Gaël Faye’s novel, Renaudot Prize 2024, traces the history of Rwanda for those who cannot

Books – Write for the dead and not forget. Also write for the living whom the unspeakable horror has cut into silence. Gaël Faye won the Renaudot prize this Monday, November 4 for his second novel Jacaranda published this summer by Editions Grasset. Confirmation of success for the Franco-Rwandan writer, also rapper, eight years later Small Country and his Goncourt prize for high school students.

In his first novel in 2016, Gaël Faye took readers to Burundi in 1993. He recounted the civil war in his native country then the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda through the eyes of a young boy, forced into exile. Just like Gabriel in Small Countryand like the author himself, the narrator of JacarandaMilan, was born to a Rwandan mother and a French father.

But the resemblance ends there. Because the massacres that stopped Gabriel’s childhood in their tracks, Milan only saw them through a TV screen. Gaël Faye this time takes as narrator a dual national who has only known France and is unaware of half of his origins.

“He is ignorant of his history. And when conflicts arise, we often confuse ignorance with indifference”says Gaël Faye in a video for Grasset. But Milan wants to understand, despite his comfortable life in Versailles and his mother’s silence about his past.

Jacaranda, or Rwanda through the ages

Jacaranda follows his 26-year quest, searching for his roots and discovering a country larger than the darkest three months of his past. As the narrator grows up, he traces the history of Rwanda through five generations of characters.

There is the young Stella, a Rwandan born after the genocide, whom he knew as a baby and who we see reaching adolescence. Claude, who is Milan’s age but has a diametrically opposed life because he lost his entire family in 1964 and must build his life as a young adult in a country in tatters. Aunt Eusébie, a character already present in Small Countrywho chose to stay in Rwanda after the murder of her four children. And Eusébie’s grandmother, Rosalie, a rare witness to the last sovereigns and the court of Nyanza, who knew the country before the invention of “ethnic” identity cards by the Belgian settlers.

This multigenerational story reminds us that the genocide of the Tutsis is not a parenthesis frozen between April 7 and July 17, 1994. For Gaël Faye, “it was also a way of going back to the source of the racialization of the Rwandan people, with the most dramatic consequence possible.” Jacarandawhose final pages take place in 2020, also looks towards the after. The writer questions the relationship of Rwandan youth to the annual commemorations which last a month, shows the rapid modernization of Kigali and recalls the transitional justice role of gacaca, these village courts which judged the executioners of the Tutsis.

The weight of silence

Over the decades, Milan takes root in this country which is also his own, like the jacarandas, these trees with purple foliage which give their name to the novel. But if Gaël Faye delicately recounts a country which is being rebuilt thanks to human ties, Jacaranda “is also the story of silence in families, in the shadow of which we grow up”.

The narrator’s mother prefers to remain silent rather than relive her traumas by talking about them. It is the weight of his silence that pushes Milan to live in Rwanda. An autobiographical element of the book: “Going to live in Rwanda meant reconnecting with my mother’s family history, part of which was hidden from me. […] I felt confronted with silence”declared Gaël Faye in an interview with Weekly Books last July.

“Jacaranda is an attempt to make my last thirty years coherent with Rwanda”he explains, admitting that he doesn’t even know if his mother read Small country: “She never spoke to me about it”. Aware of the importance of speech, Gaël Faye writes for himself and for those who cannot, or no longer can. It describes the realities of post-traumatic stress for survivors and their descendants: the avoidance syndrome which locks us into silence but also depressive episodes and reliving syndromes.

“This is not a novel about genocide. It’s a novel about the repercussions of extreme violence, on a human scale.”he notes to Grasset. The author insists: this is not a “Rwandan history” but of a “universal history”. Jacaranda resonates all the more strongly in light of other recent tragedies, from Gaza to Nagorno-Karabakh. The repercussions of this extreme violence are still to come. Gaël Faye’s pen carries the hope of being able, one day, to rebuild oneself.

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