A sweeping multi-generational saga about a family torn apart by the 1994 Rwanda genocide. A story of racial and cultural identity, of grief and trauma, of displacement and exile, of family and nationhood. It’s a powerful tale of a family attempting to reconnect and rebuild just as the nation is trying to rebuild, in a country where killers and victims are forced to live side by side. A multi-layered novel, complex and nuanced, beautifully written with insight and empathy. A truly moving read.

"All Your Children, Scattered" by Mairesse offers a mosaic of voices, painting a portrait of resilience amidst adversity. The narrative structure adds layers to the stories of displacement and identity. While some segments shine vividly, others left me yearning for deeper connection. A mixed experience that highlights both the strengths and limitations of its unique approach.

This is a complex story. It has two different voices, something which does not seem apparent in the very beginning. Mother and daughter take time to talk about the present and the past to give us a complete picture.
This is not a story for people who want a linear timeline presentation. We move back and forth in time without a title to proclaim where we are. The voice (which is declared before the chapter begins) that is telling us about themselves and the situation is the only way to place where we are.
It is a tough story, swirling with a discussion of identity and personal goals. Blanche and her mother, Immaculata, have been forged by different life experiences. The latter worked hard and married a French man to secure her future and had a daughter with him. What happens after is only revealed in bits and pieces. We only know that she has a completely Rwandan son as well, one who has parents from different warring sections of Rwandans, and this puts him in a very difficult position when war comes.
I have recently not been a fan of continued back and forth, which sometimes gives me a headache. In this case, however, it was because of the frazzled feeling I got by the changes in the topic of conversation that I felt the depth of chaos in the lives of the people I was reading about.
I have recently listened to a book that included the Rwandan civil war, but this book shows a whole different angle. The pre and post-war world is more in focus than the actual atrocities of the war (although that gets obvious mentions as well).
For the length of the volume, this book definitely packs a punch. I would recommend it to people who like complex family dynamics and exploring translated works.
On that note, I must say the translator has done a great job since I never felt like I was reading a translated work.
I received an ARC thanks to Netgalley and the publishers, but the review is entirely based on my own reading experience.

All Your Children Scattered uses the voices of a mother and a daughter to bring the experience of the Rwandan Genocide down to personal terms. The writing speaks beautifully of difficult emotions and how trauma persists through generations.

It's very tough for me to give feedback for this novel. My thoughts are conflicted. The poetic nature of the writing is a choice that for me completely obliterated the realities of the Rwandan civil war. I'm struggling with it. It has made me consider the ways people heal from such senseless horrific personal and historical events. To survive they need to focus solely on their own experiences, maybe, and to conquer incomprehensible past evils with a mixture of beauty and forgetting. The stories here are so personal. It's a novel about the aftermath of great destruction, where the characters are uneasily building stepping stones back to one another, and are rebuilding lives as best they can. Besides the elegant writing itself I admire the quiet ways Mairesse confronts the schisms within communities and even within families, in a country where members of the community of slaughterers and the surviving community of the slaughtered need to learn once more to be neighbors.

Tous les enfants dispersés is Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s debut fiction novel charting the intergenerational effects of the 1994 Rwandan genocide against Tutsis within a family. Published originally in French and winning multiple French literary awards, Europa Editions has now released an English translation All Your Children, Scattered with Alison Anderson as translator. My thanks to Europa and Netgalley for providing a digital ARC in exchange for unbiased review.

Reading the mother's Nyirakiragi/Immaculata's narrative, it's striking that there's been pogroms against the Tutsis before, in 1959 and 1973. She recalls her father giving their Hutu neighbour a cow for helping them during the 1959 killings but notes with bitterness that this neighbour's sons would go on to participate in the 1994 massacre of their family members. It's interpersonal details and debts like that which add to the horrific surreal nightmare: a Hutu school headmaster is killed by his pupils in 1994 for refusing to give up his Tutsi mother and maternal uncles already affected from the 1973 pogrom, his widow beseeches Immaculata in 1997 to tell her son Bosco to remember the headmaster's kindness in covering up his joining of the rebel army and not to kill her relatives in Zaire.

