Cockroaches

Cockroaches is a 2006 memoir by Rwandan novelist Scholastique Mukasonga, first published in French as Inyenzi ou les cafards and translated into English by Jordan Stump in 2016. The book relates Mukasonga’s personal experiences during the conflict that culminated in the Rwandan genocide of 1994: the author has referred to the book as a “paper grave” for the loved ones she lost. Cockroaches was well received by critics as a “haunting, urgent personal history of the Rwandan genocide.” The title refers to the Banyarwanda word inyenzi, meaning “cockroaches” and used as an ethnic slur against the Tutsi population of Rwanda, who were the principal victims of the genocide.

Mukasonga opens her memoir at the table of her kitchen in France, where she lives now. Her children are asleep in the next room. She is mourning the people she has lost: “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 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.”

She revisits her childhood in the late 1950s. The Rwandan Revolution has brought Hutu nationalists to power. Mukasonga’s family is forcibly relocated from their home to a poorer community in eastern Rwanda, and from there to Gitwe, a purpose-built village for displaced Tutsis. After a while in Gitwe, Mukasonga’s family moves to Gitagata, which Mukasonga will flee and where her family will die.



These bare narrative bones are clad in rich observations of a happy childhood and of the unrecognized intimations of genocide. Mukasonga remembers following her mother around, cutting school to steal fruit with her friends, and in one especially lyrical passage, making banana wine, a favorite Rwandan pastime. However, interwoven with these memories are the darker ones: the times Mukasonga was called “inyenzi” and threatened with rape. At school, Mukasonga finds herself bullied and outcaste as a Tutsi.

Eventually, the darkness swallows the lighter memories. There are “noises, shouts, a hum like a swarm of bees, a growl filling the air.” Men with machetes and spiked clubs arrive and Mukasonga must hide in the bushes.

After the attack, teenage boys are left to watch over the survivors: “Many of the boys were posted along the shoreline, as if standing guard. When we walked into the water to fill our calabashes, we saw what they were guarding: the tied up bodies of victims slowly dying in the shallows of the lake, little waves washing over them now and then. The newcomers were there to keep away the families who wanted to rescue their children or at least take home their bodies. For a long time we found little pieces of skin and rotting body parts in our calabashes when we fetched water.”



Mukasonga’s parents arrange for her to be smuggled across the border to Burundi with her younger brother, André. When they arrive, they find themselves alone. Mukasonga is seventeen. “With no one to count on, we had to look after ourselves, so we came up with a plan…As long as I was in school, André would work to support us and pay for my studies; once I finished and found a job, once I was self-sufficient, he’d go back to school. Then it would be my turn to support him. We followed our plan to the letter.”

Mukasonga trains as a social worker, André as a doctor. When they are both established in their professions, Mukasonga leaves for France and André for Senegal. They each fall in love, have children, and build new lives. They return to Rwanda when they can, but each visit is more dangerous than the last.

When the genocide comes, Mukasonga’s family is killed, together with virtually everyone she remembers from her life in Rwanda. Towards the end, Mukasonga’s memoir breaks down, becoming a fragmentary list of names and memories: Joséphine Kabanene, the prettiest girl in school; Birota the teacher, Sekimonyo the tall beekeeper.



“And when I close my eyes, what I see is always the same night, a night in the dry season, a night lit by the full moon. The women are busy around the three stones of the hearth. Sitting cross-legged on either side of the road, the men are gravely talking and passing around calabashes of sorghum or banana beer. Little boys are playing with a banana-leaf ball in the road; others are racing after the old bicycle wheels they use as hoops, giggling wildly. The girls have swept the yard and the road and now they’re singing and dancing. And now the women are studying the moon, whose illuminated face, they believe, reveals the future. In my memories, that enormous moon is always there, hanging over the village to pour out its pale blue light.

“In the bright night of my memory, they’re all there.”