Cover of ‘Small Country‘ by Gaël Faye. / THE REPUBLIC.
THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / BOOKS DEPT.
A Séance for a Past Self
Cover of ‘Small Country‘ by Gaël Faye. / THE REPUBLIC.
THE MINISTRY OF ARTS / BOOKS DEPT.
A Séance for a Past Self
In November 2023, on a bright sunny afternoon, I visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial. I had understood that the experience would not be an easy one, but I felt that it was necessary that I paid my respect to the thousands of Tutsis who had been subjected to genocide during a dark 100 days in 1994 Rwanda. On my phone, for almost the past month, I’d been scrolling through X (formerly Twitter), heartbroken by the suffering and deaths of Palestinians in Gaza unable to understand how the world was standing by as another genocide was threatening to unfold. I was also at the memorial because of Gaël Faye’s Small Country, a book I’d first read four years before, at a time in my life when I seemed to collect books on civil wars, exile and nostalgia without meaning to. I hadn’t considered how, in the following years, I would muse over the novel and even start following the author’s musical career as a rapper in France. I’ve read it several times since that first reading and with each reading, I find out something new. However, the central question of the novel revolves around exile and memory.
Small Country begins with a prologue. The narrator Gabriel, sometimes called Gaby, is recollecting a childhood memory from when he was almost eleven years old in Burundi in the early 90s. Two pages later, in a different chapter, it cuts to an adult Gaby, on his thirty-third birthday, living just outside of Paris. He has been in exile in France for over 20 years. He says, ‘I am haunted by the idea of returning. Not a day goes by without the country calling to me.’ We see that even though he has lived in France for longer than he was in Burundi, he lives as if in suspension, between the past and his present life. This in-betweenness seems to be a permanent condition, as if it were a terminal illness. Sometimes, his narration in his present life feels as if he is conducting a séance for his past self, an identity and memories he is unable to come to terms with or let go of.
THE ACCIDENTAL WRITER
The author, Faye, was born in August 1982 in Bujumbura, Burundi. His father was French, and his mother was a Rwandese Tutsi. This is the same heritage as the narrator of the book, Gabriel. Faye fled Burundi when he was 13, while Gabriel flees Burundi for France when he is around eleven. I am not pointing out the similarity to argue that they are the same person, but rather to argue that the language of exile in the novel was powerful because the author had experienced the same.
Faye had not intended to write this novel. He was already a musician at the time. It was Catherine Nabokov, well known in French literary circles, who found her teenage son listening to Faye’s music. She thought the lyrics had great narrative potential and so she found his contact details and asked to meet with him. Later, after urging him to write, Faye wrote ten pages of the novel as he felt the form gave him greater freedom as opposed to writing a memoir.
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₦70,000.00 – ₦75,000.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page -
₦70,000.00 – ₦75,000.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
shop the republic
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₦70,000.00 – ₦75,000.00Select options This product has multiple variants. The options may be chosen on the product page
COLONIALISM AND DIVISION
For us to understand why exile is such an integral part of the novel, it is important to understand colonialism and the effect it had on the two main groups in the novel: that is the Tutsi and the Hutus. Before the partitioning of Africa at the Berlin conference in 1884, the Hutu and Tutsi lived mainly in what is now Rwanda and Burundi. These two were not divided into tribes as they shared the same language, religion, and land. The difference between the two was more social. The Hutus formed the peasant class while the Tutsi formed the elite class. About 85 per cent of the population was Hutu, 15 per cent was Tutsi while the Twa were one per cent. At this time however, a Hutu could become a Tutsi if they acquired more wealth and land. They were ruled by a king who was known as Mwami.
The Rwanda and Burundi region, after the arrival of the Europeans was first colonized by the Germans and then, after Germany lost the First World War, was put under Belgian trusteeship. The Belgian administration through an official census of 1933-1934 divided who was Tutsi and Hutu through three sources of information: number of cows owned, physical differences and information from the church. They defined the Tutsis as a Hamitic race and the Hutus as Bantus. These divisions became permanent and legal. In addition, the Belgians favoured the Tutsi minority and accorded them privileges over the Hutu, in a divide and rule style of administration. This calls to mind Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, where he says, ‘by its very nature colonialism is separatist and regionalist. Colonialism does not simply state the existence of tribes; it also reinforces and separates them.’
