga's Cockroaches is the story of growing up a Tutsi in Hutu-dominated Rwanda--the story of a happy child, a loving family, all wiped out in the genocide of 1994. A vivid, bittersweet depiction of family life and bond in a time of immense hardship, it is also a story of incredible endurance and the duty to remember that loss and those lost while somehow carrying on. Sweet, funny, wrenching, and deeply moving, Cockroaches is a window into an unforgettable world of love, grief, and horror.

Runtime: 4. 36 hours, 4 library CDs

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, Africa, History, Rwanda, Biography Memoir, War

149 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2006

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

[Candi · Rating 4 out of 5]

This title might be misleading at first glance – it has nothing to do with that dreaded insect. Here, the word cockroach is used as a derogatory term for an entire ethnic group that was nearly wiped from the globe in very recent history. Cockroach (Inyenzi) is the term given to the Tutsis by the Hutus in Rwanda. This book is a deeply personal and moving account written by Scholastique Mukasonga, a Tutsi who lost the majority of her family during the 1994 genocide. 1994?!! ! This isn’t the first I’ve learned about this very horrific and disturbing piece of history, but it never fails to take my breath away. While I was living my fairly sheltered life in western New York, a whole group of people were shunned, humiliated, persecuted, and eventually murdered all because of the color of their skin, the shape of their nose, and the texture of their hair. It sickens me to read of such things, particularly when world leaders were not ignorant of these crimes against humanity. I’ll be honest in saying it gives me no hope for the future at all.

“Bertrand Russell was all alone when he condemned “the most horrible and systematic human massacre we have had occasion to witness since the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis.” The Catholic church, the former mandate authority, the international criminal courts, none of them had anything to say, apart from denouncing Inyenzi terrorism.”

Scholastique is one of the “lucky” ones. Her parents knew the only way to save some of their children was to provide them with an education. Scholastique and one brother managed to do so. The rest of her brothers and sisters, their spouses and children, and her parents were not at all fortunate. Scholastique now lives with the horror of knowing they suffered. She lives with guilt as a survivor. And she tries desperately to keep all thirty-seven of them in her memory. This book is written for them and for the countless others who were massacred.

“Over and over, I write and rewrite their names in the blue-covered notebook, trying to prove to myself that they existed; I speak their names one by one, in the dark and the silence. I have to fix a face on each name, hang some shred of a memory.”

I’m not going to say go out and read this book if you think it’s not for you. I’m sure you can imagine it’s a very tough reading experience. I’m not sorry I read this, however. Several years ago I picked up a historical fiction work about the genocide titled Running the Rift. That book and this memoir, along with the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, all provided me with everything I needed to know about the execrable and inexcusable mistreatment of human beings in that particular place and time – as well as in the world at large. Perhaps cockroaches treat one another better?

“I recite the names of all those who have no one left to mourn them. I cry out their names – to whom? for whom?”

[Ina Cawl · Rating 5 out of 5]

First I believe we should thank Archipelago for producing such fine books.
This was really very hard book to read especially for those who had similar experience like the Author portrays,a world where your skin, hair, nose, Tribe, Race and other physical features can determine your fate and how others treat you sometimes as human and in unfortunate cases as subhuman or as Cockroach in a literal sense.


story about me

I remember when going to hunt there was places I was told to never approach not for fear of mines but because it contained Mass Graves where the former or last Somalian Government used to kill my tribe in a collective way, i remember always finding bones there when floods come and makes some bones resurface.

when I ask my paternal uncles why the government used to kill in this unhuman way they used to answer me because the thought of us as a subhuman and so we don't have the right to be treated like human or the right to exist.

but when I ask my maternal uncles why there was such genocide when the government was falling down and the country breaking up they would answer that my tribe were fifth column and a threat to the common good of the nation, but I am sure of one thing that I feel no remorse for the fall of the state because if the Somalian state still existed today I wouldn't be here.
the book starts with a nightmare a mob chases after the Author with a machetes trying to catching her and after she woke up she goes to the main room which contain box within it stuffs from her home which does not exist anymore and a pictures whose life cut shorts by irrational hate and prejudices of her community.

what is good in the introduction of the book is humanizing and personalizing the victims and what i mean by this it is different when i say a million Tutsis has dies in genocide or sos and so has died, i don't know about other human beings but it feels to me they are more Humane and alive when you mention their names and talk about their histories

the book starts in the late of 1950th where the author was born in southwest of Rwanda, in Gikongoro province, high-altitude rainforest,although the author doesn't remember her birthplace she still recalls her mom stories of the place of the wheat that grows in that altitude and the endless battles she had with the monkeys

The first pogroms against the Tutsis broke out on All Saints’ Day, 1959. The machinery of the genocide had been set into motion. It would never stop. Until the final solution, it would never stop.

it was in this young age that the Author had encountered her first anti Tutsis violence where her
in which she survived a mob of Hutus who was trying to kill her and all of her families but thanks to her moms barely escaped the mob although her house was burnt.
lastly this book is really heavy and painful to read and it required a lot of courage to write it and i really encourage everyone to read it so this could not in your place and it will be the last genocide and Humanity could learn something from it.
one final note i live in opposite world and i mean in Rwanda people of light color or soft hair or small noses used to be prejudged and persecuted and in case of my country Somalia people of with more black color and thick hair and slightly big noses are still presecuted and forced out of their farms and houses just because the were as Bantu Somali

[leynes · Rating 5 out of 5]

WOW. This was my first five star read of 2021. Inyenzi ou les cafards is the testimony of a woman who lost nearly 40 family members during the 1994 genocide agains the Tutsi in Rwanda. By bearing witness to the horrors her family had to endure, she forces us readers to do the same. To not look away. To name these crimes by their proper name: a genocide. Mukasonga pleads with the reader that this genocide must be vocalised, the names of the hundreds of thousand victims cannot be forgotten.

It has been a long time since I ugly cried during a book but Mukasonga's bravery, her honesty and her unique way of telling her life's story in such a moving (but also educational) manner sucked the air right out of my lungs. Reading about the genocide was too much to handle for me at times. It made me acutely aware of Mukasonga's resilience and strength, since living through these horrors and facing the burden of surviving goes beyond anything I can imagine.

For me, this book is a must-read (it also available in an English translation, called 'Cockroaches') since Mukasonga is able to provide a unique perspective on Rwanda beginning from the 50s up to our present day.

All is lost, all is over.

