Welcome to Litsy!

The author tries to tackle more than 400 years worth of history in about 300 pages, so some of a lot of details are left as a brief sentence or passage but for what is here, I can see that a lot of work and care went into this but a larger piece of me was really interested in learning about about the history of the different indigenous tribes and the meso American groups prior to European colonization a lot more but all in all a good read.

31 years ago on this day (April, 7), the genocide against the Tutsi started in #Rwanda.
#FoodandLit
@Catsandbooks @Texreader

Pic of the memorial in Geneva by MHM55, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

This essay collection was written as part of the “Rwanda: Writing as a Duty to Memory“ 1998 initiative involving writers from various African countries (so, not Rwandan, but not Western). They were invited to Rwanda for 2 months to produce literary texts “outside of Western narratives“. These essays feel quickly thrown together. They require a decent amount of knowledge re the genocide to fill in the blanks (not a criticism, just an observation).

I bought this over a decade ago, and it‘s been sitting on my shelf since then. It felt like the right time to pick it up and I‘m so glad I did. It‘s packed with history and information but in a way that‘s easily absorbable.

Starting early w/ Englebert des Collines (tagged is a different book by same author) for #FoodandLit #Rwanda b/c it's a library book & I don't like to keep them longer than necessary. Englebert, a Tutsi genocide survivor roaming the streets of Nyamata looking for drinks & conversation, told his story to Hatzfeld, a French journalist/novelist whose parents were Holocaust survivors.
@Catsandbooks @Texreader
Pic of daffs for something less depressing

It is impossible to judge a memoir of a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Mukasonga had escaped through Burundi, married a French man and was living in France when 27 of her family members were murdered. She is a survivor, and with that comes guilt and a desire to tell her story.
I think it is helpful to know about this time and place before going in, she does not attempt to explain the politics or landscape (I had a map open while reading)
4/5⭐

Reading about how the Rwandan regime made the Tutsi people dig up food to plant coffee plants that the government would sell and keep the money from as I sit drinking coffee halfway across the world and 60 years later.
This is not a pleasant book but so important, especially today and thinking that I had believed that the '96 Genocide happened pretty much overnight but learning it was a 40 year battle.

Continuing the countdown of my books, from 1st to 25th, THE JACKAL‘S MISTRESS. Today it‘s my 15th, THE SANDCASTLE GIRLS (2012), a love story set in the midst of the Armenian Genocide. As a grandson of two survivors, this is a profoundly important book to me.

What do the living owe the dead? How do we deal with victims of mass killings? Families need closure and people deserve to be buried/put to rest with their names in places their loved ones can visit. We are human because we have rituals to honor the dead. All of these topics come up while Hagerty describes her profession of handling bones in Argentina, uncovering mass graves of victims of the genocide there. Sobering work but important.