After winning the hearts of millions of readers and being adapted for the cinema, “Petit pays” is now available as a comic strip. The duo Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia have been skillfully transposing Gaël Faye’s beautiful and tragic novel into a comic strip for seven years.
It took a certain amount of audacity to adapt “Little Country”. Fnac and Goncourt novel prize for high school students in 2016, this book is also the work of an accomplished singer and musician since 2013.
Inspired by Gaël Faye’s childhood, “Little Country” takes us to Burundi, in the 1990s. In the streets of Bujumbura, ten-year-old Gabriel lives a carefree daily life surrounded by his friends and family. But his happiness will quickly be shattered following the separation of his parents and the outbreak of a civil war. War which will be followed by the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda.
A shock duo
To illustrate this story at a child’s level, the publishing houses quickly thought of Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia. The screenwriter and the designer have worked together for many years. In 2005, the series “Marzi” made them known to the general public. This comic tells the story of Marzena’s childhood in communist Poland in the 1980s.
Goldsmith’s work
It took seven years to adapt “Little Country” into a comic strip. First, Marzena Sowa reads the novel several times. Then comes a whole work of deconstruction, rearrangement of sequences, fusion of certain characters and change of pace. Different stages which require the approval of Gaël Faye. But the role of the singer-writer does not end there. He provides the photos, the documentation, the childhood memories for the duo to absorb. Once the new script has been written, it is Sylvain Savoia’s turn to intervene.
The designer admits that what he likes about his work is cutting: “Going from writing to images is what I prefer. It’s a moment of creation, of magic , where we bring the characters to life, we invent situations, settings,” he confides in the Vertigo show on June 25, 2024.
>> Listen to the column dedicated to the comic strip “Petit pays”:
Under his semi-realistic pencil line, we have fun seeing Gabriel steal mangoes from the neighbor, caress his tame vulture and bathe in the river.
Asked about his favorite sequence, Sylvain Savoia confides that he had a lot of fun drawing the moment when Gabriel and his friends go to the university swimming pool and challenge each other around the diving board. “An initiatory, dreamlike and timeless moment,” he declares. A carefree interlude quickly overtaken by the rise of extremes and the madness of men.
Sarah Clement
Marzena Sowa and Sylvain Savoia, “Petit pays”, based on the novel by Gaël Faye, Dupuis, April 2024.
