Mushikiwabo is a Rwandan working as a translator in Washington when she learns that most of her family back home has been killed in a conspiracy meticulously planned by the state. First comes shock, then aftershock, three months of it, during which her worst fears are confirmed: The same state apparatus has duped millions of Rwandans into butchering nearly a million of their neighbors.
Years earlier, her brother Lando wrote her a letter she never got until now. Urged on by it, she rummages into their farm childhood, and into family corners alternately dark, loving, and humorous. She searches for stray mementos of the lost, then for their roots. What she finds is that and more---hints, roots, of the 1994 crime that killed her family. Her narrative takes the reader on a journey from the days the world and Rwanda discovered each other back to colonial period when pseudoscientific ideas about race put the nation on a highway bound for the 1994 genocide.
Seven years of full-time collaboration by two writers---and the faith of family and friends---went into this emotionally charged work.
Rwanda Means the Universe is at once a celebration of the lives of the lost and homage to their past, but it's no comfortable tribute. It's an expression of dogged hope in the face of modern evil.
Sprache
Dateigröße
ISBN-13
978-1-4299-0731-6 (9781429907316)
Schweitzer Klassifikation
Louise Mushikiwabo was born and raised in Kigali and educated at the National University of Rwanda and at the University of Delaware after immigrating to the United States in 1986. She is active as a public speaker on Rwanda-related issues, works as a public relations consultant, and lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband.
Jack Kramer is a reporter and ex-marine who has covered six wars as well as Rwanda, Algeria, the oil crisis, Saudi Arabia, the revolution in Iran, and the civil rights movement in the Deep South. His articles have appeared in
The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Washington Post, Business Week, Time, and
The Wall Street Journal. The author of a memoir
, Travels with the Celestial Dog, Kramer lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife
