Motherhood Quote by Scholastique Mukasonga

Hospitality here isn’t a lifestyle choice; it’s a survival ethic forged in the long shadow of displacement. Mukasonga, a Rwandan writer marked by the afterlife of exile and the genocide that devastated the world she came from, frames a domestic ritual - saving two mats - as both practical preparation and moral stance. The detail is disarmingly humble: not beds, not a feast, just woven mats on the floor. Yet that modesty is the point. In exile, you learn how quickly comfort can vanish, how thin the barrier is between “family” and “unexpected traveler”.

The line “like all my family condemned to exile” carries quiet indictment. Exile isn’t romantic wandering; it’s a sentence handed down by history, bureaucracy, and ethnic violence. Against that machinery, the mother’s habit becomes a small, stubborn counter-institution: a household policy that refuses scarcity thinking. Saving two mats means the stranger is anticipated, not merely tolerated. It’s an argument that refuge should be built into everyday life the way you store water or keep a light on.

The closing wish - “May each of us always have a mat to welcome the stranger” - shifts from memoir to injunction without grandstanding. “Always have” is doing double work: the blessing is for generosity, but also for the basic stability required to be generous. Mukasonga suggests a hard truth: empathy often depends on having just enough to share, and the people most likely to understand that are those who’ve slept on the floor themselves.