Rwanda Means the Universe: A Native's Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines [Hardcover]

Louise Mushikiwabo (Author), Jack Kramer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 4, 2006

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her impassioned and necessary but overwritten memoir of the Rwandan genocide, Mushikiwabo delves deep into her family and national history to explain the horrific slaughter of 800,000 people in 1994. Mushikiwabo, the youngest of nine children in a Tutsi family, was living in Washington, D.C., at the time of the genocide—and many of her friends and family members back home were butchered. She begins her story by reconstructing the week leading up to the assassination of the Hutu president, Habyarimana, a murder that sparked the mass slaughter of ethnic Tutsis. From there, she looks back in an effort to recount the history of Rwanda, a former Belgian colony, through the aperture of a single family: "Trying to sort this out will send me rummaging back to my father's days and on past him, back three lifetimes... like some hapless sister searching for her missing in morgue after morgue, I'll slink from source to source." At times, Mushikiwabo overwhelms her already complicated story in her unbridled stretch for lyricism. But when she writes directly, especially as she does in the book's heartbreaking final pages, her journey into Rwanda's past offers urgent insight. (Apr.)
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From Booklist

Reflecting on the world's belated reaction to the genocide of 800,000 Tutsi in Rwanda, the author of this remarkable memoir looks at the centuries-old roots of that horror while simultaneously describing its devastating effects on one extended Tutsi family. Mushikiwabo, the last of nine children, was living in Washington, D.C., in April 1994, when the genocide began. She chronicles the massacre's first six days, poignantly elucidating small details of her family's everyday lives, the reality lost in media coverage of the carnage. She also travels back in time to her own childhood and that of her parents, then documents the years of British, German, and Belgian rule. Mushikiwabo focuses the most on the Belgians, who initially favored the Tutsi, but when they pushed for independence, switched allegiance, and in 1959 turned control over to handpicked Hutus. Mushikiwabo's exhaustively researched and acutely perceptive cautionary history calls on us all to respond to the wrongs we see around us--for "what the universe has done to Rwanda, it is doing to itself." Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 384 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (April 4, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312209592
• ISBN-13: 978-0312209599
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #960,494 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riviting..., April 14, 2006

By 

Katie Berman (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Rwanda Means the Universe: A Native's Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines (Hardcover)

A gripping, personal account of growing up in Rwanda and the Rwandan genocide. Ms. Mushikiwabo's memories are at turns heartbreaking and charming, her country's history intriguing, and the statistics unfathomable ("State executioners and local volunteers...catching and dispatching more than three times as many people as al Qaeda did when it dropped the World Trade Center. That's not how many they killed altogether. That's how many they killed every day - ten thousand a day...for one hundred days."). Childhood stories bring Ms. Mushikiwabo and her family to life, making them your family, your friends. This is an engrossing read that starkly reminds us simultaneously of the cruelty of human nature and the spirit to survive unimaginable sorrow.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating, But Difficult to Read, July 4, 2006

By 

Robert Sidelinker (Doylestown, Pennsylvania United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rwanda Means the Universe: A Native's Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines (Hardcover)

The information in this book is extremely important. I also appreciated the historical context given by the author. Those things said, I was disappointed in the textbook nature of the book. This was, unnecessarily I believe, an extremely difficult read. There were scores of English words I've never seen before. This, in addition to French and Kinyarwanda. I was also disappointed that the historical context was not presented more clearly.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, but there's better, November 7, 2006

By 

James A. Becker Jr. (Gurnee, IL United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Rwanda Means the Universe: A Native's Memoir of Blood and Bloodlines (Hardcover)

The book was a tough read, that you couldn't speed through to totally comprehend. I did like the detail of the book, but there seemed to be alot that could have been cut out due to irrelevance.
Overall though, I would recommend reading the book if you want to get a grasp on the history behind the terrible Rwandan genocide.