Kinyarwanda phrases and proverbs are a strong feature and a repository of knowledge passed down from mother to daughter. Their relationship is prickly and stonewalled by Immaculata's silence.

<i> What would happen if we literally began speaking, voicing our boundless desire for abortion, our exhausted desire for forbidden pleasure, our burning desire for absolute power? What would have happened if, instead of opening only my belly, the doctor had opened all of me, laid bare my heart, and my throat, so aptly referred to as umutemeli w’ishavu, the lid of sorrow?

And whenever I tried to begin to tell you, my sentences dissolved into unavoidable ellipses, lost in the memory of a trauma I could not bring myself to pass on to you. I thought I was protecting you. I hanged myself on my tongue.</i>

Silence is a recurring theme, from the names given (Nyirakiragi - 'the silent one' to grandson being inadvertently named Kunuma-'remain absolutely silent') to being forbidden to speak Kinyarwanda by French nuns when Immaculata is in secondary school to when she stops speaking <spoiler>after her son Bosco kills himself</spoiler>. Her son Bosco too is silent about the horrors he witnessed after joining the Inkotanyi in 1991 at seventeen and returning to his ravaged town to find his mother emaciated hiding in the basement of a bookstore.

What detracted for me was the drama reveal of the baby daddies and closing romanticization of biracial offspring. There's also a vigorous discussion of who has the right to tell the story of the genocide.

<i>When every letter is traced with a drop of your own blood, you don’t go pointlessly flaunting yourself, you learn to fill the blank spaces with eloquent gazes. It’s a question of decency, make of it what you will. People who write about us, those who seek to transcribe our silences, without knowing the score: they sometimes lack good manners. I won’t let him transform you into fodder for fiction.

All your children scattered, on earth as in the sky, we are here today. </i>

3.5 ⭐️

I wanted to enjoy this novel, for its subject matter, author and general context. And yet there was something about the voice, the poetic language that made it hard to embrace. I could not finish it.

All Your Children, Scattered is simply exceptional and on reading it’s easy to see why it (the French-language original) has won so many prizes. What is even more astounding is that this is Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse’s debut novel.

The novel is structured to give us shifting perspectives between Immaculata, Blanche and, to a lesser extent, Stokely.
Towards, the end the structure is boldly, poignantly and movingly played with. The perspectives of Blanche who fled Rwanda to her estranged father’s country of France and that of her son, Stokely, were the most interesting to me as these engaged with the relationships between (the consequences of) colonialism, language and identity.

With the rotating perspectives in which the events of the past and the tensions between the Immaculata and Blanche are slowly revealed to us, the pacing might not be to the tastes of every reader but for me the pacing of the information revealed to the reader was just right and, as a result, I kept on reading to the next chapter wanting to know more. The pace of the novel may be on the slow side but the story is so compelling that the novel demands to be read in few sittings.

I think it is worth mentioning that whilst the subject matter of genocide comes with some obvious trigger warnings, the novel rarely details anything graphically but rather only gives brief mention of such things. Refreshingly, the focal point of the novel is rather the intergenerational processing of the trauma of one family. So if you are thinking that the novel sounds too bleak and triggering to read, I would suggest reading the trigger/content warnings and their severity.

One small but powerful thing I really loved about the latter part of the novel is the moving appreciation of literature from all around the African continent (including but not limited to Chinua Achebe and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o).

I would highly recommend this novel and after reading I’m even more looking forward to getting to Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga to see to what extent it feels in conversation with All Your Children, Scattered

All Your Children, Scattered by Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse, translated from French by Alison Anderson, Europa, 2022

Review by Alyea Canada, Assistant Editor

Silence is powerful. It creates spaces where loss looms and trauma can thrive, all while perpetuating their incredible transmissibility. In her debut novel, All Your Children, Scattered, Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse explores this effect of silence and trauma through three generations contending with the genocide in Rwanda and its ramifications. The story mostly unfolds in shifting points of view between Immaculata, a Tutsi mother who hid in Rwanda during the genocide and, in a way, lost both of her children; and Blanche, her mixed-race daughter who was sent to Bordeaux, France, to escape the genocide. A few sections are also devoted to Stokely, Blanche’s son, who is struggling to find a place between the two countries of his mother. The resulting work is a beautiful and moving depiction of a family reaching for each other across years of separation and the weight of history, as they try to speak the silences lying between them.

