Small Country by Gaël Faye – Highly recommended
Small Country by Gaël Faye (2016) Original French title: Petit Pays.
| J’ai beau chercher, je ne me souviens pas du moment où l’on s’est mis à penser différemment. A considérer que, dorénavant, il y aurait nous d’un côté et, de l’autre, des ennemis comme Francis. J’ai beau retourner mes souvenirs dans tous les sens, je ne parviens pas à me rappeler clairement l’instant où nous avons décidé de ne plus nous contenter de partager le peu que nous avions et de cesser d’avoir confiance, de voir l’autre comme un danger, de créer cette frontière invisible avec le monde extérieur en faisant de notre quartier et de notre impasse un enclos.
Je me demande encore quand les copains et moi, nous avons commencé à avoir peur. |
Despite my best efforts, I can’t remember when we started to think differently. To consider that from now on, we would be on one side and on the other side would be enemies like Francis. I keep hunting high and low in my memories, I can’t remember clearly the moment when we decided to be no longer content to share the few things we had, when we stopped trusting each other and started seeing the other as a threat or when we created this invisible border with the outside world transforming our cul-de-sac and our neighborhood into a paddock
I still wonder when my friends and I started to be afraid. |
I have read Small Country by Gaël Faye in *embarrassed cough* June. This billet is beyond late and the temptation to just let it go and not write about this novel was strong. But Small Country deserves better than my laziness and most of all, it deserves to be talked about and widely read.
The narrator of the earlier quote is Gabriel. Now an adult, he recollects his childhood in Burundi and how his life was turned upside down in 1993 by the civil war between Hutus and Tutsis, resulting in mass killings of Tutsis.
For Gabriel, two major events happened at the same time, shattering his innocence and putting an end to his carefree childhood. First, his parents separated. His father is French and his mother Rwandan. They were probably an ill-matched couple and their love story ended with a separation. Then History in-the-making came around the corner and trampled everything with its dirty boots.
Now living in France, Gabriel tells us about his childhood, his last months in Burundi and the coming of the civil war. He resurrects for us his games with his friends, his relationship with his sister Ana, a visit to relatives in Rwanda and he tries to picture the atmosphere of these terrible times where everyone had to pick a side. His mother is from Rwanda and she’s a refugee in Burundi. Her family is still in Rwanda and the ethnic cleansing in Rwanda happened at the same time as the civil war in Burundi. Gabriel’s family is doubly concerned albeit safer than the average Burundian thanks to his father being French.
Adult Gabriel realized that he has gaps in his memories, that he blocked out the terrible three months of the ethnic cleansing:
|
Au Rwanda, cette chose qui n’était pas la guerre dura trois longs mois. Je ne me souviens plus de ce que nous avons fait pendant cette période. Je ne me souviens ni de l’école, ni des copains, ni de notre quotidien. A la maison, nous étions de nouveau tous les quatre, mais un immense trou noir nous a engloutis, nous et notre mémoire. D’avril à juillet 1994, nous avons vécu le génocide qui se perpétrait au Rwanda à distance, entre quatre murs, à côté d’un téléphone et d’un poste de radio. |
In Rwanda, this thing that was not a war lasted three months. I don’t remember what we did during that time. I don’t remember about school, my friends or our quotidian. At home, we were four again [his mother has come back, due to the events] but a huge black hole has swallowed us. Us and our memory. From April to July 1994, we have lived through the ongoing genocide in Rwanda from afar, between four walls, beside a telephone and a radio set. |
He has the memories of a child and what helped him through these terrible times was their neighbor’s library. She started to lend him books and he used them as an escaping device, a way to forget his daily life.
| Grâce à mes lectures, j’avais aboli les limites de l’impasse, je respirais à nouveau, le monde s’étendait plus loin, au-delà des clôtures qui nous recroquevillaient sur nous-mêmes et sur nos peurs. | Thanks to my readings, I had knocked down the limits of our cul-de-sac. I could breathe again. The world went beyond the fences that had us curled up with our fears. |
Literature as a safe haven…
Despite the horrifying context, Small Country is not bleak because Gaël Faye describes the life in the cul-de-sac, the neighbours, the parties and the games with his friends. He takes us with him to his childhood’s world and evokes the smells, the food, the fruits and the rhythm of everyday life.
| Rien n’est plus doux que ce moment où le soleil décline derrière la crête des montagnes. Le crépuscule apporte la fraîcheur du soir et des lumières chaudes qui évoluent à chaque minute. A cette heure-ci, le rythme change. Les gens rentrent tranquillement du travail, les gardiens de nuit prennent leur service, les voisins s’installent devant leur portail. C’est le silence avant l’arrivée des crapauds et des criquets. Souvent le moment idéal pour une partie de football, pour s’asseoir avec un ami sur le muret au-dessus du caniveau, écouter la radio l’oreille collée au poste ou rendre visite à un voisin. | Nothing is sweeter than this moment when the sun sets behind the mountains. Twilight brings coolness and warm lights change from one minute to the next. At this hour, the rhythm of life changes. People quietly come back from work, night watchmen start their shifts, neighbors settle in front of their houses. It’s the silent moment before the toads and crickets arrive. Often, it’s the ideal moment for a football game, to sit with a friend on the low wall above the gutter, to listen to music with your ear glued to the radio set or to visit a neighbor. |
He shows us the beauty of Burundi and the happy memories. It’s told from the view point of a child who doesn’t quite grasp the madness of the adults and the complexity of racial feuds.
Gaël Faye is a poet, a hip-hop and rap singer and a writer. Small Country is his debut novel and it won the Prix Goncourt des Lycéens, the Goncourt given by high school students and it’s well-deserved.
Gaël Faye fled from Rwanda with his family when he was 13 and Small Country comes from his own experience, which increases the emotional bond the reader forms with Gabriel.
Highly recommended.
PS: The clumsy translations are all mine.
Book Around the Corner 
I really want to read this one and your review tempts me even more.
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It’s a quick read and it’s an important read.
You’ll like it, I’m almost sure of it.
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Peut-être parce qu’il est immigré et qu’il écrit dans un langage simple, j’ai découvert que je pouvais lire les extraits français que vous avez ici, alors j’ai commandé l’édition française …
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Il n’est pas immigré, son père est français et le français est sa langue maternelle.
Je pense que cela paraît simple parce que le narrateur est un enfant.
C’est un très beau livre.
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Est-ce que tu as lu Inyenzi ou les cafards (Cockroaches) par Scholastique Mukasonga? C’est aussi un livre en français qui concerne Rwanda. (https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/02/16/cockroaches-by-scholastique-mukasonga-translated-by-jordan-stump-bookreview/)
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Non, je n’ai pas lu ce livre et je n’en ai pas entendu parler. Je vais chercher ça.
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Le Kindle!~
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It’s difficult to ascribe laziness to work done (or not done) voluntarily and for free. We readers appreciate your diligence. I’m wondering if the author’s little corner of comfort is itself a comment about the horrors around him, or just that some life still goes on. We are so remote from wars over here that they are hard to imagine. The closest we get, second-hand, is to immigrants and refugees, though truck drivers don’t meet many of those.
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Well, if Lisa reads this book, the time I spent writing my billet was worth it.
He brings back to life Burundi as it was before the war, before the horror and before his life fell apart.
It’s also a good way to show another side of African countries.
And yes, I always wonder how people live through wars, how impossible it is for us to imagine everyday life in wartime.
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Je lis un peu plus de littérature francaise et/ou francophone ces jours-ci et celui-ci fait partie de ceux que je voudrais découvrir. Ton billet m’en donne encore plus envie.
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C’est vraiment un joli livre, difficile à lire parfois parce qu’il est intolérable de savoir que c’est une histoire vraie et qu’on aimerait qu’aucun enfant, nulle part, n’ait à vivre des horreurs pareilles.
Mais c’est aussi une belle description de la vie au Burundi, avant le cauchemar.
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I couldn’t wait for it to come out in English so I read it in French and thought it was excellent, deserving of the prize and recognition.
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It’s excellent and I agree with you, it deserved its price and all the publicity around it.
PS : Something tells me you’d like The Tin Flute by Gabrielle Roy.
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Oh, thanks for the recommendation, I’ll look that one up!
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This sounds really powerful Emma, thank you for alerting me to it. I’m so pleased it’s available in translation too! I read a review on Ali’s blog today with a child narrator describing the lead-up to war. There’s something so effective about a child’s perspective conveying the impact of such terrible world events.
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It’s a short and powerful book, with the child perspective and the knowledge that it’s autobiographical.
It has been made into a film too and it’s worth watching.
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