“I was born with this story. It ran in my blood. I belonged to it.”
Current installment of Tommi Reads the World – we’re still in the Bs.
Country: Burundi
Title: Small Country
Author: Gaël Faye
Language: French
Translator: Sarah Ardizzone
Publisher: Éditions Grasset 2016; English translation published by Hogarth 2018
Bordering Rwanda, Burundi is a small African country embroiled in political unrest and violence. A decade-long civil war began in 1993 when the country’s first democratically elected president (Hutu) was assassinated by Tutsi opposition in the military. The conflicts between the two ethnic groups, Hutu and Tutsi, had long been exploited by the western world, and ultimately came to a head in the 1990s. This is the country Gaël Faye was born to in 1982, and the country he had to flee at age 13.
Small Country is Faye’s story of ten-year-old Gabriel, whose childhood is stolen when the country he loves erupts into chaos; and while short, it is mighty. Gabriel’s mother is from Rwanda, having fled genocide and escaping to Burundi. Gabriel’s father is a white Frenchman, clinging to the privileges remaining from Belgium’s colonial rule. First, Gabriel’s home life is upended when his parents separate. Then his country weeps and bleeds as his childhood is taken in the time it takes to spark a flame.
Faye has ripped his chest open to show us how he bleeds, to highlight the nervous condition of the exiled, to scream of a lost childhood, a lost country, and the lost lives. This novel positively blew me away; it’s likely my favorite thus far in my “Tommi Reads the World” list.
Read this book.
A Girl Named Tommi 