Gutsembatsemba: topographies of the trauma in Cockroaches, by Scholastique Mukasonga

Abstract

This article aims to analyze the relations between space and literary testimony in the autobiography Cockroaches, by the Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga. Originally published in 2006, Cockroaches chronicles Mukasonga’s childhood, adolescence and adult life in Rwanda, while surviving to the constant persecution by Hutus, the country’s ethnic majority, against Tutsis, second largest population in the country. In 1973, Mukasonga leaves Rwanda, and it is from this diasporic place that the writer starts her narrative. Therefore, based on the assumptions about space of Antonio Dimas (1985), Doreen Massey (2006) and Mikhail Bakhtin (2014), articulated to reflections about trauma literature by Marcio Seligmann-Silva (2008), Alfredo Bosi (1995) and Jean-Marie Gagnebin (2005), we intend to analyze how the objective and material topographies narrated by Mukasonga in her testimony operate as symbolic spaces that points out to representations of gutsembasemba, that is, the final genocide perpetrated against Tutsis, which ocurred between April and July in 1994.