The main character of "Little Country" is a French boy Gabriel, who lives in Bujumbura with his father, mother and sister Ana. In fact, Gaby is a Frenchman only according to documents, in fact he is a Mestizo, his mother belongs to the Tutsi people, although most of the inhabitants of Burundi and Rwanda are Hutus.
The boy lives in a privileged area, where mostly French and Belgians live, goes to a private school, and in his spare time hangs out with children from mixed marriages. The end of Gabi's childhood turned out to be associated with terrible events in Burundi and Rwanda: the country that gained independence for a long time and persistently can not decide how it should live on, who will rule it and who will stay in it.
A small country is what remains of the real Burundi in the soul of the already grown-up Gabriel, who chooses the second between his Homeland and peace and security, but wildly misses the first. No matter how unstable the situation in the country is, children are children, and over time, turning into adults, they begin to feel longing for the past, even if this past was drenched in the scarlet blood of their loved ones.
Gael Fai on the pages of his small and autobiographical novel does not just tell another story of the end of childhood, but raises a lot of quite important questions. Some of them are primitive, such as "is it worth fighting just because you have different noses from birth", some have obvious answers that lie in the plane of the topic "war is bad", while others are very complex and ambiguous for me personally: filtering information for children is good or harm?
The rejection of any self-identification is the choice of an intelligent person or a fool who is not able to make a choice? ignoring what is happening around for the sake of your own peace of mind - a way to protect your own mental health or the course of an ostrich hiding its head in the sand stupidly from fear?
His hero is a little Tutsi-Burundian, born as a result of a mixed marriage, for 250 pages he does not just get older, he finally pulls his head out of the sand and watches what he cannot change: the collapse of his family, the destruction of statehood, the death of friends and relatives.
If earlier adults closed themselves in the office and spoke in a whisper, so that God forbid terrible or rude words did not reach the tender ears of their children, now children store grenades in the refrigerator and burn the car together with the passenger in a fit of revenge, all barriers are destroyed, all filters are broken, the war sweeps away everyone in its path, regardless of age and the "nationality" column in the passport: if you are a Tutsi, you will be killed by a Hutu, if a Hutu, you will fall victim to revenge at the hands of Tutsi.
I have already said a thousand times, and I will repeat again, that books in which children are the central characters or narrators are not my topic, they are often too simplified, to primitivism, and any plot slides into a sentimental and instructive plane.
The recently read novel by the Cambodian writer Vad Ratner "In the shadow of the Banyan Tree" is a perfect example of this: although the narrator is already an adult, for some reason she again slips into a simplified child's consciousness, hiding behind the fact that she was seven years old at the time of the events described. In the case of" Little Country".
My worst fears were not confirmed, yes, of course, the novel has thoughts from the category of "thank you, Cap" that often fill anti-war novels, but I still saw an adult who remembers his childhood, and does not immerse himself in it, believing that his reader will automatically descend to the level of twelve-year-olds.
539.731 SRY