Rapper, songwriter and musician Gaël Faye became famous primarily for his first novel, small country (Grasset), which won numerous awards in 2016, including the Goncourt des lycéens, and was adapted into a film. He told of the terrible genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda, where his mother was from. For his second novel, jacaranda (Grasset, 288 pages, 20.90 euros), At 42 years old, he has just received the Renaudot 2024 prize.
I wouldn’t have gotten here if…
…If I had not gone to see the theater, on the eve of my high school diploma, in June 2000, the show Rwanda 94. My best friend, who is not Rwandan, had offered me a place and we both took the train to Lille to see this work by a Belgian company, Groupov. It lasted six hours, but it was like it lifted the fog that had always existed in my life.
How can a play cause such an explosion?
It allowed me to put words to the silence that reigned in my family. I left Burundi in 1995, at the age of 13, to arrive in France with my mother, who lived in Versailles, and we had never been able to talk about this past where the words “conflicts”, “genocide”, “massacre” were confusingly intertwined. . Not even the war that my sister and I had experienced. Until then he had asked questions and had not received an answer. This work shocked me so much that I had to see it again five or six times, bringing my friends.
What did this program say?
The piece began with the testimony of a survivor. On an empty stage, a woman sat in a chair and, addressing the room, told her story, how her children had been killed during the genocide. It was incredibly intense, which allowed me to take the measure of this event, to understand that a genocide is, first of all, anchored in an ideology. That this genocide was not a matter of centuries-old conflicts between Hutu and Tutsi. Nor was it based on a physical difference, as I had always been told, between the Tutsi, supposedly tall and thin, and the Hutu, supposedly short and stocky.
As a lecture, this piece showed how 19th century European biological racismmy The 19th century imposed a racial reading grid on Rwandan society, accompanied by anthropometric measures to measure noses and categorize Rwandans. How the Hutu and Tutsi, who were social groups, were transformed into racial categories. How the ethnic identity card came to Rwandan society in 1931 and at that time fixed the way Rwandans saw themselves. Suddenly, I understood my mother’s story…
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