Little Country by Gaël Faye transposed into a graphic novel to further go beyond the boundaries of the novel

Small country has grown again: a story of a childhood impacted by the Rwandan genocide and the war in Burundi, Gaël Faye's best-selling novel is given new life in a poignant comic strip, which appears on Friday.

After having been brought to the screen and on the boards, it is now in the boxes of a graphic novel that the life of young Gabriel, the author's alter ego, unfolds. His story, for those who do not yet know it, is that of a boy in Burundi on the edge of the precipice. In 1992, the Great Lakes country was about to fall into a bloody civil war, while the massacre of the Tutsis was being planned in neighboring Rwanda.

Born to a French father and a Rwandan mother, like Faye himself, Gabriel grew up in Bujumbura, surrounded by this background noise of hatred that he cannot explain and which adults refuse to talk about. “Parents often think that by saying nothing, we protect the children, but that is false,” says Gaël Faye, met with his two co-authors, Marzena Sowa (screenplay) and Sylvain Savoia (drawing), in the offices of the Dupuis editions.

Gaël Faye knows what he is talking about. Like his young hero, the novelist and singer grew up in exile in Burundi in what he calls a “family of silence”. In 1995, at the age of 13, he had to flee the country, a year after the Tutsi genocide which left 800,000 dead and whose thirtieth anniversary has just been commemorated in Kigali. “It’s a coincidence of timing but it’s a good thing. This story must not simply be told through political discourse but also through fiction, so that we can enter it through a more sensitive door,” analyzes the writer, based in Rwanda where he wrote his next novel.

It is also thanks to a work of fiction, the play Rwanda 94 which he saw in 2000, that Gaël Faye “understood the genocide”. “Coming out of there, everything dawned on me. I understood the history of my family, why they had gone into exile,” he says. This piece by the Belgian collective Groupov also forged his conviction that the story around the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups was part of “racist theses from the 19th century”. “Knowledge of our history has been taken away from us,” he maintains.

Adapting such a personal story into comics was no easy task. The Franco-Polish Marzena Sowa devoted a year and a half to it, rereading the novel “at least twenty times”, including in its Polish translation, to “dissect” each passage and choose those which she would have to do without to construct a story. chart. “It was very intimidating,” she confides, before adding that she was helped by her own story. Born in Poland in 1979, behind the Iron Curtain, she grew up in the midst of the rise of the Solidarity union and the anti-Soviet protest. She also experienced silences and a family life troubled by politics, which she also chronicled in the graphic novel Marzi. “I felt all this while reading Small Country, even if it’s another culture, another country. There is this universality,” confides the adapter.

The designer's task was not any easier. If the comic focuses on the sometimes carefree life of Gabriel, Sylvain Savoia has devoted a few chilling panels to the massacres in Rwanda and Burundi, to “make us feel the terror that arises in everyday life”. “That’s the big question that arose for me: how to represent what is unbearable?”, he recalls. To ignore it would have been, for him, unthinkable. “We have to show it so as not to give food to the deniers.”

In fact, thirty years later, the memory of the genocide remains vivid, particularly in France where the country's role at the time of the massacres is the subject of an examination of conscience peppered with imbroglios. In the latest example, the French presidency circulated a statement according to which Paris “could have stopped the genocide” but Emmanuel Macron then refused to endorse it. “This story continues and will not stop soon,” predicts Gaël Faye, noting that many of the actors in the genocide are still alive. “Everyone walks on eggshells.”