A Book of My Own

For most of her life, Rwandan novelist Scholastique Mukasonga was not a writer but a UNESCO social worker. She began writing only in 1994 out of what she called an “urgency to remember”—her town, her mother, and her thirty-seven family members, who were murdered during the genocide of that year. She recorded everything in a little blue notebook which, in 2006, became an autobiography, Cockroaches.

Mukasonga has since continued to write with similar intent—to “rebuild a lost world from memory and preserve the dignity of humanity.” In doing so, she has become not only a perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize, but also one of the great humanitarians of our time.

In 2021, Mukasonga wrote the foreword to Can Xue’s Purple Perilla and, afterwards, set upon making an isolarii, aptly titled A Book of My Own. Writing these past two years, as she has watched migrants set off in boats to the UK from her new home in Normandy, she tells the story of her self—her name, her own exile, her memories of her identity taking shape. It is perhaps the most conceptual work of her oeuvre, as historically necessary as it is dramatically beautiful.