The bulk of the book is devoted to Immaculata and Blanche as they try to reconnect upon Blanche’s return to Rwanda, and as their relationship is revealed, we are also introduced to Bosco, Immaculata’s son and Blanche’s half-brother, who fought with the Rwandan Patriotic Army during the genocide and struggles with the invisible wounds of war. No one in the family talks about their experience of the genocide or the aftereffects of the violence, and the novel similarly refuses to indulge in much discussion of what happened. Instead, Immaculata’s chapters deal mostly with her life prior, revealing the truth of her children’s paternity—a story that is inextricably tied to French colonialism; Blanche’s chapters describe the after of the genocide and her intense survivor’s guilt, which keeps her from Rwanda for seven years. At first, I found it frustrating that Mairesse mostly leaves the immediate experience of the genocide unspoken, but then I found myself questioning why I felt like I needed to know the specific details. While I’m sure a frank discussion could be healing for the characters, it would simply be voyeuristic for the reader. The question of when bearing witness becomes exploitation is briefly addressed in a scene between Immaculata and Blanche’s husband, but for the most part, the reader is left to grapple with these feelings on their own.

The silences between the characters are also present within the pages. We don’t know who these characters were before the genocide, and thus we don’t know what they are trying to rekindle. In many ways, Blanche and Immaculata also seem unsure of what they are trying to build: “How did we speak to one another, before? I seem to have forgotten. Which before did I want to return to, anyway? There were two of them. No, three.” This overarching silence is given further presence when Immaculata literally stops speaking after another tragedy befalls the family, and Blanche begins to fear that she is losing her native language of Kinyarwanda as she attempts teaching it to Stokely. The idea of language as being closely tied to motherhood (the very idea of a “mother tongue” is questioned at one point in the novel) is explored through Blanche and Immaculata’s relationship to their own languages and voices, illustrating the burdens of history that mothers often bear. Immaculata reflects on how, upon entering secondary school, she was forbidden from speaking her native language—if one were to be caught speaking Kinyarwanda, it was met with ridicule from both the white teachers and classmates. The legacy of colonialism, then, is inextricably tied up in the very languages these women are passing to their children.

There is something almost epistolary about the structure of the novel, with Blanche and Immaculata’s chapters speaking to and reaching toward each other across time. Because Immaculata mainly discusses the past and Blanche the present, the novel doesn’t follow a linear timeline; instead, its temporality shifts, with Stokely’s birth and Immaculata’s silence providing temporal anchor points. It is a structure that requires attention, but is reflective of the non-linear way that history unfurls into the present. While it took me a minute to adjust, I eventually found a flow between the narratives and the world they built. The chapters don’t necessarily correspond specifically, but thematically; Blanche discussing falling in love with her husband is followed by Immaculata discussing the first time she met Blanche’s father. It is a formalistic choice that Mairesse uses to indicate the struggles of these women, as they pursue different paths to get back to one another.

While Blanche and Immaculata speak in the second person—further contributing to the feeling that they are writing to each other—Stokely’s chapters are entirely in third person, underscoring the in-betweenness of his identity. Stokely, named after an American Black Panther, is being raised in France by an African mother grappling with survivor’s guilt and a West Indian father with his own family trauma. At times, every choice he makes feels like a declaration of allegiance—for example, his desire to play the clarinet rather than the more traditional instruments of Black jazzmen. While it’s clear that Stokely will become the catalyst for Immaculata and Blanche’s reconnection, his own journey to reconnect with his mother’s history is also pivotal, speaking simultaneously to the racism inherent in contemporary French society and its insidious valuations of privileging certain kind of victimhood over others on the world stage.

