Gael Fay. “My children live in a post-ethnic Rwanda where we no longer define ourselves in terms of race.”

After the incredible success of small country Goncourt des Licens has been adapted for film, in comics and translated everywhere, Gael Fay confronts her relationship with Rwanda. Jacaranda. The history of Milan, a mixed race seeking its Rwandan part, is the fruit of victory over itself; “At first I told myself that I would never succeed, that this story was too complicated, too heavy, that it messed up a lot in me. Especially since I wanted a short book that would deal with issues of transmission and connection between people and generations, as well as reconstruction, justice, trauma…” A successful bet with this novel, whose gentle tone only emphasizes the horror of the genocide and the hardships that followed.

Madame Figaro. – Why were you deployed? Jacaranda for so many generations?
Gael Fay. – Because I was lucky enough to know my great-grandmother, the equivalent of Rosalie in the novel, who lived in pre-ethnic Rwanda, while my children live in post-ethnic Rwanda, where we no longer define ourselves. race These two generations were not shaped by race, unlike my grandmother and mother, and mine. I wanted to create a dialogue between these characters, each of whom is at one end, with young Stella, who recorded Rosalie’s memories and restored them. Between them we have this madness of racialization of society. Tutsi and Hutu originally assigned social status depending on whether you owned cattle or cultivated land, and these changed identities; Hutu. Siblings included both Hutu and Tutsi. And then, we racialized it all, measured foreheads, noses…

You also remember that the issue of ethnic groups is linked to colonial occupation…
Belgium and the Catholic Church introduced the idea of ​​racial hierarchy, 19th century theories;^e were set in Rwanda at the beginning of racism in the 19th century. Suddenly, we established that some were “genuine” inhabitants and others came from elsewhere, and we linked patterns of thought and behavior to racial phenotypes. The Tutsis would be like that, and the Hutus would be like this… The whole structure of the state had planned the genocide, with the army created years ago, militias, lists of Tutsis prepared for a long time, Radio and Television. Mille Collines, which denounced where the Tutsis were, as well as the centers where they were told to gather, to stay there: in schools, in churches. Murambi, book of bones, Boubacar by Boris Diop thus recalls this technical school where fifty thousand people were killed in one night. The ideology was the mind matrix of a state that used all means to exterminate the Tutsi, not because of what they thought or did, but because of what they were. One million people were killed in three months, making it the fastest genocide in history.

Jacaranda deals with later You give voice to the survivors, like Milan’s friend and relative Claude, who faces his executioners on trial…
I wanted to reflect the difficulty of living together. Claude says that the killers were not strangers, but neighbors, friends, relatives. And it is with them that we will have to survive and reorganize… The process gakaka The People’s Courts also seem to me to be a unique solution that Rwanda was able to create to allow people to express themselves and escape the cycle of impunity. Before that, we had never condemned anyone in Rwanda. Killing Tutsis was like cutting grass. it had no effect. These courts gave an opportunity to restore the victims, to say: you exist, you are important for the nation. Rwanda is as big as Brittany and between 2005 and 2012 there were two million trials. As we traveled around Rwanda at that time, we saw people gathered in clearings, forest edges, village squares, and justice being done. in the very places where the pogroms took place…

Eusebi speaks at the commemoration…
Every year we went to the April 7 commemorations here in Paris where the Rwandan community gathered. At the age of 15, I attended this ritual of testimony for the first time, with survivors who told about life before, discrimination already present, at school or at work, and then the turn of the genocide… I was asked to sing at the stadium in Kigali on Memorial Day 2014, and because I had already seen people cry and leave the room in Paris, so I thought I knew what to expect. Except that it was a stadium of 30,000 people and hundreds of people experiencing traumatic crises, survivors of pogroms… It was as if the body of society, which had been lying all year, was convulsing and tearing the mask.

THE: gakaka these people’s courts gave an opportunity to restore the victims, to say. “You are, you are important to the nation.”

Gael Fay

What does this tree, the jacaranda, represent in your eyes?
It symbolizes the history of the family, and it is also a landmark for Stella. He is a link, a root. 70% of Rwandans were born after the genocide and are under 30 years old. However, there is a breakdown in transmission, because there is a lot of silence in the families, because the weight of the genocide covers everything, but also because the country is developing at an incredible speed, which, moreover, corresponds to the general norms, except: It is this youth looking for roots in Rwanda. However, the obsession with construction, consumerism, and progress with a capital letter “P” uproots everything and cares for nothing, damages the sensitive and the poet. Interviewing young people for writing, I noticed that they feel this discomfort, but do not express it in words. Projecting ourselves into the future, we forget that human beings need this poetic element that is never present in political discourse. When the jacaranda is uprooted, Stella is compensated and ends up in a mental hospital with the whole cesspool of society; this “night boat” is the hidden face of what we call the “Rwanda Miracle”. I wanted to appeal to this new generation, to say that we also listen to them, that their suffering is not legitimate because they did not live through the genocide. They should not feel oppressed or allowed to express them out of modesty or politeness.