Life & Wisdom Quote by Scholastique Mukasonga

Memory here isn’t a gentle scrapbook; it’s a ticking deadline. Mukasonga frames remembrance as “urgent duty”, a phrase that borrows the language of ethics and obligation, not nostalgia. The subtext is blunt: when history has been engineered to erase you, recalling becomes a form of survival work. You don’t “choose” to write; you report for duty.

“I was living with the threat of losing that memory” lands like a private panic with public consequences. It points to trauma’s double bind: the past is unbearable to hold, yet terrifying to misplace. For a Rwandan writer shaped by the genocide and its long prelude of displacement and persecution, the fear isn’t only personal amnesia. It’s the larger machinery of denial, silence, and the way a shattered community can lose its own archive when people, places, and names are wiped out.

The line “I had to work with what I had” signals scarcity: incomplete recollections, broken family narratives, gaps created by violence. Instead of pretending to omniscience, she elevates limitation into method. The blank page becomes an active partner, “my confidant”, turning writing into a relationship where what cannot be spoken aloud can still be placed somewhere safe. That trust in the page is also a wager against oblivion: if memory is fragile, text can be a substitute body, a durable witness.

What makes the passage hit is its refusal of literary romance. The blank page isn’t inspiration; it’s an emergency contact. Writing becomes an act of salvage, and the intimacy is tactical.