Life's Pleasures Quote by Scholastique Mukasonga

There’s a deliberate smallness to this sentence that feels like a dare. Mukasonga frames coexistence not as a grand moral achievement but as an ordinary ritual: drinking beer with the person next door. In Rwanda, where “Hutu” and “Tutsi” were turned into lethal categories by colonial bureaucracy, propaganda, and eventually genocide, choosing to foreground the neighbor over the label is not naive. It’s insurgent.

The line works because it refuses the reader’s appetite for identity as explanation. “He is my neighbor” is an insistence on the local, the lived, the mundane. “And that’s all I want to know about him” lands harder: it’s not ignorance, it’s boundary-setting. Mukasonga is signaling how ethnic classification functions like a trapdoor. Once you “know” the category, you are invited to inherit the story that comes with it: suspicion, historical grievance, the false clarity of us-versus-them. The sentence rejects that script.

The subtext is haunted. Mukasonga, a Tutsi survivor writing in the long shadow of 1994, understands that the language of difference can be weaponized with terrifying speed. The beer becomes a counter-symbol to the paperwork of ethnicity: a shared container, a social bond, an everyday proof of humanity that doesn’t require a theory.

It’s also not sentimental. She doesn’t claim the neighbor is good, or safe, or redeemed. She claims a right to relate to him outside the identity machine. That insistence is political precisely because it sounds like life.