Life & Wisdom Quote by Scholastique Mukasonga

Erasure is doing double duty here: it is the murder of people and the murder of evidence. Mukasonga’s narrator isn’t describing a ruin you can visit and mourn; she’s describing a crime scene that has been deliberately converted back into “nature”, a bush that functions like a second executioner. The phrasing is blunt, almost administrative - “every last trace”, “wiped away” - because the violence she’s pointing to isn’t only frenzy, it’s method. Genocide doesn’t just kill bodies; it edits the archive.

The line “It’s as if we never existed” is the sentence that carries the real terror. It names the final ambition of the killers: not simply to end a family, but to make the end unprovable, ungrievable, unrecorded. That’s why the bush matters: it’s camouflage and metaphor, the world’s easy willingness to let disappearance look like the normal passage of time.

Then Mukasonga pivots to an almost unbearably intimate claim of custody: “And I alone preserve the memory of it”. The “alone” isn’t self-mythologizing; it’s the loneliness of the survivor as an accidental librarian. Memory becomes a responsibility, not a comfort. Writing, in this frame, isn’t art as self-expression. It’s triage. It’s an emergency substitute for a grave, a house, a community, a paper trail.

The closing - “That’s why I’m writing this” - strips away any romance about storytelling. The intent is prosecutorial as much as personal: to put names, rooms, and lived detail back where “the bush” has been allowed to smooth everything into silence.