Faye's Jacaranda Explores Forgiveness After Rwanda
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- Gaël Faye publishes his second novel Jacaranda, following 2016 debut Small Country, tackling the Rwanda genocide and its generational ripples.
- The novel opens in summer 1994 with 12-year-old Milan in Versailles; his mother Venancia, a Rwandan émigré who built a clothing boutique, withholds why she fled to Europe.
- Milan's 'cousin' Claude arrives at summer's end terribly injured by a machete, is nursed back to health in France, then disappears as abruptly as he came.
- Part two jumps to 1998, when 16-year-old Milan travels to Rwanda and meets Eusébie, a Tutsi genocide survivor turned justice campaigner, who becomes an alternative mother figure.
- Through Claude, Milan meets Sartre, who sheltered dozens of Tutsi orphans during the violence at Le Palais and became their Fagin-like guardian with an extensive library of books and music.
- The book's most painful chapters depict the gacaca courts — mass open-air hearings that ran until 2012, gathering testimonies across the victim-perpetrator divide.
- Faye frames the novel around a chain of divides — victim/perpetrator, Tutsi/Hutu, parent/child, black/white, Europe/Africa — and asks where forgiveness can possibly stand.
Why it matters: For readers of post-genocide literature, Faye cements his reputation with a structurally bold follow-up to *Small Country*, using one Franco-Rwandan family to test whether forgiveness has any ceiling when the violence spans a continent and several generations. Grounding the moral inquiry in the real gacaca-court process, which ran until 2012, gives the abstract questions a specific, documented reckoning mechanism to push against.
