A Séance for a Past Self

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 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.

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.