Yet, in Mahmood Mamdani’s book, When Victims Become Killers, he says, ‘the history of cohabitation and of intermarriages ran for centuries. And while social definitions were clearly cut out, physical definitions were less so.’ Therefore, we see how flawed the Belgians’ method was, how it only served to heighten division. Years later, when the events of Small Country begin in the prologue, the narrator is around eleven years old and the confusion of this division is still evident. We find his father trying to explain to him and his sister, Anna, the different groups in Burundi, where they live, and Rwanda. His father says that the Hutus are the biggest group, and they are short with wide noses; the Tutsis are tall and skinny with long noses and ‘one can never tell what is going on in their heads,’ and finally about the Twa who he says are too few they hardly count. Despite the conversation, Gabriel and his sister are left extremely confused, and on the street, they try to guess who is Hutu or Tutsi. When they see a tall and skinny man with a wide nose, they don’t know what to make of it. Yet there is a war starting to break out between these two groups.
Because of the Belgian administration in Rwanda, in 1959, the Hutu majority staged a revolt on the cusp of independence and overthrew the Tutsti monarchy in Rwanda, which was led by King Kigeli V. This was accompanied by a massacre of the Tutsi who went into exile in neighbouring countries in Uganda and Burundi. It was this generation of exiled children who would later become soldiers and return to Rwanda to fight for what they lost.
In the novel, we meet Gabriel’s mother, Yvonne. She is a Rwandese Tutsi who fled into Burundi in 1963. As a refugee, she has been unable to return to Rwanda for years. In one scene when the family visits Bukavu, a border town in Zaire (present-day Congo DRC), Yvonne stares out to a different city on the other side of the lake’s shores in Rwanda, the place she left on a night of massacres when her family home was set ablaze. In a later scene, during an argument with her husband, she says she is a refugee, that her country is Rwanda, and she will always be a refugee in a Burundian’s eye. This is striking as it shows she is yet to belong in Burundi despite having lived there for almost thirty years, even though Burundi itself had a substantial population of Tutsis. Nuruddin Farah captures this experience in a sentence in his book, Yesterday, Tomorrow: Voices from the Somali Diaspora, when he says, ‘My exile got me acquainted with living in the peripheries of societies which I’ve not been a full-fledged member.’
Because she is away from her land, Yvonne is not able to sufficiently pass on her mother tongue to Gabriel as he never learns to speak it. What is lost in exile is not only a homeland, it seems, but the language of that homeland, and in later generations one is no longer able to recognize the language of those who had been exiled.
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POSTCOLONIAL GOVERNMENTS
After independence and with the collapse of the monarchy, Hutus came to power in Rwanda. And in turn this saw several of the Tutsis who had fled into Burundi and Uganda remain there afraid for their lives.
The leadership of these two countries where the Tutsi fled to differed. In Burundi, it was led by a minority Tutsi population who had taken up roles in the military, and yet in the novel we find that the government in Burundi subjected refugees to quotas for foreigners and restricted intakes in schools. Burundi for the most part was led by governments that took power in successive coups. Encapsulating this, a paragraph from the novel reads:
Later on, I discovered it was traditional to play classical music during a military coup. On 28th November 1966, for Michel Micombero’s coup, it was Schubert’s piano sonata No. 21; on 9th November 1976, for Jean Baptiste Bagaza’s coup, it was Beethoven’s 7th symphony; and on 3rd September 1987, for Pierre Buyoya’s coup, it was Chopin’s Bolero in C major.
Lastly the narrator adds, ‘On this day, 21st October 1993, we were treated to Wagner’s Twilight of the Gods.’ What is evident in each coup d’état is the creation of exiles.
The Tutsis who went to Uganda had a different fate, and in turn the children who grew up there formed the Rwandese Patriotic Front (RPF), which would return as an army in the early 90s. This came about largely because of the Ugandan Bush War, which brought Yoweri Museveni into power in Uganda in 1986. In British journalist, Michela Wong’s book, Do Not Disturb, where she analyzes the Paul Kagame regime, Wong asserts that the fiercest fighters who fought for Museveni during the Bush War were Banyarwanda. They had largely been alienated by previous regimes due to their status as exiles. ‘Many had thought themselves an integral part of a society that, it now turned out, no longer wanted them,’ Wong writes. ‘As motivations go, the knowledge that you have nothing to lose probably trumps loyalty to your friends, or even belief in a higher purpose.’ In 1990, the Banyarwanda left Uganda through the South as an army to return to a homeland many of them had only seen as children or had only heard of through stories from their parents. Tensions culminated in 1994, after a plane carrying the Hutu presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, Juvenal Habyarimana and Cyprien Ntaryamira, was mysteriously shot down.
In Small Country, what we find out about exiles is a need to reclaim a homeland, a centre from which one has been violently removed from. The narrator’s uncle, Pacifique, leaves his studies in Burundi at the lycée Saint-Albert to join the RPF. Before he leaves, he rises early to train on the shores of Lake Tanganyika with other Rwandese young men in preparation for battle and a difficult life as RPF soldiers.
