Gaël Faye returns with "Jacaranda": a story of silence and reconciliation in Rwanda

The sky-blue flowers of the jacaranda trees and the "silence" that still reigns in his own family regarding the persecution of the Tutsi inspired the Franco-Rwandan Gaël Faye , the author of Little Country , to return to literature with Jacaranda , his second novel.

The rapper and composer also confesses, in an interview in Paris, that it was not easy to return to writing after the overwhelming success of his debut work , which has accumulated more than two million readers in 40 different languages ​​and was adapted to film in 2020.

"I let a few years go by, released two albums, toured ... And then I realized I was living in a country, Rwanda, where the vast majority of the population had been born after the genocide. I felt a bit like an old man," recalls the author, who was born in Burundi in 1982, went into exile in France with his family at the age of thirteen, and now lives in the Rwanda of his maternal ancestors .

"I was 11 years old at the time of the genocide, and I wanted to write a story to speak to this new generation and tell them about the journey we've made in 30 years," Faye concludes.

That desire actually came from realizing that silence reigned in his own family despite the impact of Little Country , where he uses autobiographical elements to tell, through the eyes of a child, the experience during the genocide of a family with a French father and a Rwandan mother who were refugees in neighboring Burundi.

" In my family, it was still impossible to talk not only about my first novel, but about our story (...). It was perhaps this element that pushed me to write, and the more I spoke about this silence around me, the more I realized that it is a silence that exists in many Rwandan families," she explains.

For this reason, in Jacarandá (Salamandra publishing house) he sought to portray these voids across several generations, again using elements from his own life, but following a path opposite to that of his first book.

Named after the tree of Latin American origin that colors the landscape of many cities on the African continent blue, Jacaranda tells the story of Milan, a mixed-race French-Rwandan boy who knows nothing about his secretive mother's past , his family's traumas, and the 1994 genocide, beyond what he sees on television.

A trip to the country where her grandmother still lives will unlock her curiosity and desire to understand her own history.

Despite the autobiographical elements in his two novels to date, Faye, who also has a Catalan great-grandmother on his father's side, says he's not interested in talking about himself as if he were filling out a diary: "You write to reach others."

But it also assumes its need to start from reality , especially having a past marked by events as out of the ordinary as exile or mass violence.

The 1994 Tutsi genocide, in which an estimated 800,000 people were massacred in just three months, was one of the bloodiest episodes in recent world history.

Silence in the face of trauma is a common human reaction , Faye believes, but for whom it is not possible to remain there in order to build real reconciliation: "We must talk, tell, put it into words. Silence is deadly . With silence, we run the risk of things happening again."

"Furthermore, it's not true that by not speaking, we don't transmit pain. That's also a paradox," he says.

Even those who didn't experience the genocide suffer traumatic crises in today's Rwanda , explains the musician. But at the same time, he is convinced that humanity is capable of "remaking itself" through justice and forgiveness.

"That's what I've learned," Faye says, "from Rwandan society. I've lived there for years and I see executioners and victims living side by side . There's the truth of the heart, and maybe people don't love each other, but they've learned to live together again."

Jacaranda , which Faye also says will be adapted for film , was one of the sensations of the French literary "rentrée" (the avalanche of new titles that arrive in bookstores at the end of summer). It won the Renaudot Prize and was a finalist for the prestigious Goncourt Prize, the most important award for French-language fiction.