Overview

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.

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9798212025430

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Reviews

[Mukasonga's] haunting, urgent personal history of the Rwandan genocide will deeply shade your map. -- New York Times Book Review A child's view of one of history's most chilling instances of genocide...A thoughtful, sobering firsthand account of the refugee experience, [and] a story that speaks to readers far beyond the African highlands. -- Kirkus Reviews Harrowing...Mukasonga's powerful and poignant book plants itself in that terrible absence, its stone etched with a difficult, necessary grief. -- Publishers Weekly Related with brave, sobering, steely-eyed calm. -- Library Journal (starred review)

"[Mukasonga's] haunting, urgent personal history of the Rwandan genocide will deeply shade your map. -- ""New York Times Book Review"" A child's view of one of history's most chilling instances of genocide...A thoughtful, sobering firsthand account of the refugee experience, [and] a story that speaks to readers far beyond the African highlands. -- ""Kirkus Reviews"" Harrowing...Mukasonga's powerful and poignant book plants itself in that terrible absence, its stone etched with a difficult, necessary grief. -- ""Publishers Weekly"" Related with brave, sobering, steely-eyed calm. -- ""Library Journal (starred review)"""

Author Information

Scholastique Mukasonga is an award-winning French Rwandan author of novels, memoirs, and short stories. Born in Rwanda in 1956, she experienced from childhood the violence and humiliation of the ethnic conflicts that shook her country. In 1960, her family was displaced to the polluted and underdeveloped Bugesera district of Rwanda. She was later forced to flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda. In the aftermath, she learned that thirty-seven of her family members had been massacred. Jordan Stump received the 2001 French-American Foundation's Translation Prize for his translation of Le Jardin des Plantes by Nobel Prize winner Claude Simon. In 2006, Stump was named Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has translated the work of Eric Chevillard, Marie Redonnet, Patrick Modiano, Honoré de Balzac, and Jules Verne, among others. He is a professor of French literature at the University of Nebraska.

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