Of course, Inyenzi ou les cafards can be classified as a memoir: Mukasonga, born in 1956, narrates in a chronological manner her life from her early childhood the southwest of Rwanda, by the Rukarara river, to the first programs against the Tutsi in 1959, her family's deportation with many other Tutsi to Nyamata, their life at the refugee camp, her time at the Lycée Notre-Dame-de-Citeaux in Kigali (at a time where only 10% of Tutsi were admitted to secondary schools), which was cut short when the Tutsi children were driven out of schools in 1973, and her exile in Burundi, which at the end was key in her escaping death, as Mukasonga started working for UNICEF there, found a French husband and moved to France in 1992, two years before the genocide.

But to me, Inyenzi ou les cafards is so much more than just a memoir. It is a testimony and a memory. Mukasonga is the guardian of her people, she is the memory of the dead. By bearing witness and writing their lives and stories down, she is keeping them alive. For eternity. At the end of the book, she reflects on how it is her duty to be there not just for her lost family members but also for all the dead who have no one to mourn them. She has to cry out their names. She ponders if she has fulfilled the mission that her parents entrusted her with thirty years earlier. Has she managed to live in the name of them all? I cannot imagine how heavy the burden of survival is that she will have to carry through the remainder of her life.

The assassins wanted to erase even their memory but, in the school notebook that no longer leaves me, I record their names and I have for mine and all those who fell in Nyamata only this paper tomb.

This book, Inyenzi ou les cafards, is their paper tomb, a literal and/or literary grave. It is a striking image, all the more powerful because it's true. After narrating the events of her life leading up to the genocide, Mukasonga than takes it upon herself to recount the lives of all the people she knew that lost their lives during these few fateful months in 1994. And even if she only remembers a couple of sentences for some people, she still commemorates them in this tomb. As a reader, you are invited to bear witness to all these lives who were so brutally cut short, all these unfilled promises and possibilities. Reading the last two chapters of her book is a chilling experience.

She recalls the names of the deceased in a notebook she is writing on while visiting Gitagata and Gitwe, which were reduced to ruins. The book ends with a description of a snake she finds that she uses to symbolise the endurance of what the génocidaires tried to destroy. She lists the names of deceased friends and acquaintances as a form of memorial and burial.

Mukasonga still lives in France today. She works as the judicial representative for the Union départementale des associations familiales de Calvados and has published many more books. It has taken her more than ten years to fain the courage to return to Rwanda, which she did in 2004. The last chapter of Inyenzi ou les cafards details her experience travelling to all the significant places of her childhood and young adolescence, the house where her parents where killed only to find that their former residence had been cleared away. Some things she only fully realised once she stood before them. It was tragic to see how a part of her still held out the hope, despite knowing it better, that she would find them to be alive. It is so human, to hold onto hope.

Mukasonga is a gifted storyteller because she has the ability of sucking the reader into her world, her life. I could imagine so many of the scenes that she described, and not just the horrendous ones, also the ones full of joy and family unity, of her creeping into her cousin's room at night and the two girls giggling about boys and relationships. But I would lie if I were to say that the sobering, heartbreaking moments of Mukasonga's life aren't the ones that were most memorable to me.

She manages to capture what she calls "la terreur au quotidien" (everyday terror) that all Tutis felt beginning from the 50s on. After the first programs, they live in constant fear. They are deported, deplaced, some flee early on, others have no other choice but to stay behind. There were little moments in this book that were incredibly hard to stomach, e.g. when Mukasonga narrates that when Hutu soldiers came to the refugee camp in Nyamata the beautiful Tutsi girls were hidden away from their families but when a solider "claimed" a girl, the family usually handed her over because "giving up on one person might save the entire family".

A similar sentiment was felt when Mukasonga and her older brother André were chosen to flee to Burundi in the 80s, as they were among the oldest and best educated of all the siblings. Mukasonga, even back then, knew that "they were the ones chosen to survive." The family couldn't afford to flee as a whole, so the parents had to make this impossible decision: save as many as they can.

It was very interesting to see how much the family valued education, as they saw a good education as a means to get out, and possibly also a means for revenge and persistence. Therefore, it was very interesting to see how Mukasonga detailed her years at secondary school. As a Tutsi, she was an outsider and felt very lonely because most of her classmates rejected her. One moment I will never forget is how Mukasonga, alongside the other few Tutsi children at the school, stayed up until the early hours of the morning to study in the school toilet for fear of being expelled from school.

One moment that brought tears to my eyes is when Mukasonga recalls how she visited her family in May 1986. This would be the last time she would ever see her parents. Something she, of course, didn't know at the time. Upon leaving, she recalls: "I see my mother, on the edge of the runway, her frail silhouette wrapped in her loincloth. It is the last image I kept of her, a small silhouette that fades away at the turn of the track."

In terms of learning about the effects of colonialism on Rwanda, there are two things that I found most noteworthy: First of all, how the work of Christian missionaries infiltrated the whole of society so that Mukasonga's mother was scared of the religion of her own ancestors, she "hadn't been taught to read, she hadn't been taught to write, she had been taught to pray."

Second of all, how the strive between the Hutu and the Tutsi was aided under colonial rule. In 1935, Belgium introduced a permanent division of the population by strictly dividing the population into three ethnic groups, with the Hutu representing about 84% of the population, Tutsi about 15%, and Twa about 1% of the population. The Belgians modernised the Rwandan economy, supporting Tutsi supremacy (because they reigned higher in the "racial hierarchy" of the West), leaving the darker-skinned Hutu disenfranchised.

The ethnic identities of the Hutu and Tutsi were reshaped and mythologized by the colonisers. Christian missionaries promoted the theory about the "Hamitic" origins of the kingdom, and referred to the distinctively Ethiopian features and hence, foreign origins, of the Tutsi "caste". These mythologies provided the basis for anti-Tutsi propaganda in the following decades, as, after World War II, a Hutu emancipation movement began to grow in Rwanda, fuelled by an increasing sympathy for the Hutu within the Catholic Church.

For me, there's a lot left to learn about the genocide and I will definitely seek out more knowledge on the role of Western countries in it, but for now, I can appreciate Mukasonga's book for its brilliant personal approach to this very complex and difficult topic.

[Pedro Pacifico Book.ster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Baratas, de Scholastique Mukasonga

“Baratas” é o termo pejorativo para se referir ao povo da etnia Tusti pelos Hutus, que são a maioria em Ruanda. A perseguição ao grupo minoritário era tão intensa que resultou em um massacre no ano de 1994, que vitimou brutalmente quase 1 milhão de pessoas em um período de apenas 100 dias. O Genocídio de Ruanda, como ficou conhecido, é um dos mais brutais acontecimentos da História recente.

