Eight years after the immense success of Small country (Grasset, 2016), his first partly autobiographical novel, adapted for the cinema by Éric Barbier in 2020, the Franco-Rwandan singer-songwriter and rapper Gaël Faye dives back into the scarred memory of Rwanda in a more frontal way.
Jacarandahis second novel, takes us to the heart of the ordinary silences, the buried horror and the mourning of the last of the genocides of the 20th century.e century.
Son of a Frenchman and a Rwandan exiled in France since the early 1970s, Milan, 12, does not know much about this African country where his mother comes from. “My mother’s past was a closed door,” he tells us. Until one day in 1994, after the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsis – a million deaths in three months – his family took in for a few weeks a Rwandan orphan of his age, Claude, “wounded during the war”.
Four years later, Milan landed with her mother in Kigali, the capital, where she had not set foot again for 25 years. For the adolescent, [b] “lanc comme neige” in the eyes of Rwandans, during these two summer months, the change of scenery will be total: red dust, mosquitoes, smooching, music (highlife, afrobeat, funk, rumba), adulterated alcohol and street urchins. He also discovers friendship and the weight of what is left unsaid. Milan, as he is often reminded, sees nothing and does not understand what he sees around him.
He also learned during this first stay, with amazement, that his mother still had family in Rwanda. With each question he asks, he encounters the same hostility. Despite everything, the country exerts its fascination on him.
He decided to return there, at the age of 23, to confront and try to understand for himself this “inner swamp” in which the Rwandans seemed to him to live, by devoting his master in law to the popular courts set up by the Rwandan government to judge the crimes of the genocide.
Over time, through testimonies gleaned here and there from friends or acquaintances, Milan will learn to see and understand. The hard “work” of the militiamen, the massacres with machetes, the rapes and the dispossession. The quiet complicity of neighbors for whom the very idea of truth still remains a scandal.
Born in Burundi to a Rwandan mother and a French father, having grown up in France after fleeing the country at the age of 13, Gaël Faye has lived in Kigali since 2015.
By choosing to settle in Rwanda, Milan, for its part, will try to contribute in its own way to the reconstruction of the country. Perhaps he also seeks to understand his mother’s silence and to unearth family secrets.
Through Jacaranda — named after a flamboyant tropical tree with clusters of lavender blue flowers, which here becomes a symbol of memory and resilience —, using a few emblematic and well-defined characters, Gaël Faye tells us in a simple way 30 years of life of this country.
Capable of moving but without pathos, here he brings the executioners and the victims, memory and denial, silence and speech, face to face. Like an exorcism.
“We must continue to tell the story of what happened so that this story is passed down to new generations and never happens again anywhere.” » This is the key, thinks the narrator of Jacarandaof a patient and necessary reconciliation, where everyone is responsible for the truth.