Cockroaches Quotes

“No memorial has been built on Rebero. Nothing to commemorate the fallen but boulders and white and rust-red stones. I look for signs from the hill, I dig at the ground. The sun is straight overhead. This is the hour of mirages. I push away the little rocks, I scratch at the ground. I find a shred of tattered cloth half-buried in the dirt. I try to convince myself that it comes from Antoine’s shirt. I hesitate, then leave that false relic where it lies. I pick up a stone with a sharp edge. In remembrance.”
― Scholastique Mukasonga, Cockroaches

“The soldiers demanded that President Kayibanda’s portrait be hung in every house. The missionaries made sure the image of Mary was put up beside him. We lived our lives under the twin portraits of the President who’d vowed to exterminate us and Mary who was waiting for us in heaven.”
― Scholastique Mukasonga, Cockroaches

“Behind them is a tangle of brambles, as if no human being had ever ventured that far. And yet men, women, and children once lived in this place, even if the right to live was denied them, even if no effort was spared to erase every trace of their existence.”
― Scholastique Mukasonga, Cockroaches

“I hadn’t shed my Tutsi status when I crossed the Nyabarongo – anything but. And in any case, there was no way to hide it. Every student was issued an ID card marked with their so-called ethnic group, like a brand on a cow.”
― Scholastique Mukasonga, Cockroaches

“In 1994 the Tutsis of Nyamata once again sought shelter in the church, but this time there was no Father Canoni to chase off the murderers: the UN soldiers had come to evacuate the white people, and the missionaries went with them, knowing they were leaving for dead more than five thousand men, women, and children who thought they’d found sanctuary in their church.”
― Scholastique Mukasonga, Cockroaches

“Sometimes she spent a whole afternoon on the little patch of land she set aside for the plants no one grew anymore. For her they were like the survivors of a happier time, and she seemed to draw a new energy from them. She grew them not for daily consumption but as a way of bearing witness to what was in danger of disappearing, what did indeed disappear in the cataclysm of the genocide.”
― Scholastique Mukasonga, Cockroaches

“Nothing remains of all that now. The killers attacked the house until every last trace was wiped away. The bush has covered everything over. It's as if we never existed. And yet my family once lived there. humiliated, afraid, waiting day after day for what was to come, what we didn't have a word for: genocide. And I alone preserve the memory of it. That's why I'm writing this.”
― Scholastique Mukasonga, Cockroaches

“Every family had to grow a certain number of plants, and they had to be planted along the dirt road, in front of the house, so they’d be easier to inspect and eventually to harvest. We had to pull out all our own plantings, and even worse, uproot a good part of the banana grove, which was just beginning to bear fruit. We had to go all the way to Rwakibirizi, more than ten kilometers from Gitwe, to pick up the plants. Coffee plants take a great deal of care, and they left us little time to tend our field. School was no longer the children’s priority: our first job was to change the mulch around the coffee plants.”
― Scholastique Mukasonga, Cockroaches

“Despair fell over everyone left behind. They understood: they would never go home again. Because they were Tutsis, they were condemned to live like pariahs or plague-carriers, on a reservation with no hope of escape. But that despair was the cement of a solidarity far stronger than any supposed ethnic spirit had ever created.”
― Scholastique Mukasonga, Cockroaches