‘More than just a genocide country’ : recuperating Rwanda in the writings of Scholastique Mukasonga

Abstract

How can we write fiction about 21st-century Rwanda? This article analyses the writing trajectory of the most successful Rwandan writer, Scholastique Mukasonga. Through close analysis of her published works, it traces a literary passage from mourning to recuperation. It also examines the interaction between Mukasonga’s most recent fictional texts (a second novel and a second collection of short stories) and the series of digitized artefacts presented on her website. Combining a postcolonial framework with insights from clinical and political psychology, the article shows how Mukasonga’s most recent writing encourages us to think about Rwanda differently, and suggests a new way of reading literary responses to the 1994 genocide.