A autora nasceu em Ruanda mas conseguiu fugir a tempo e sobreviver ao genocídio. No entanto, a maior parte da sua família não teve a mesma sorte e acabou se tornando mais um dentre tantos Tutsis mortos. E é justamente essas memórias de uma sobrevivente que encontramos em “Baratas”, um texto autobiográfico que alcança as mais antigas lembranças de Scholastique para nos criar um panorama pessoal sobre a escalada da perseguição ao seu povo.

O livro é, por si só, um ato extremamente corajoso, já que a autora precisa revisitar muitos acontecimentos relacionados à morte de sua família e ao medo constante que viveu em um grande período da sua vida. O principal objetivo era sobreviver, desde a sua infância, enquanto seus pais tentavam dar aos seus filhos uma vida o mais normal possível em um ambiente de total insegurança e sem poder chamar a atenção. Algo impossível, que termina na fuga da autora de sua própria terra.

É o meu terceiro livro de Scholastique e fico impressionado com a capacidade da autora de impactar o leitor. A leitura é difícil, com passagens que incomodam por revelarem o grau de violência enfrentado pelos Tutsis. Na minha opinião, é necessário conhecer mais sobre esse acontecimento histórico tão triste e recente, mas que ainda é pouco conhecido por nós. Fica até difícil acreditar que de trata de uma história real. A sensação de revolta é inevitável.

Nota 9/10

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[Sue · Rating 5 out of 5]

A must read! ...but a very difficult one.

Rwandan history is not clear in my mind except for the terrible flare of genocidal violence in the 1990s where the Tutsi people were violently exterminated from those areas of the country to which they had been consigned in earlier decades. Mukasonga fleshes in those decades through the lives of her family and neighbors, those she went to school with, those she played with and gathered water with at the lake. In the 1950s and 60s, the Tutsi people were forced to move from their homes and assigned an area of the country in which to live, a new geography to learn, new land to farm, new schools for their children. Everything new. Because their skin was the wrong shade, their noses too straight, their look just not right to fit with the Hutu norm. And Hutus were in power. In her novel Our Lady of the Nile, Muskasonga deals with some of these issues in a fictional way; here it is memory and fact.

In opening, we hear through a child's voice, in a child's memories of a move, of changes in home, friends and experiences, of scary military raids with no apparent reason except terror, of death for no purpose except the same terror. There are good memories too of family love, of brothers and sisters, of neighbors and school, of planning for a hoped for future. But behind the plans there is a tension because there are those niggling worries. All is not calm and quiet in this new home between the 1960s and 1990s. There are small indignities and larger raids. In 1973, there were larger attacks and Mukasonga's family made a decision.

In Burundi we could probably continue our studies and
find work. And above all - my parents weren't quite sure
how to say it - at least some of us had to survive, to keep
the memory alive, so the family would go on, somewhere
else. (loc 867)

Because of this escape, Mukasonga is alive and a social worker and an author today and able to provide witness to what happened in Rwanda during all these days of terror. But so many others are not.

I know that I have been woefully ignorant of the scope of what happened in Rwanda over the years and in 1994. This book was overdue for me and I believe so many others should read it. As has been said innumerable times before, if we do not learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it. This is difficult but necessary reading as Mukasonga takes us through to her return after the genocide to the destroyed village and the remnants of her childhood.

A very strong 5 rating and highly recommended.

A copy of this book was provided by the publisher through NetGalley in return for an honest review.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can’t give this memoir less than five stars, although it is a disturbing book, that caused my reactions to sway between sadness and anger.

The author was born in 1956 as a member of the Tutsi minority in Rwanda. I’m sure most of us will have some knowledge of the terrible Genocide of 1994. She was living in France when this occurred, although dozens of her family members were murdered. What the book makes clear though, is that the Genocide was just the culmination of a long period of persecution of the Tutsi, referred to as inyenzi – cockroaches – by the Rwandan authorities. Of course this sort of language is always used by those who seek to dehumanize others, to remove their individuality and make them into something that must be destroyed.

In Rwanda, the Tutsi were subject to “terror that was systematic and organised.” Under the pretext of conducting security sweeps, soldiers or militiamen would regularly ransack houses, beat people with rifle butts, and rape young women. The author relates how one day, when walking to her primary school with a group of other girls, a soldier tossed a grenade into the group, resulting in one girl becoming permanently disabled. What must it be like to have to live your life outwith the protection of the law, always in fear and completely at the mercy of others, simply because of your ethnicity?

The Rwandan government put severe limitations on the number of Tutsis who could attend secondary school, but the author was one of those who did gain a place, boarding in a school 45km from her home. When returning home in the school holidays, she dreaded crossing a particular bridge which was always guarded by soldiers. The girls returning home would be forced to line up, at which the soldiers would spit in their faces, hit them with rifle butts, stamp on their bare feet with their Army boots etc. I think part of the explanation for this is simply that some people gain satisfaction and a sense of status from demonstrating their power over others.

In 1973 there was another wave of pogroms, during which all Tutsi students were expelled permanently from school. Mukasonga managed to flee to Burundi as a refugee. In Burundi the Tutsi had retained power and it tended to be the Hutu who were the subject of persecution and massacre, but the author says she formed a bond with Hutu women who had lost family as a result of “the ethnic madness” that affected both peoples and “was leading them into the depths of horror, while we women helplessly looked on.”

It took the author until 2004, 10 years after the Genocide, before she could face returning to Rwanda, to a country where no-one admits they took part in the massacres or shows any remorse. In many cases there is not even a trace of the houses in which the victims lived. It was the intention of the killers to erase even the memory of their victims, to make it seem they had never existed. In response, the author names and describes each of the people of her village, who can no longer tell their own stories. She is the only one left to do so.

[Jenny (Reading Envy) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is absolutely the hardest book I have ever read. Cockroaches is a memoir from Scholastique Mukasonga, author of the award-winning novel Our Lady of the Nile. This book actually came first in French, but is being translated second into English.

I have a vague awareness of the Rwandan genocide. I am shamefully aware of my lack of knowledge.
What I didn't know is how far back the persecution of the Tutsi people began.

