“I write to stop time”

Eight years after your first novel, inspired by your childhood in Burundi, you published Jacaranda, on Rwanda. How did this second book come about?

In Small Country, I was talking about the time before, the time of childhood paradise, in the exuberant nature of Burundi where I grew up, before the country sank into civil war in 1993*, and neighboring Rwanda was buried under the genocide of the Tutsis from April to July 1994. In Jacaranda, I describe the aftermath: how human beings live together after this extreme violence. Two characters from Small Country still lived in me: Rosalie, the great-grandmother who knows the history of before colonization, and Aunt Eusébie. They pass from one story to another, like a wink, like the stories of Rwanda and Burundi fit together while remaining independent.

Do you live in Rwanda yourself?

Yes, in Kigali, the capital, since 2015, with my Franco-Rwandan wife and my two daughters. They go to school in uniform, sing the national anthem, take classes in French, English and Kinyarwanda, dance Rwandan dances… Rwanda is experiencing a demographic boom: three-quarters of the population was born after the genocide, which has just celebrated its 30th anniversary. Young people represent the reality and the future of the country, but they are caught in a terrible tension. Full of vitality, they want to build. But at the same time, they have to face the painful memory of the genocide and the silence that reigns in families. This gives rise to dysfunctions and mental illnesses in them, as in my young heroine, Stella.

Is the country not doing everything it can to move forward without forgetting?

Collective memory is revived. But in the intimate setting, the transmission does not pass. In my novel, the energetic aunt Eusébie, mother of Stella, involved in politics, and Venancia, mother of Milan, the Franco-Rwandan teenager, who have both experienced horrors, are silent. This silence preserves the survivors who, without it, would fall into abysses from which they would not be sure to return. Because they have seen their family, their children, disappear. But paradoxically, it makes young people insecure. Some children and adolescents present post-traumatic symptoms of events they have never experienced. The unconscious is the strongest.

Did your own mother tell you her story?

She had the same journey as Aunt Eusébie, my character… But we never really had a discussion about it. This silence weighs on me, but I respect it. And I am condemned to make hypotheses. Writing, creating, is my way of saying that I don’t understand.

You are a novelist, songwriter and rapper. How did your vocation as an artist come about?

I am the son of a Rwandan mother and a French father. My mother had taken refuge in Burundi with her family after the 1962 massacres against the Tutsis. My father was cycling around the world, where he met my mother by chance.

As a child, I was not particularly drawn to reading or writing. But my aunt, on the French side, had subscribed me to a collection of children’s books. The packages, with the smell of new books, with stories of my age, enchanted me.

My artistic streak must come from my father. Alongside his plumbing business in Bujumbura (the economic capital of Burundi, editor’s note), he wrote boulevard plays, directed them, and performed in them. And I took part! He also had a comedy show on television, where we performed sketches. I lived my childhood in total carefreeness, until the war caught up with me.

At the age of 13, you left Burundi for France. How did you experience this exile?

In 1995, Western nationals were murdered in Burundi and my French school closed. My friends’ parents returned to France. My father didn’t want to leave, but I did, because I was terrified of the war – my parents had divorced when I was 4 and I was living with him. I joined my mother, with my younger sister, in a 50 square meter apartment in Versailles-Chantier.

Arriving in France is a sensory shock. In Bujumbura, I lived in a large house with high ceilings and walked barefoot, close to nature, in the heat, with full awareness of my body. There, I find cramped conditions, cold, and solitude.

” My life is commuter trains/Grey houses, tagged walls, rainy skies »you sing in your song Taxiphone. Was that your feeling?

Yes! At that time, I leave in the morning at night, I come back in the evening at night. I have no friends. I take refuge in the neighborhood libraries to read: Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, Hemingway, Camus. I write a lot, poems. It’s almost therapeutic, I write to stop time, because everything goes by too quickly, everything keeps disappearing. I send letters, I call my father in Burundi, my family in Rwanda, my friends, whom I join for the holidays.

Then, in high school, I went to a community center where young people did rap, hip-hop. I rapped my lyrics. After studying finance and three years in the City of London, I returned to France, found a musician and we launched our first group: Milk Coffee and Sugar. In 2011, we were a “revelation” at the Printemps de Bourges. And in 2013, I released my first solo album.

Other albums come, then Small Country, and now Jacaranda. How do you work?

I am an observer: I draw on reality to write my fiction. The character of Rosalie, for example, comes from a great-grandmother I knew in Bujumbura, who lived through the pre-colonial period. She witnessed the arrival of the Belgians in 1916. She saw how they arbitrarily decided to separate the population into two: the Hutus, farmers, and the Tutsis, breeders, on whom they relied to run the country.

Then after the Second World War, when the Tutsis, educated – because they formed the elite – wanted independence, the Belgians changed alliances, relying on the Hutus, encouraging hatred of the “dominants”. Hence the anti-Tutsi pogroms of 1959, 1962, 1973… The granny of Butare, another character in my novel, owes a lot to my own grandmother. I am attentive to the whole society around me, to the youth, I take notes, all the time.

What is the situation in Rwanda today?

The country wants to be a Start-up Nation, modern, clean. Highways and housing developments are coming out at full speed. The regime encourages the tertiary sector, digital technology, tourism. Because not everyone can live from subsistence farming, there is not enough land for everyone – the density per square kilometer is one of the highest in Africa. The desire to improve people’s lives is palpable.

Rwanda remains a poor country, but we are not in poverty. Society functions, security is assured, we have access to care, even if the hospitals lack resources. There is a crazy energy. But everywhere there are people underground, everywhere we find mass graves: each time a prisoner leaves prison and reveals the locations. In a territory as big as Brittany, a million Tutsis were massacred, especially women and children.

” If there is no sanctuary on earth, is there one elsewhere? » you were wondering in Small Country… Are you a believer?

I am Catholic. My maternal grandmother, who was very pious, took me to church on Sundays and made me take catechism. However, what I learned about the genocide made me uncomfortable with the institution. While during previous pogroms, churches had been a refuge for Tutsis, here they became death traps. Many men of God participated in the massacres. All moral values ​​were swallowed up. I have yet to meet a man or woman of God who can restore my confidence in the institution. But that has not altered my faith.

* In 1993, Burundi plunged into a civil war between Hutus and Tutsis, which left 300,000 dead. A peace agreement was signed in May 2005.