Rwanda Means the Universe
A Native's Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
Mushikiwabo is a Rwandan working as a translator in Washington when she learns that most of her family back home has been killed in a conspiracy meticulously planned by the state. First comes shock, then aftershock, three months of it, during which her worst fears are confirmed: The same state apparatus has duped millions of Rwandans into butchering nearly a million of their neighbors.
Years earlier, her brother Lando wrote her a letter she never got until now. Urged on by it, she rummages into their farm childhood, and into family corners alternately dark, loving, and humorous. She searches for stray mementos of the lost, then for their roots. What she finds is that and more---hints, roots, of the 1994 crime that killed her family. Her narrative takes the reader on a journey from the days the world and Rwanda discovered each other back to colonial period when pseudoscientific ideas about race put the nation on a highway bound for the 1994 genocide.
Seven years of full-time collaboration by two writers---and the faith of family and friends---went into this emotionally charged work. Rwanda Means the Universe is at once a celebration of the lives of the lost and homage to their past, but it's no comfortable tribute. It's an expression of dogged hope in the face of modern evil.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In her impassioned and necessary but overwritten memoir of the Rwandan genocide, Mushikiwabo delves deep into her family and national history to explain the horrific slaughter of 800,000 people in 1994. Mushikiwabo, the youngest of nine children in a Tutsi family, was living in Washington, D.C., at the time of the genocide and many of her friends and family members back home were butchered. She begins her story by reconstructing the week leading up to the assassination of the Hutu president, Habyarimana, a murder that sparked the mass slaughter of ethnic Tutsis. From there, she looks back in an effort to recount the history of Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, through the aperture of a single family: "Trying to sort this out will send me rummaging back to my father's days and on past him, back three lifetimes... like some hapless sister searching for her missing in morgue after morgue, I'll slink from source to source." At times, Mushikiwabo overwhelms her already complicated story in her unbridled stretch for lyricism. But when she writes directly, especially as she does in the book's heartbreaking final pages, her journey into Rwanda's past offers urgent insight.