“Jacaranda”, by Gaël Faye, Grasset, 282 p., €20.50, digital €.
HAUNTED COUNTRY
Gaël Faye’s second novel was expected not only because of the enormous success of small country (Grasset, 2016), but because its own author expected it so. Eight years apart, in fact Jacaranda of the first text, which is a lot, today, in literary life. From one book to another there is a kind of carry-over effect: firstly, because certain characters in small country come back in Jacarandabut also because memory is always poorly regulated and silences, forgetfulness, continue to do their job. The time separating the two novels thus doubles its theme: as the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda (1994) recedes, how does the present address what haunts it?
small country It took place in Burundi and spoke of a childhood very similar to the one the author had lived in this country. He evoked the genocide from this lateral position and especially from the Burundian civil war that preceded it in 1993. Jacaranda It begins in France and talks about a childhood much less similar to that of the author, but the novel continues in Rwanda, where Gaël Faye lives today. Like Burundi, Rwanda is a “small country”even smaller: 26,338 square kilometers versus 27,834 square kilometers. In France, to return to what is known, we say “big as Britain”which is technically true (27,208 square kilometers). However, neither geography nor history unite these three lands. Burundi and Rwanda are landlocked countries – but with large lakes – and their recent history is marked by the violence of the last genocide of the 20th century.my century, committed by neighbors against neighbors, which, even more so in a “small country”makes coexistence impossible.
As always in history, we respond to this impossible with silence and amnesia; Even when free speech is fought for in public courts, large swaths of truth are obscured and the community remains broken and mute. Gaël Faye inscribes this silence in Rwandan culture – “Don’t go stirring up the past,” the mother told her son, (…) “It is not in our culture to be indiscreet” – but it is common to all cultures. Trauma opens wide the memory hole. Jacaranda It tells the reasons and effects of silence throughout four generations. In the center, that of the children of 1994, who did not understand what was happening and who, surviving, almost all found themselves exiled; upstream, those of parents and grandparents, who lost a large part of their families; downstream, that of children born after 1994, who unknowingly carry the traumatic memory as a legacy. To this belongs Stella, who spends her solitary childhood in the friendly branches of her jacaranda tree and, when her tree is cut down, she finds herself institutionalized, unable to live. For her to learn to speak again, others must speak to her and be able to tell her that, in this same purple tree, three sisters and a brother who died before her birth played. This claim is particularly difficult in the case of a genocide characterized by its incredible brutality and the fragmentation of its actors (one fifth of the country’s population participated in the genocide).
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