In a novel where language is so integral, Anderson’s skillful work stands up to scrutiny. She does an excellent job of balancing the chorus of voices, ensuring that they remain individual and distinct. In this multiplicity, All Your Children, Scattered is a brief but powerful novel about the weight of silence and the intergenerational nature of trauma, and despite the weight of its subject matter, there is a light at its center. In opening up these various narratives, Mairesse’s work acts as a reminder that even if the past cannot be restored, silence does not have the last word.

2.75 stars - ALL YOUR CHILDREN, SCATTERED is a reflective read about the bridging of identities, the impact of the Rwandan genocide on a particular family, and the choice of legacy. I personally dislike the first half, but the novel's greatly elevated by its last 30%.

The first half of the book is bogged down by its frustratingly slow pace that meanders on the less interesting bits of the characters' lives. Mairesse's novel isn't particularly fueled by the plot, and the aformentioned section is most affected by this. Nothing really happens, or if it does, it's all in the same similar vein of telling and not enough showing.

The slow and overly reflective nature of the first half is also further compounded by initially confusing characters and POVs; each chapter is named after the character whose POV it focuses on, but this can be confusing when the characters are initially more known by their relation to one another (ex: mother, brother, etc.).

Nevertheless, the novel is nicely written and translated; I'm particularly impressed by the latter's choice of certain words. Once things start picking up about halfway through, the exploration of the characters and their psyche are interesting. Seeing how each member of the family copes with the genocide, its impact, and their changing relationships towards one another are intriguing.

I also really like the abundant Black and African cultural references that lend a lot of a sense of time and place to the story, and how Mairesse explores aspects of Black and political - especially diasporic and immigrant - identities. My favorite thing about the book, however, is Stokeley, his identity, and his relationships with Blanche and Immaculata - each imbued with both particular challenges and bonds. His determination to be connected to his Rwandan culture is at times touching and emotional as well.

This is a book that meditates on heavy but necessary topics, reflecting on how each character grapples with an event as devastating as a genocide, though I wish the first half was less slow.

This was a beautiful book. It traces the threads of colonial violence and genocide in Rwanda through three generations of a family. Blanche, multiracial daughter of Immaculata, returns to Rwanda after the genocide to reunite with her mother who survived by hiding in a bookstore. The two struggle to rebuild their relationship and repair each other. Blanche also negotiates raising her son in France with a multifaceted identity, struggling to help him to appreciate his Rwandan roots and his French upbringing. This book is exquisitely written and looks at the depths of injuries inflicted by colonialism, war, and genocide, and how surviving often is only part of the struggle. It's not an easy read but I loved it.

“All the Children, Scattered” – Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse

Set across three generations of a Tutsi family, this novel charts the course of the different members as their lives are torn apart by the Rwandan genocide, and how the effects of this effect still ripple through and haunt them.

I’m going to struggle to explain how much I enjoyed this book, and how highly I rate it. All the characters are multi-layered: there’s Immaculata and her attempts to bloom in a country emerging from French colonial rule, desperate for a way to better herself and get an education yet held back by her preconceived ideas of her own race. Her daughter is the product of her drive and doubts, the result of her mother’s brief affair with a white academic, and subsequently forced to be an outsider in two worlds. Blanche then strives not to pass this feeling onto Stokely, her son, at this point living in France and looking for a sense of himself.

Their lives play out against the backdrop of the Rwandan genocide and the subsequent war in then Zaire, a war in which Blanche’s brother Bosco is an active participant, something which he carries with him. This theme of identity and division is present throughout the book – characters often struggle with their origins and place in the world, suffering from actions and inactions taken by colonizers. However, this felt very much like a Rwandan book and a Rwandan story, one in which the reader is assumed to know the basics of the history of the country, allowing Mairesse to explore deeper and more nuanced themes of family, race, duty and generational trauma.

Sincerely, this is one of the best books I’ve read this year, a deep and balanced look at the aftershocks of events that would shock the whole world, without focusing on the events itself. Get yourself a copy of this when you can, which I believe is August 23rd in America (the rest of you have to wait, but it’ll be worth it). Make a note of this one.

