'For those who, despite everything, have decided to live, there will always be a home.' – Scholastique Mukasonga.
A Book of My Own is a work on the experience of exile and migration, memory and selfhood, from legendary French-Rwandan storyteller Scholastique Mukasonga.
For most of her life, 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 favourite for the Nobel Prize, but also one of the great humanitarians of our time.
228 pages, 7 x 10.8 cm, softcover, isolarii (New York).