Mukasonga's memoir starts with her birth, where families of Tutsi background are already being forcibly removed from their homes and relocated. But this was back in the 1950s and 1960s, not the 1990s. As the decades go by, the increased violence and fear gets worse and worse. She was able to escape Rwanda to Burundi, and then by some miracle ended up in France to continue her social work career in 1992. 27 of her family members were killed in the genocide centered in Nyamata, but of course they are only 27 of the as many as 800,000 killed just that year. But Mukasonga makes it clear that this was only the culminating event. People were being killed all along. Even more of them had their spirits, educations, and hopes killed for decades before. And when she returned back to Rwanda ten years after the massacre, the people remaining, the neighbors she remembers from her childhood were most definitely parties to the killing in some way. Because they live on the land. Because they survived. Her home and land were unrecognizable, and her family had been effectively erased from existence. How does a person face such a thing?

One of the important things this book does, and one of the reasons I think it is so important to read it - it takes the time to name the names. Not only her family but the people in her village. The friends she had, the neighbors she knew, all destroyed.

I've already recommended this book to a friend who teaches conflict literature. It seems like maybe if you can read this and understand how far back the intentional marginalization of the Tutsi goes, how institutionalized and government-sanctioned it became, perhaps then a parallel can be drawn to other situations in the world. Those that aren't there yet, but are headed there. History repeats. We need to be paying attention.

Thanks to the publisher for providing early access to this title via Edelweiss. This is slated to be available in October 2016.

[Paula Mota]

Desejaria escrever esta página com as minhas lágrimas.

Nunca nenhuma africana negra recebeu o Nobel da Literatura e creio que Scholastique Mukasonga o merece, como magnífica memorialista que é, como sobrevivente de um povo perseguido e massacrado durante décadas, até mesmo por justiça poética, como homenagem ao milhão de tútsis chacinados pelos seus concidadãos hútus durante 100 dias, em 1994.
Em parte, esta é a mesma história que já tinha lido em “The Barefoot Woman”, dedicado a Stefania, a sua mãe, mas a verdade é que o massacre do Ruanda é o alicerce de toda a produção literária de Mukasonga, porque está intrinsecamente ligado à sua vida e à sua psique, à sua culpa de sobrevivente.

Eu contava e voltava a contar. Dava um total de 37.

É em honra desses 37 membros da sua família, pais, irmãos, irmãs, cunhados, cunhadas, sobrinhos e sobrinhos-netos, que a autora erigiu este “túmulo de papel”, na falta de muitas campas individuais e identificadas, visto que milhares de corpos foram enterrados em valas comuns enquanto outros ficaram à mercê dos elementos e dos animais selvagens ou foram atirados aos rios. Quem, na altura, viu as imagens dos rios tingidos de sangue com cadáveres estropiados a boiar nunca poderá esquecer.

Houve, é claro, sobreviventes. Nenhum genocídio é perfeito.

Mukasonga abre “Inyenzi ou as Baratas” com um pesadelo recorrente e inicia a narrativa dos acontecimentos de forma cronológica, em 1959, com os primeiros progroms dirigidos aos tútsis, quando tinha apenas três anos de idade, altura em que a família teve de abandonar a sua aldeia com uma panela de ferro fundido como única bagagem, para se exilar em Nyamata, uma zona de savana quase desabitada, infestada de moscas tsé-tsé.
Em 1962, o Ruanda tornou-se uma nação independente depois de décadas a ser administrado por potências europeias, tornando-se um símbolo dos efeitos de um colonialismo salobro e de um pós-colonialismo irresponsável, em que a Igreja Católica desempenhou um papel pernicioso, instigando umas etnias contra as outras, e a ONU, mais uma vez, como assistimos atualmente na Palestina, não deu uma resposta atempada nem eficiente.

Bertrand Russell estava completamente só quando denunciou “o massacre mais horrível e mais sistemático desde o extermínio dos judeus pelos nazis”. A hierarquia católica, a antiga autoridade mandatária e as instâncias internacionais não tiveram mais nada a dizer sobre o caso a não ser condenar o terrorismo dos Inyenzi.

O terrorismo dos oprimidos e acossados, um cenário demasiado familiar e actual. Foi no início dos anos 60, com a subida dos hutus aos poder que surgiu o termo “Inyenzi” (barata), uma forma de desumanizar aqueles que se quer exterminar, como Hitler fez aos judeus, como Putin faz aos ucranianos, para conseguirem o apoio da população em geral. Apesar da discriminação e do sistema de quotas no ensino, Mukasonga e alguns dos seus irmãos ainda conseguiram estudar. A temporada passada num colégio de freiras entre 1968 e 1971 comprova o espírito de resistente que sempre a caracterizou.

Nós, as tútsis, ficávamos despertas. Esperávamos que todas as nossas colegas dormissem profundamente, que já não houvesse ninguém a ir à casa de banho, que as freiras estivessem definitivamente recolhidas. (…) Muitas vezes, estudávamos ali as lições e fazíamos os trabalhos de casa até de madrugada. Tudo o que aprendi em Notre-Dame-de-Citeaux, aprendi nas casas de banho.

Foi 1973, quando já estudava na escola de assistentes sociais, que o cerco se apertou em torno dos tútsis e os pais de Mukasonga decidiram pôr dois dos filhos mais velhos, os mais instruídos, a salvo no Burundi.

Tínhamos sido escolhidos para sobreviver.

Depois de se formar, trabalhou em vários programas da Unicef, casou-se com um francês, teve dois filhos e encontrava-se em França quando se deu o último acto da limpeza étnica, em 1994.

Da morte dos meus, tenho apenas buracos negros e fragmentos de horror. O que mais faz sofrer? Ignorar como foram mortos ou saber como os mataram?

É aqui que o relato desta guardiã da memória familiar fica realmente pungente, já que, aos poucos, ficou a saber como morreram ou escaparam todos os seus entes queridos, e que se torna quase sufocante na linha temporal de 2004, quando finalmente ganha coragem para regressar ao “país dos mortos”, para visitar as ossadas reunidas na cripta escavada por baixo da igreja de Nyamata e voltar à casa dos pais, totalmente em ruínas e invadida pelo mato, onde se cruza com antigos vizinhos, pois tal como noutros pontos do mundo, devido à política de reconciliação, carrascos e sobreviventes têm de continuar a coexistir.

