Life & Wisdom Quote by Scholastique Mukasonga

Fiction, for Mukasonga, is less an escape hatch than a controlled burn. The line admits a practical truth about writing after catastrophe: the first person can become a trap, forcing the author to either perform authenticity or relive the wound on the page. By choosing fiction, she doesn not dilute experience so much as re-engineer it into something survivable - and, crucially, sharable. Distance is not denial; it is craft as self-preservation.

The subtext is that "I" is never just a grammatical choice. For a writer shaped by the Rwandan genocide and the long prelude of ethnic persecution, the first person can be both too exposed and too easily consumed by readers hungry for testimony. Fiction offers a buffer against that voyeurism. It also offers leverage: invented characters can carry the weight of communal memory, letting individual grief broaden into a social portrait without turning the author into the sole witness on display.

This is intent dressed up as modesty. Mukasonga is describing an ethic of narration: how to honor the dead without being swallowed by them, how to tell the truth without being forced into the narrow role of "survivor voice". The distance she names is aesthetic - the ability to shape time, shift perspective, control tone - but it is also political. Fiction can slip past the gatekeepers of denial, fatigue, and "too much information", smuggling unbearable realities into the reader's imagination where defenses are weaker.