In Rwanda, Hutus hate the Tutsis, because the Tutsis were related to the royalty. The majority of the country were Hutus, and beginning in the 1960s, drove Tutsis away from their homes, to a dry, barren patch of land, and stopped giving them rations, so they were forced to begin frantically gardening, in order to have food. The author's parents prioritized education for their children, sacrificing to send them to schools when they passed the National exams. To survive, the refugees had to face daily rape, beatings, and humiliation. Though the author herself was not with her family when it happened, in April 1994, a massacre of hundreds of thousands of the Tutsis took place. Genocide. The author returned later to her refugee village to try to trace out where the remains of her childhood home was.

This book is not as comprehensive as "We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed along with our families," by Phillip Gourevitch, whose book covered a larger area. But the horror and unreality of what destruction and cold-bloodedness humans are capable of remains the same. One has to ask: "Just what is the point of homo sapiens?" They are definitely misnamed. ( )

The Publisher Says: 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, bitterwsweet 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 onto an unforgettable world of love, grief, and horror.

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. ( )

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 Hutsi tribe were slaughtered by the Tutu tribe. ( )

As with Mukasonga's novel, 'Our Lady of the Nile,' this is typically French, classically restrained despite the horrors it describes. She writes about her family, and Rwanda's recent past, while also leaving unsaid those things which can't really be said--and not because she's giving in or abandoning hope of dealing with it, but because the book is better for the absence at its centre. ( )

Wow. This is a remarkable book, something that should be taught along great classics of the Holocaust and King Leopold's Ghost and other books that really get across the trauma, horror, and banality of the evil that leads to a genocide. It's short and poetic and I think that for those people who have had the monstrosities of the Shoah blunted because it's used as the example of the Worst Thing That Ever Happened, this would remind them why "Never Again" and why people look at those proposing white ethno-states "for the lulz" so harshly. This book shows what that means while being entirely about Rwanda, while being entirely grounded in its space in history. It's short, poetic, beautifully written, and it hits you right in the gut. ( )