Estou sozinha numa terra estrangeira onde já ninguém me espera. Fecho os olhos e às recordações sobrepõem-se as coisas desaparecidas.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Harrowing, essential story of the Rwandan genocide from a single family's perspective. Mukasonga is a deft, restrained writer who doesn't linger as she goes beat by beat through her life of inconceivably arbitrary discrimination and horror with a surprising amount of warmth. But happiness is haunted here. We know, because she tells us, that nearly everyone we meet will die horrifically. Interaction, then, is super-charged with sadness - 37 family members are going to be killed; characters we come to care about won't be spared; one scene toward the end, in particular, is virtually unreadable. The ending, a sort of three-dimensional slide show of lives that were nearly erased, will stick with you. Supplemental reading was difficult and necessary for me here. The theme is reminiscent of "The Act of Killing," and stands in bold contrast to that film's provocative luridness - how can you face people who murdered your family? What is it to know that no one was ever caught, because everyone is guilty? How can people who've suffered such unimaginable loss possibly keep on going?

[Ana WJ · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I’ve ever read.

[Richard Derus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Each and every time you try to explain away hateful, horrible things someone you love says, you bring the fate of the ones they're spreading hate for a small step closer to Scholastique Mukasonga's family's fate. She is not dead because she was away at boarding school, by a lucky chance, when the Tutsi people she was born among were once again displaced by the Hutu.

The soldiers demanded that President Kayibanda’s portrait be hung in every house. The missionaries made sure the image of Mary was put up beside him. We lived our lives under the twin portraits of the President who’d vowed to exterminate us and Mary who was waiting for us in heaven.

The boarding school in Kigali, thank goodness, was close enough to Burundi that her Hutu classmates, who called her "inyenzi" (the cockroaches of the title), weren't successful in eliminating her after the school no longer taught Tutsi students in 1973. Her family, driven out of the place she was born during the 1959 pogrom by Hutu against Tutsi, made the horrible decision to save Scholastique and her also-educated brother André. Their time in Burundi led Scholastique to marry a French man in 1992. She was in France when the genocide occurred.

But, in all honesty, she makes it plain that the genocide was set in motion when the Belgians divided the Hutu majority from the Tutsi, and placed the taller, straighter-nosed Tutsi in power over the Hutu. The country's independence was always going to be a starting bell for a race war after that. Incidents; laws backing them up; and those "harmless" socially acceptable slurs made 1994 a slow-motion cataclysm.

The last chapter of this book is so painful to read that it took me a month to finish it.

What the hell, I hear the voices mutter as they click away, this is supposed to be the recommended-reading season on this blog! And it is. I recommend you read it as our neighbors, our families, even (perish forbid) our friends fall into the hateful, ignorant, yet addictive rage-mind that we're seeing "populist" authority figures promote around the world. We in the US are primed for it by the existence of vaccine refusers, Holocaust deniers, CRT scare-mongers, gay-baiters, and all the "socially conservative" religious liars and hate-mongers. Conservative my ass! They're radical right-wing dictatorship-building under decent (or at least not actively evil) people's very noses. They're gerrymadering something as close to permanent power as they can; packing the courts with their vile minions; and it won't take that long, well under forty years, for the Rwandan genocide to come true here, as well.

All I have of my loved ones' deaths are black holes and fragments of horror. What hurts the worst? Not knowing how they died or knowing how they were killed? The fear they felt, the cruelty they endured, sometimes it seems I now have to endure it in turn, flee it in turn. All I have left is the terrible guilt of living on amid so many dead. But what is my pain next to everything they suffered before their tormentors granted them the death that was their only escape?

Do not wait until it's too late. Buy and read this uncomfortable, disquieting tale of a country that lost its mind and then threw its soul away. We in the US should not be forced to endure this, when we still can head it off.

Over and over, I write and rewrite their names in the blue-covered notebook, trying to prove to myself that they existed; I speak their names one by one, in the dark and the silence. I have to fix a face on each name, hang some shred of a memory. I don’t want to cry, I feel tears running down my cheeks. I close my eyes. This will be another sleepless night. I have so many dead to sit up with.

I survived the AIDS years. I relate to what Author Mukasonga is telling us in this book with, perhaps because I am a survivor, a great deal of urgency. I do not want some young gay man's sister to write these words after the next Kyle Rittenhouse gets his jollification from opening fire on a group of gay protestors. I live in dread of the #BlackLivesMatter moms and dads writing these words for their sons, dead at the hands of murderous bigots.

Learn from the past. At long last, look. Learn. Do not allow the whole country to sleepwalk down the tracks to another Auschwitz.

[Lee Klein · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this survivor’s account of the Rwandan genocide, her first name is her savior. Scholastic achievement helps separate her destiny from that of her supportive Tutsi family. After receiving everyone’s blessing, she rises through various academic levels, despite Hutu disapproval, until she’s a full-fledged social worker teaching women about the nutritional superiority of soybeans. She marries a French man with whom she has two children. Thanks to education and effort, she achieves the impossible for so many in her culture. But establishing a different life causes anguish. In a coded letter, her parents describe how “it’s raining harder” than it ever has before, suggesting elevated instances of Hutu aggression. Ultimately, Mukasonga writes to maintain the memory of the thirty-seven family members killed during the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

“The killers attacked the house until every last trace was wiped away. The bush has covered everything over. It’s as if we never existed. And yet my family once lived there. Humiliated, afraid, waiting day after day for what was to come, what we didn’t have a word for: genocide. And I alone preserve the memory of it. That’s why I’m writing this.”

The world they inhabit is well-evoked: how the children dance in imitation of the elephant’s graceful walk, how they guard the fields against looting monkeys, how they ferment sorghum and bananas for beer, how a family only really begins with the birth of the seventh children, how they barricade the entrances to their huts with tin when they expect roving bands of soldiers. I nevertheless wished for more characterization. The name “Jeanne,” for example, carries the particularities of a personality for the author but not for readers. The language, too, at first almost seemed straightforward to a fault, reminding me of the famous Adorno quotation: “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz.” A predominance of passive voice and an unflashy vocabulary (“big” seems like the default adjective) suggested that the translator had remained loyal to the original French and resisted the temptation to improve (modify syntax, substitute synonyms) when creating his English version. In a recent interview, Jordan Stump confirmed this, calling Mukasonga’s voice “a delicate, tricky thing. It’s quiet and understated, but it’s not flat; it can be intensely moving, but it’s not exactly poetic, lyrical, eloquent. Matter-of-fact . . . with a little bit of a lilt sometimes, and through tears or clenched teeth at others.”

The children of Holocaust survivors—David Grossman (See Under: Love) and Art Speigelman (The Complete Maus), for example—tend to deploy elaborate literary technique and considerable imagination to convey their impressions of their parents’ experience, whereas first-hand survivors’ accounts tend to trap the ferocity and enormity of the experience in a simpler way. Senseless ethnic violence never threatened Updike’s Shillington, but no stylist is needed to render episodes and emotions of this sort.