Thanks to @netgalley and @europaeditions for allowing me to read a copy in exchange for an honest review.

A mother who survived the Rwandan genocide and her and daughter who fled it try to come to terms with their grief and trauma.

A new release coming soon! (August 2022) I got to read an advanced reader copy from the publisher and I cannot wait for this book to come out!

All My Children, Scattered traces the movements of three generations of a Franco-Rwandan family, as they each, in their own painful ways, unravel the complex emotions and tensions inflicted on them by Rwanda's colonial history and, more recently, the Rwandan Genocide. Immaculata, the mother, struggles to find a place for herself and her children in a world still ruled by colonial culture. She finds herself equally trapped and freed by her own internalized ideas about race and color. She passes on these questions of identity to her daughter, Blanche, a mixed race, half white, half black woman, who finds herself also struggling with what it means to be Rwandan within and outside of Rwanda, in Europe. Blanche is a survivor of the genocide and turmoil of the 1990s; she wrangles with her luck, her fate, her role in it as a Rwandan expatriate. Stokely is Blanche's son, another generation removed from the colonial encounter and one generation removed from the Genocide, but he is no less subject to this history.

There are other characters woven into their story: Bosco, Immaculata's other child, her son, who also survives the genocide by fighting through it. He was a soldier, a human being caught up in the gritty reality of the genocide. Then there is Blanche's husband, a West Indian man, facing similar questions of postcolonial identity. He understands and yet, also, cannot understand Blanche's Rwandan identity.

What I love most about All My Children, Scattered is its historicity and the native point of view it privileges, centers, revolves around. Mairesse immerses the reader in the Rwandan experience of history. While colonial history is a foundational premise of the novel, it does not fall into that trap of making this about white men and white experience; this is not a novel of the colonizer, this is about Rwandans, the people and their experience.

I deeply appreciated that Mairesse did not delve into the details of colonial events, what happened in what year; the machinations of state politics was a buzz (a loud one at times) in the background. What was most visible was the effect of politics on the ordinary citizen, the family, individuals. This is not a historical fiction that reads like a history lesson - thankfully! -- no, this is a novel that focuses on the emotional trauma, the unseen generation damage.

Mairesse's prose delivers. The language is beautiful and evocative. The voice of each character is clear, unmistakable. Each chapter is narrated by a different character so Mairesse treats the reader to a view of Rwandan history from multiple points. The reader feels the connections across time, the intangible tensions from one generation to the next.

This is a book to read and re-read.

The translation of this work into English from French, done masterfully by Alison Anderson, extends the gift to the world that is Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse's "All Your Children, Scattered "to the Anglophone world. As a lover of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, I never thought a work could meet the high bar for literary might that work set, until I read this novel. Following the lives of Immaculata, her daughter Blanche, and Blanche's son Stokely, this novel saliently explores familial bonds to one's elders, as well as to larger cultural divides, all set against the backdrop Rwandan genocide against the Tutsis. Mairesse's vivid and magical detailing of the natural landscape of Rwanda, especially the Jacaranda tree, make the ordinary, often overlooked aspects of a setting carry the influence of her background in poetry. There are countless images and vividly detailed scenes that have stuck with me. It's very rare to find a novel that announces its greatness on the very first page, but this immediately hooked me as both a vivid image and a thesis for this work as a whole, "peace goes out to greet the flowers gorged with water from the rainy season, still struggling to exhale a fragrance of life in spite of it all, in a place where the stench of rot has seeped into everything."

This novel examines how one's cultural identity is pieced back together in the face of mass violence and collective trauma, highlighting a historical atrocity that has been made to feel distant by the global media churn. Discussions in American schools often end with a viewing of Hotel Rwanda, which was released ten years after the 1994 massacre. This novel was first published 27 years after the genocide, and I wholeheartedly argue it is essential reading for any history course or world literature course. This is a literary feat through and through, and I excitedly await future works from Mairesse, as well as holding personal hope for a Nobel Prize in literature down the line, as Marquez was awarded in 1982. I hope this work instigates expanded interest in authors from across the African diaspora, it surely has for me personally.