2024 Book Review #6: Petit Pays by Gael Faye

Petit Pays by Gael Faye is heartbreaking but essential reading.

It’s been on my to read list for a while now, and while it tells of the sew saw horrors in Rwanda and Burundi in the 1990s through the experiences of a child growing up too quickly, it made me think of the lost innocence of children currently in the Gaza Strip, Ukraine, Yemen, Sudan, the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, the Sahel and other places ravaged by violence.

Here the words Hutu and Tutsi are only reintroduced two thirds of the way through, indicating that this built in hate comes from adults, while the main character also has to confront discrimination from being half French and half African, and no longer just identified as a child.

An idyllic, carefree pre-adolescent life in a comfortable neighborhood of Bujumbura in a metaphorical cul-de-sac disintegrates as does his family and friend group as a “little country” is put in the blender of the horrors of humanity.

His Rwandan mother lives in Burundi with his entrepreneurial French dad, before separating and going back to her native country and the camps of the Democratic Republic of Congo just after the genocide, in a harrowing search for her lost relatives.

History is witnessed here at the multi ethnic, multi class, multi national cosmopolitan street corner level, through the sensibilities of a growing boy who finds himself to be more of a reader than a warrior, thanks to an old Greek woman’s collection of books.

He learns that opera music only comes on state radio when there’s been a coup. He’s perplexed at how another rich white expat woman cares only about her horse who runs away during upheavals as a recurring symbol for the inability to ever flee.

Whatever the tragedy, there is always this root of humanity saving some of us, which Faye, also an accomplished rapper, conveys admirably through poetic punch lines, whimsical anecdotes, asymmetrical family relationships, the meaning of stolen mangoes and finding refuge in words to document a brutalized generation.

The book is available in English as Small Country, but I read it in French, bringing me back to my own days in mid 2000s civil war torn Ivory Coast, on the western side of Africa, where authorities in the commercial capital listed foreign journalists among its enemies, and several of my acquaintances were killed or disappeared, so-called patriots and rival rebels from neighboring countries manned roadblocks in different parts of the country, blood diamond conflicts from Liberia and Sierra Leone spilled over, dividing lines were kept by foreign soldiers, and ethnicities of each became intricate topics, while we all lived in daily fear of the next government attack, French intervention, protest crackdown or rebel incursion.