It seems almost improper to critique this book on a conventional literary level, considering its focus. Its heft, however, overwhelms minor craft concerns in the end. Straightforward prose becomes transparent and sorrow animates proper names as this textual representation of sleepless nights sitting up with the dead establishes itself as a striking entry in the literature of atrocity.

For Mukasonga, since Hutus had always considered Tutsis no more than cockroaches, mass slaughter had always seemed inevitable.

“It was Habyarimana’s death that set off what everyone in Nyamata knew was coming, something that would be named by a word I’d never heard before: genocide. In Kinyarwanda, we would call it gutsembatsemba, a verb that means something like ‘to eradicate,’ formerly used to talk about rabid dogs or destructive animals. When I learned of the first massacres, immediately after Habayariman’s death, it was like a brief moment of deliverance: at last! Now we could stop living our lives waiting for death to come. It was there. There was no way to escape it. The Tutsis’ fated destiny would be fulfilled. A morbid satisfaction flashed through my mind: we in Nyamata had so long expected this! But how could I have conceived the depth of the horror that would overtake Rwanda? An entire people engaged in the most unthinkable crimes, against old people, women, children, babies, with a cruelty and ferocity so inhuman that even today the killers feel no remorse.”

The title immediately suggests Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” but Cockroaches functions more like a horror novel. Predominantly linear in structure, the first sections establish a world that will be ruined. You read the opening pages, knowing something awful lurks ahead. If read as a conventionally structured, real-life horror novel, the climax amounts to the half-page description (on page 130 of 165) of the death of the author’s sister Jeanne, eight months pregnant:

“Wounded, Jeanne falls to the ground. Her belly is sliced open. The fetus is ripped out. They beat her with the fetus. Nana [her youngest child] is at her side. The killers go on their way, leaving Nana there with her. And then someone, and I will never know who that someone is, asks a dying Jeanne, as she lies in a pool of her own blood, what he can do for her. ‘You can’t do anything for me, but if you can do something, take Nana with you.”

She deems the words she uses to describe the scene “emotionless, made cold by death” but that page emitted a heat that forced this reader to look away and intone a secular “Jesus Christ.” Why read this in general and why read this now in particular? Maybe because genocide is an endpoint of existence that, when sympathetically recollected in tranquility via exposure to text, serves as an extreme surrogate experience that relieves an average reader’s comparatively minor everyday suffering. It could be worse: we could be packed in cattle cars on our way to the gas, or we could be a Tutsi girl bringing water to her handsome, intelligent, imprisoned father whose guards dismember him bit by bit (“fingers, a hand, an arm, a leg”).

But books like this also seem to strengthen our intolerance for intolerance itself. Intolerance based on superficialities (Tutsis are taller, thinner, and have straighter noses than Hutus!) can lead to the ultimate horrific profundity.

Right now in the United States, the president-elect just won on a platform of intolerance. It's no feat of the imagination to envision a possible albeit hopefully improbable next step: mass detention centers, tall fences lined with razor wire, heavily armed “real American” guards firing indiscriminately on people of color seeking a better life.

Or maybe in this country, an obscure variety of genocide—consider the combined toll of gun violence, opioids, obesity (linked to thirteen types of cancer), cardiovascular disease caused by diet/lifestyle, suicide—would continue to distribute itself among the population, disproportionately affecting the poor, no matter who's in power.

Memoirs like Cockroaches, written out of absolute emotional and psychological necessity, share histories that readers cannot let repeat. Ultimately, we can’t do anything for Scholastique Mukasonga or her family, but we can do something: take her story with us and spread the word.

[Hirondelle (not getting notifications) · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a hard book to read because of its theme. My library has it classified as "non fiction - genocide - personal narrative", and that is what is. But you can try reading the moving dedication and first few pages to be forewarned. This is not my usual reading fodder and not something I would be in the right frame of mind to do proper justice at any given time. Non fiction, genocide, personal narrative. Rwanda and tutsi. And it was bad, very very very bad.

The genocide on focus is the genocide against the Tutsi, in Rwanda in 1994 but also, I am now are, in the years leading up to it. I remember reading, seeing pieces in the news way back then and how confusing and hopeless it all seemed. This is not a book about the historical details or numbers, it is instead a personal memoir of growing up tutsi in 1960s and 1970s Rwanda (and a childhood full of age old details I did not know and could not imagine and that part was on itself already fascinating) and a memoir, a record of the people the author knew who died. The writing is simple, elegant, minimalist almost in the narrative and viewpoint is extraordinarily insightful and somehow strikes a balance about being clear of the anger, resentment felt over so many roles, but without feeling didactic or simplistic. A great book and one of those I will remember specially.

Li em português, boa edição (mas o posfácio pareceu-me pomposo, particularmente em contraste com a voz da autora), traduzido por Maria de Fátimo Carmo e gostei da tradução, e acho que apanhou muito bem a voz da autora.

[Skip · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very difficult book to read about the Rwandan genocide, detailing the author’s personal experiences as a persecuted Hutsi from the late 1950s through the 1990s. Born in her family’s enclosure at Cyanika, her earliest memories are from their resettled home in Nyamata, where her family lived in exile. Raised with a strong sense of community, with hardworking parents and siblings who sacrificed everything so that Scholastique and her brother could get educated. Forced to relocate again, she recalls how her family lived under the constant, escalating threat of violence from soldiers, who terrorized with threats, physical abuse, rape, torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and death. Her sharp mind is recognized though, and she is sent to a boarding school, where she faces racism by her Hutu classmates, who remind her of her status as an “Inyenzi” (i.e., a cockroach.) She escapes to Burundi with her brother, completes her education in social work, and marries a Frenchman. When she finally returns to Rwanda, Scholastique is horrified to discover the fate of the rest of her family during the purge in 1994 when 800,000 of the Tutsi tribe were slaughtered by the Hutu tribe.

[Shawn Mooney (Shawn Breathes Books) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nearly 40 members of Mukasonga's family were massacred in the Rwandan genocide. In this short memoir, she documents the years of violence and discrimination that led to that atrocity. Her loved ones's deaths were "black holes and fragments of horror;" their otherwise perfectly ordinary lives are narrated with joy and dignity. Their killings were almost unbearable to write, but her keeping them alive on the page offers at least faint solace.

