Writing as Living Archive: An Interview with Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse

is a Rwandan writer who moved to France aged fifteen, after surviving the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi. Critically acclaimed in the francophone world, her collections of short stories, two novels, and a testimony have won numerous international prizes, including the Prix des cinq continents de la francophonie, Prix Kourouma, and, most recently, Prix Franz-Hessel. Her work explores varied perspectives on genocide, the enduring presence of colonial violence, and above all – drawing on her own mixed-race identity – the possibility of nuanced and chosen identifications in a world that increasingly favours division. When I first read Umubyeyi Mairesse’s novels, I was struck by the ambition. Here was writing that was intergenerational, featuring multiple points of view, layered landscapes of memory, and complex family dynamics replete with love, longing, and disappointment. Umubyeyi Mairesse cares for craft, for long-form structure, for the possibilities of poetic language, and for the ways in which words might stretch our perceptions of the world. She is also unequivocally Rwandan: grounded in the riches of Kinyarwanda’s long poetic tradition and in her own childhood growing up in Butare. These allegiances are intertwined. In the epigraph to her first novel, All Your Children, Scattered ( Tous tes enfants dispersés , 2019), we find Holocaust survivor Georges Perec’s description of seeking kinship in books, nestled alongside a Rwandan proverb about the location of sorrow in the body, and a quotation from Bessie Head about the embodied expression of belonging. She finds, through literature, new paths to solidarity. We spoke in spring