As I explained in my last post, the second historical moment in my project is the Genocide against the Tutsi, which took place in Rwanda in 1994. Questions of resilience, recovery, healing and reconciliation affect the lived reality of many Rwandans to this day, particularly in cross-generational relationships. Fiction stands as one interesting access point for exploring these relationships and questions, and the 2016 prize-winning novel Petit Pays has provided new insights into what ‘resilience’ or débrouillardise might look like for a child growing up alongside the genocide.

Petit Pays, by Gaël Faye, has received critical acclaim for its lyrical depiction of a childhood universe set alongside the violence of Burundi’s civil war and the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda.

It tells the childhood story of Gabriel (or Gaby) as he comes of age in Burundi. We are given a picture of his everyday life, and gradually the disruption and destruction of various forms of violence, both at a domestic and broader regional level.

A number of critics who’ve examined Petit Pays have claimed the story is about a ‘paradis perdu’ or lost paradise where the perfect innocence of childhood is interrupted by the violence of war and genocide. I disagree with these readings, and find that instead the text shows a far more complex, ambivalent, and therefore more interesting experience of childhood. The protagonist, Gaby, gets involved in all kinds of scuffles, but what the author really brings to fore is the number of small-scale moral dilemmas he faces.

I write about Faye’s presentation of a child as an ‘implicated subject’, using a term proposed by Michael Rothberg in his 2019 work The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. With ‘implicated subject’, Rothberg provides an umbrella category for those who participate in injustice, but in indirect ways. My previous research into the Genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda has focused on the stories of adults who lived through it, so considering this figure of Gaby (as a child protagonist who is entangled in all kinds of systems of privilege and power) has highlighted the need for vocabularies of resilience to capture a broader range of subjects. It is the complex positioning of being ‘alongside’ that really came to the fore in my work on this novel: in a bordering country, excluded from adult conversation, dabbling in violence, afflicted by distress. My work continues to examine what débrouillardise looks like in this scenario: moving beyond the assumptions of rule-abiding subjects within resilience discourse.

I spoke about this text in 2020 as part of a research workshop organised by Pierre-Philippe Fraiture. The workshop was titled ‘Central Africa and Belgium: Empire and Postcolonial Resonance’. I now have a book chapter awaiting publication in Central Africa and Belgium: Empire and Postcolonial Resonance (University of Leuven Press). My chapter is titled ‘Récit d’enfance, récit de distance. Gaby as implicated subject in Gaël Faye’s Petit Pays’.