Writing as Living Archive: An Interview with Beata Umubyeyi Mairesse

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. <br/><br/>When I first read Umubyeyi Mariesse’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.<br/><br/>We spoke in spring 2025 at the Maison de l’Institut de France in South Kensington (London), where Umubyeyi Mairesse was staying to launch her latest autobiographical book, The Convoy (Open Borders Press, 2025), translated from French (Le Convoi, Flammarion, 2024) into English by Ruth Diver. It recounts how she escaped Rwanda as part of a humanitarian convoy during the genocide, and how she has searched to learn more about this rescue operation as an adult. Shifting between English, French, and the occasional phrase in Kinyarwanda, we discussed the loneliness of the genocide survivor when their experience isn’t heard, and how she found community through the words of survivors of earlier violence. We explored her turn to testimony after many years working with fiction, and her desire to witness both the international community’s failure to intervene, and the extraordinary bravery of a few individuals who risked their lives to help. Throughout, we considered how her work reinserts the inflections of missing voices into the archives, and witnesses the persistence of the past in the present.<br/>