Slam, music, literature: Gaël Faye, awarded the Renaudot prize on Monday, is an artist with multiple talents, whose work never ceases to return to the wounds of Rwanda.
“We are crowning a slammer, a rapper and also all of his work as a musician and as a novelist,” commented Frédéric Beigbeder, member of the jury. “It’s important because literary prizes are often criticized for having blinders in a closed world.”
“You can't understand what I do in literature if you don't listen to my music. Everything responds to each other,” said Faye at the Drouant restaurant in Paris, where he received his prize.
Everything smiles on this young man by the looks, who does not look like his 42 years, and whose very tall height and ample and precise gestures are reminiscent of a basketball player. A sport that he practiced a lot in his youth. To the orange ball, then to a career in finance which he cut short, he nevertheless preferred the microphone, the mixing desk and the pen.
His first solo album, “Pili-Pili on a butter croissant”, revealed him in 2013. It will be followed by a Victoire de la musique (stage revelation) in 2018 and another disc, “Lundi villain”, in 2020.
In 2016, his first novel, “Petit pays”, reached the final of the Prix Goncourt, beaten by Leïla Slimani. He took his revenge with the high school students’ Goncourt.
In 2024, the second, “Jacaranda”, was one of the favorites of literary prize juries. Readers joined in, not just fans of his music but also fans of contemporary literature.
“Success is down to the grace of the man. There is such sincerity, such magnetism…”, according to Olivier Nora, the boss of his publishing house, Grasset.
– “Words of appeasement” –
In the literary work, the pen is as alert as the themes are serious. Impossible to break away from the genocide which devastated Rwanda, the country of his Tutsi mother, in 1994.
“The first time I started singing was during commemorations of the genocide. I was 15, 16 years old. We were told: write texts between two testimonies,” he told AFP in September .
“When someone has just recounted their ordeal, the only thing we can do is come with words of reassurance. This has always been my way of doing things,” he added.
On the genocide, Gaël Faye, of French and Rwandan nationality, never misses an opportunity to advise reading, on the one hand, the testimonies of survivors and, on the other hand, the most recent history books. So many works which do not have the distribution of his.
His literature and the lyrics of his songs take another approach to depict this Rwanda where he lives today. They indirectly take the point of view of the traumatized.
Thus the narrator of “Petit pays” grew up in Burundi, like the author, while the narrator of “Jacaranda” was born in France, before leaving for Kigali to study post-genocidal justice.
In this Renaudot, the writer sees “the possibility that the story continues to circulate, that it goes to places where it was perhaps not planned and that is what I wish for this novel, because I think he carries within him a story that has educational value, also for our present.”
– Ambition –
Demanding French literary criticism has been mixed on the quality of these novels, their style, their construction. Not about the fit between the author, his subject and his audience.
“A well-made literary product”, where “the young adult reconstituting his childhood makes it much more coherent than it surely was”, said “Petit pays” En attendant Nadeau, a leading online literary magazine.
“His text is effective, generous, enveloping. It shows the gaps, but it fills them,” judged Le Monde about “Jacaranda”. The daily estimated that “the language is fluid, but offers no surprises”.
Undoubtedly the literary pen of Gaël Faye, an artist who multiplies the channels of expression, still has areas to explore.
“When I arrived at Grasset, I told them: consider me as an author. Not as the rapper who writes novels.”
