A review by half_book_and_co
Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga

More than thirty members of writer Scholastique Mukasonga's immediate family have been brutally murdered during the Rwandan genocide. In her memoirs, she writes about growing up Tutsi in the 1950s, displacement, discrimination but also the few joyful moments she gathered and daily life. Through a more or less chronological approach, she manages to convey that the genocide in 1994 was not something sudden but the last step after decades of oppression and violence (with a lot of bystanders). The book, which was published in French in 2006 and ten years later in the English translation, does not end in the 1990s but Mukasonga writes about going back to Rwanda in 2004 and visiting the places her family has been killed at. She asks, how can you go on living, how do you carry the burden of having been chosen to survive?