[Ana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Numa época em que algumas palavras se tornaram banais de tanto e tão mau uso que lhes tem sido dado, Mukasonga descreve-nos, sem alarde e com a economia de palavras imposta pela genuína dor, um genocídio de verdade.

Uma das leituras mais difíceis que já fiz.

[Chris Steeden · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was recommended by one of you lovely Goodreads members. It is a memoir from 2006 that was not translated into English until 10 years later.

The author, Scholastique Mukasonga, starts at the beginning of her life as is the case with memoirs. This was in the late 1950s and she was born (1956) in the southwest of Rwanda, in Gikongoro province, at the edge of Nyungwe forest. Her family are Tutsis. Anti-Tutsi violence began in 1959 and they are deported to Nyamata, in the district called Bugesera. The displaced people here would go home once the troubles were over. It was supposed to be only temporary. I had no idea this had started that long ago. My knowledge is only around the 1994 genocide. I had a lot to learn it seems.

The soldiers in Nyamata called them ‘Inyenzi’ – cockroaches. Over the years the tension builds and builds. There are terrible incidents building up to 1994 that the author goes over. It is a short matter-of-fact memoir but my word it is horrifying. Having to be on your guard and on the run your whole life. When the best bet is to get out of the country but knowing that still a lot of your family and friends are there. Trapped. Waiting for the inevitable.

If you do not know the background of the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda I recommend reading up on that first before reading this. There are plenty of articles on the internet that will provide a good overview.

[Nate D · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is, unfortunately, a significant historical moment to revisit some past genocides. Mukasonga has also approached the terrible events of her upbringing in Rwanda in her perfect, lightly-handled yet horrifying novel Our Lady of the Nile, but here she presents them in the unadorned brutality of memoir. Experiencing many of these events as child who had known nothing else, she presents them with the spare elegance of a particularly bleak fairy tale, where the arbitrary and cruel are inescapable facts of existence. Confronted with later events, those that took place when Mukasonga was older or were drawn from survivors much later, her calm, precise veneer begins to shudder under the force of the memories that it holds. Parts of this book become difficult to read, as they must be. It's vital that we do.

[Catarina Cardoso · Rating 5 out of 5]

hmm.. o que é que acabei de ler?!
aquele tipo de livros que nunca leria se não fosse para um clube de leitura e, no entanto, foi dos melhores livros que li este ano. muito duro, mas igualmente precioso.

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal. It feels appropriate to read right now with Palestine and Gaza, Sudan, DRC, etc. The guilt and sorry of surviving, the responsibility of telling the story of genocide. Beautiful and brutal.

[Gregory Duke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely and utterly unfathomable. Mukasonga's prose is evocatively spare. And that spareness is essential, because the content of this, a memoir tracking the thirty years leading up to the Rwandan Genocide and the aftermath a few years later, would be unbearable otherwise. One of the only things I've read in recent memory that is so horrifying that I cried a bit while reading. I cannot recommend this enough.

Scholastique Mukasonga, even though this is the first work of hers I've read, feels like a contemporary writer that has the qualities of a future Nobel Prize winner.

[jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

nothing remains of all that now. the killers attacked the house until every last trace was wiped away. the bush has covered everything over. it's as if we never existed. and yet my family once lived there. humiliated, afraid, waiting day after day for what was to come, what we didn't have a word for: genocide. and i alone preserve the memory of it. that's why i'm writing this.

a devastating, often excruciating memoir about ethnic violence and the rwandan genocide, scholastique mukasonga's first book, cockroaches (inyenzi ou les cafards), bravely recounts her coming-of-age in the decades preceding the mass slaughter of her fellow tutsis. mukasonga, author of our lady of the nile (an award-winning novel set in advance of the genocide), confronts both her own past and the legacy of these horrific crimes. spanning nearly a half-century of her life, cockroaches recalls her childhood, education, and emigration from rwanda. thirty-seven members of the author's family (including her mother, father, siblings [and their many children]) were murdered, part of a death toll estimated to range between 750,000 to 1,000,000+ men, women, and children.

where are they? somewhere deep in the anonymous crowd of the genocide's victims. a million of them, their lives stolen, their names lost. what's the point of counting up our dead again and again? from the thousand hills of rwanda, a million shades answer my call.

despite its grave, gruesome subject, mukasonga's memoir is punctuated by moments of levity, as she recalls instances of happier (however fleeting) moments from her youth. cockroaches is a personal tale, a historic account, a lament, a dirge, and, perhaps most importantly, an individual reckoning of grief, sorrow, and unspeakable loss. cockroaches is, at times, unbearably harrowing, but mukasonga's commitment to veracity and remembrance have turned an impossibly dark chapter in her own (and her nation's) history into a vital, crucial work of autobiography.

all i have of my loved ones' deaths are black holes and fragments of horror. what hurts the worst? not knowing how they died or knowing how they were killed? the fear they felt, the cruelty they endured, sometimes it seems i now have to endure it in turn, flee it in turn. all i have left is the terrible guilt of living on amid so many dead. but what is my pain next to everything they suffered before their tormentors granted them the death that was their only escape?

*translated from the french by jordan stump (ndiaye, chevillard, fabre, volodine, balzac, toussaint, modiano, et al.)

[Elena Sala · Rating 5 out of 5]

In her adopted home of France, Mukasonga looks at a photograph of her family on the day her younger sister got married. All the people in the photograph are dead now.
She lost twenty seven family members during the Rwandan genocide. COCKROACHES is her memoir, her account of growing up as a Tutsi, in Hutu dominated Rwanda.
Cockroaches, or actually, "inyenzi", was the term used by the Hutus to dehumanise the Tutsis. Insects that "had to be eliminated before they could turn dangerous." In April 1994, members of the Hutu majority killed almost 1.000.000 Tutsis.
COCKROACHES is not a historical investigation of the 1994 genocide. Nor does it explain the outrageous, unbelievable lack of humanitarian intervention. It is a physically small book, with a soft, lyrical voice that tells the stories of thousands of unnamed people which were murdered in the cruelest possible ways. For Mukasonga, staying alive meant the burden of bearing witness to this horrible tragedy.
COCKROACHES is an unflinching testament to all that the genocide obliterated: the customs and the lives of her people. It is a narrative of retrospect, regret and survivor's guilt written in a spare prose which accomplishes what her father wanted when he sent Mukasonga and her brother to neighbouring Burundi to save their lives: "to keep the memory alive, so that the family would go on, somewhere else."

