our review of Jacaranda, Renaudot Prize 2024

April 1994. The narrator, Milan, is 12 years old and lives in Versailles between a French father and a Rwandan mother who never spoke to him about his country or his family. The genocide in Rwanda, the images of which he sees on television, will not change anything: “My mother’s past was a closed door”. However, four years later, she offered to accompany Milan to Rwanda where she had a matter to settle. There he will discover that he has a grandmother and a young uncle who survived the genocide. Another survivor, a childhood friend of her mother, who lost her four children in the massacres, has just had a baby: life is stronger than hatred.

Between tenderness and revolt

Milan will return to Rwanda. When he is a law student, to write a dissertation on the popular tribunals responsible for judging genocidaires. Then, like the author, he will settle there permanently. Over the years, he looks, he listens, he takes notes, he describes: a bloodless and rural country which has developed and urbanized…