Cockroaches
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Mukasonga unsparingly resurrects the horrors of the Rwandan geocide while lyrically recording the quieter moments of daily life with her family—a moving tribute to all those who are displaced, who suffer.
Mukasonga’s extraordinary, lyrical, and heartbreaking book … is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about the endurance of the human spirit and who hopes for a better world.
— Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Los Angeles Review of Books
Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches is a compelling chronicle of the author’s childhood in the years leading up to the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
In a spare and penetrating tone, Mukasonga brings to life the scenes of her family’s forced displacement from Rwanda to neighboring Burundi. With a view made lucid through time and pain, Mukasonga erodes the distance between her present and her past, resurrecting and paying homage to her family members who were massacred in the genocide, but also, in movingly simple language, the beauty present in quiet, daily moments with her loved ones.
As lyrical as it is tragic, Cockroaches is Mukasonga’s tribute to her family’s suffering and to the lingering grip of the dead on the living.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this harrowing autobiographical novel, a Rwandan woman recounts a girlhood riven by the vicious war between the Tutsis and the Hutus, a conflict that left 37 of her family members murdered in the 1994 genocide. Opening with her family's expulsion from their native village, the early chapters illustrate the major trials and minor joys of communal exile. Scenes of unthinkable horror abut moments of great humanity: the narrator sees a friend maimed by a grenade; she connects with her mother by helping her tend to her garden. Academic excellence delivers the narrator from the refugee camp, first to a selective boarding school, then to an academy for social workers across the border in Burundi. After a final visit to her parents in 1986, the narrator settles in France, where she watches the genocide from afar, painfully helpless. Nearly a decade later, the narrator returns to the site of the refugee camp, where no signs of the lives lost can be found. Mukasonga's (Our Lady of the Nile) powerful and poignant book plants itself in that terrible absence, its stone etched with a difficult, necessary grief.