This shows there is a difference in how exiles see a place as compared to foreigners in different capacities. For instance, Jacques, a Belgian settler who lives in a house which resembles a Swiss chalet in Zaire, sees himself, and in extension the Belgian administration, as a saviour of Zaire. He says that Zaire hasn’t worked in a long time, that it is a messed-up country. For Michel, the narrator’s father, a French expatriate in Burundi, he sees Burundi as a place where he is privileged and France as a place where he would be a nobody. The well-to-do status of both men could be attributed to colonialism and neo-colonialism, and the advantages it gave to Europeans in Africa.
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THE PAST IS ALWAYS ALIVE
Small Country offers up Gabriel’s exile as something that was inevitable because of the history experienced in Rwanda and Burundi. Yet, how Gabriel experiences exile is very different from how Ana, his younger sister, experiences it. Ana, years later, does not want to ever return to Burundi. Gabriel feels otherwise. In a Literary Hub interview, Faye says,
And then there are people like Gabriel, who live in suspension. What I mean to say is, he arrives in a new place, but he is not really in the new place because his soul is still in the other place. That moves me, this manner of being. People who live in memories.
We see how memories affect the way exile is experienced. Gabriel carries his country with him every single day of his life, even though it is something invisible, like carrying history in the body. He is always in commune with his past and he is unable to let go. I don’t mean letting go of his past in the sense of him forgetting it, but of him being unable to come to terms with it. Viet Thanh Nguyen collates this way of living through an analysis of the effect the Vietnam War had on people. His book, Nothing Ever Dies, begins in sentences which define how Gabriel now lives: ‘This is a book on war, memory and identity,’ Thanh Nguyen writes. ‘It proceeds from the idea that all wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory.’ This is very noticeable in the text from the way the novel is narrated. The sections where he is an eleven-year-old are written in the form of someone looking back, and because of this, Gabriel has an intellectual voice of unexpected proportion for a child narrator. It proceeds that in telling the story this way the narrator wants to justify his actions within a philosophical sense in order to face his guilt and the memories that haunt him.
And what past haunts the narrator? Most of the novel traces his life growing up as an eleven-year-old. Gabriel spends his days with neighbourhood friends, who are his band of brothers. It is an ideal picturesque life in a privileged area of Bujumbura. Despite the separation of his parents early in the novel, Gabriel still appears to have a good childhood, until the history of the conflict between the Hutu and the Tutsi catches up to him. In a scene where he is coming home from swimming with friends in a taxi, the taxi driver suddenly slams the brakes. ‘Shetani! Shetani!’ the driver says, shouting the name of the devil in Swahili, portending the ominous. Gabriel, the narrator, proceeds as follows: ‘Ahead of us, in the darkness, just beyond the beam of headlights, we saw the shadow of a black horse.’ We find out later, in the unravelling of Burundi and Rwanda weeks later, that Gabriel’s mother leaves for Rwanda in search for her sister and is traumatized to the point of madness after she finds her massacred; his father dies in the end; and as for Gabriel, he is forced to set fire to a man tied up in a car.
Exile entails a fracturing of identity. When one leaves their home, their culture, their family and friends so forcefully and violently it leads to a loss of what made them who they were. In the novel, Gabriel and his sister are forced to flee when the war intensifies. Their father registers them for a repatriation plane to France, where they are to stay with a host family. Gabriel does not even have time to say goodbye. By going into exile, he leaves his entire life and even when we meet the narrator 20 years later, he mourns his loss of self as equally as he mourns his loss of innocence. In addition, in France, because of his mixed heritage, he is constantly asked, ‘So, where are you from?’
In evoking the nostalgia of his childhood, Gabriel calls to his past self in order to reconcile with what happened and how it has shaped him to be who he is now, despite the process taking him years. We see the narrator returning in a reflective sense to where he departed from his childhood self.
Perhaps an exile lived in suspension is incomplete without a return to the place one is exiled from. Gabriel returns to his neighbourhood in Bujumbura 20 years later on the pretext of collecting books that were left to him by a neighbour who passed away. When he goes back, he finds Armaud, one of his former childhood friends, and his mother, Maman, who fell mentally ill from the trauma and was thought to be missing. On a deeper level, Gabriel returns to come to terms with himself. He says, ‘I used to think I was exiled from my county. But in retracing the steps of my past, I have understood that I was exiled from my childhood.’ For him, the return home is also a spiritual journey, where his séance for his past self is successful, where he makes peace with the trauma of his childhood and can finally move forward⎈