[Conceição Puga]

"Inyenzi ou as Baratas" é um romance autobiográfico da escritora ruandesa Scholastique Mukasonga, publicado em 2006. A obra relata a infância e adolescência da autora no Ruanda, marcadas pela perseguição aos tutsis antes do genocídio de 1994.

"Onde estão eles? Perderam-se na multidão anónima das vítimas do genocídio. Um milhão de vítimas que perderam a vida e o nome. De que serve contar e recontar os mortos? Das mil colinas do Ruanda, um milhão de sombras responde à minha invocação."

[Rogerio Lopes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Algo que chama a atenção em Mukasonga é a força e o apelo de sua escrita. Por mais que o tema tratado aqui seja pesado e doloroso, a leitura fluí até com facilidade.Existe uma certa beleza e mesmo momentos ternos em sua narrativa. Sua escrita transporta o leitor a participar da alegre confecção da cerveja de sorgo e mesmo alguns acontecimentos se não são suavizados, a escrita da autora os torna assimiláveis. Isso até chegar ao último capítulo, ali parece que toda a dor e angústia que meio que estavam ofuscadas vem a tona, você sabia que estavam no texto, mas não de forma tão crua. Esse último capítulo é uma chaga aberta e é muito difícil não se emocionar, estão ali, toda a revolta, luto e dor da autora, expressos muitas vezes numa simples lista de nomes e ainda assim carrega um peso enorme. Em suma é uma leitura difícil, mas necessária, um doloroso manifesto/ memorial daqueles que foram dizimados em um genocídio sem sentido e com a conivência do Mundo todo.

[Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um registo autobiográfico muito duro sobre o conflito no Ruanda, em particular o genocídio dos Tutsis.
Um livro que me marcou, sem dúvida.

[Gabrielle Cunha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impactada!!!!!

Leitura esclarecedora sobre como se deu o massacre de Ruanda, que sabia bem pouco. A forma que a Scholastique Mukasonga narra é direta, sem floreios. Quero ler os outros livros dela pra ontem!

[Degenerate Chemist · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Cockroaches" is a memoir written about the authors experiences during the Rwandan genocide. It is also an epitaph to all the loved ones she lost.

I can't really say much more about this book. It needs to be read and experienced. Mukasonga has a story that needs to be heard.

[Davvybrookbook · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book of a personal family history and experience of the thirty years leading up to the 1994 Rwandan genocide captures a first-hand, almost anthropological, account of events from 1959 with the death of a Tutsi king supported by Belgian entities and the Catholic Church. What began thirty years before became a slow process of systematic oppression of the Tutsi people, “the lighter-skinned, straight-nosed and Ethiopian in appearance,” by a Hutu majority. The rise of Grégoire Kayibanda and a resistance force of Tutsi refugees from Burundi began what seems to be a long struggle for power, and what amounted to a displacement of Tutsi communities first in the north of Rwanda, and later in the south where Scholastique Mukasonga grew up, and also where her family was forcibly resettled. The progression of her account mirrors her growth from childhood and schooling as the pathway beyond Rwanda’s borders and to a future of opportunity, and also survival. It was known what was happening in the north, and then the forces came to the south, and over decades of military occupation and second-class status, Mukasonga and her family survived on a new land, scratching out a livelihood of farming to provide educational opportunities for the children. This haunting account ends with revisiting her homeland, the place of her upbringing, the search for survivors, the recovery of the remains of her beloved. If anything this is a harrowing failure of modernity to observe processes of dehumanization with a distanced, dispensable apathy.

Violence like this may speak to a more common reality of the historical past, to mankind’s instinct toward violence, vengeance, and the will of the powerful. It is modern eyes in the wake of a global scale of violence across the world that the killing of neighbors and eradication of communities must be held to account for those transgressions. The world is at a moment when all can be recorded, stored and remembered. For how long will these memories hold us to seek the “better angels of our nature.” In ways this book recalls the killing fields of Pol Pot of the Khmer Rouge, of Suharto’s killings of Communists, of the radical periods of the French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. What is it and how is it that these mass mobilization events can catalyze ordinary citizens to acts of such inhuman barbarity.

[Lolly K Dandeneau · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This will be another sleepless night. I have so many dead to sit up with."

(https://bookstalkerblog.wordpress.com...)

Scholastique Mukasonga tells us her heartbreaking flight from Rwanda during ethnic cleansing. Unearthing precious memories about those she lost is the beauty in the atrocities. What greater depths of pain than losing your family and so senselessly. We hear these horrors on the news, feel pain but it passes until another event takes it's place. In memoirs we personalize it, connect to suffering and allow it to burrow in our hearts. It certainly must have been a painful process excavating the past and yet there are beautiful reflections such as the story telling, the spirituality, the laundry washing in the lake water (where there are crocodiles), working fields after school. There is a gorgeous sense of community that so many of us don't have.

But terror, the soldiers bursting into homes night or day, the inhumane treatment. These are things that can be told but never truly felt to the extent of those who experienced it. Forbidden to pick up bodies? Children seeing people discarded, is there anything more horrific? I didn't know much beyond what I have seen or read about the Tutsi and the Hutu. Imagining not being able to contact your family for fear they would be harmed, not having news of them, visiting finally but having to leave. Rushed reunion, wondering when a massacre will come? And when it does, while machetes are ending the lives of loved ones- still she must SURVIVE! Adults, elderly, children... so many. "There were survivors, of course. No genocide is perfect." That must be the harshest two lines I have read, it just guts you. How did she manage to keep her humanity in the face of such horror? When her niece Jeanne-Francoise recounts what happened to her father, I caught my breath- imagining his suffering but worse, the sick torture of the young girls mind and soul as she brought food to her imprisoned father. Man's cruelty to his brother knows no bounds, but we have to believe kindness and love is the same too. Seeking refuge with family that are split down the middle, some want to protect, other's don't want the risk of having you there... it's easy to imagine what you would do, always something brave, talk is cheap. I don't know how you live with this and relive it all in the writing, but it's vital such stories be told. My admiration is high. It is a glorious form of courage and though I am disturbed, I was strangely uplifted too. " Rare are the survivors who could find their loved ones' remains and bury them in a grave." To imagine refugees returning to the land they fled, trying to hold tight to any remaining family, hoping to rebuild again... how to staunch a bleeding heart, how to have hope for such a future clouded over with the shadows of so many dead and lost? Scholastique Mukasonga must live "in the name of all the others." Heavy, unflinchingly raw, inspiring.