Talking in the Library: Scholastique Mukasonga
Join us for On Mourning and Exile: Looking Back at Rwanda, a reading and conversation with author Scholastique Mukasonga and Dr. Timothy Longman, Director of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University, on October 28, 2021 at 4:00 pm Eastern Time.
Born in Rwanda in 1956, Scholastique Mukasonga 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 under-developed Bugesera district of Rwanda. Mukasonga was later forced to leave the school of social work in Butare and flee to Burundi. She settled in France in 1992, only two years before the brutal genocide of the Tutsi swept through Rwanda.
Of her most recent book, "Igifu," the New York Times writes that it "depicts the lives of Rwanda’s Tutsis from their exile in the 1960s to the genocide of the ’90s. These stories follow the broad strokes of the author’s own life, though, unlike Mukasonga’s prior books “Cockroaches” and “The Barefoot Woman,” they are less explicitly autobiographical. Instead, she mediates the personal through fable, to convey the sense of a collective past.”
Presented by Roger Williams University Library and Scholars at Risk-US in association with the African Studies Association and Archipelago Books.
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