We Are All Rwandans

 Gael Fay was born in the African country of Burundi, his father was French and his mother was a refugee from neighboring Rwanda. Fi is a famous rap musician who released his debut novel "Little Country" in 2016, which received a number of prestigious awards, in particular the Goncourt Lyceum Prize. The book was published in Russian by Corpus. In an interview with Gorky, Fi talks about his book, genocide and Rwanda.

- The first question you are probably asked by everyone: how autobiographical is your book? Both you and the narrator of your book were born in Burundi, both have a French father and a Tutsi mother from Rwanda who fled to a neighboring country from the pogroms.

- I took a lot of my own memories and biography, but I wrote a novel. Yes, we are alike: we lived at the same time, both half Rwandan, half French. But I made up a lot of the characters. For example, the father of the protagonist is not my father.

- The father in the book is a Frenchman who came to Africa to earn money, married an African girl and now believes that everyone owes him everything. And he's a racist in disguise.

- Thank God, my father is a completely different person. But yes, you're right, such characters exist and they are racist. There are two kinds of racism: one that wants good and one that wants bad. You can say "I hate blacks" or you can say "I love blacks". But this is the same racism, only supposedly with good intentions. The first will be more honest. Strange as it may seem, the former are somewhat closer to me - like one of my heroes, Jacques, an old Belgian racist. But he really loves Africa, loves the country. When the war began, he did not flee, but stayed with his hired workers, trying to save the economy. And all the idealists, people from the embassy and humanitarian organizations who talked about their love for blacks, as soon as the genocide began, fled the first plane to Europe. But that's not what I wrote my novel about. I wanted to show a world in which people kill each other and children are at the center of this conflict. Children are trying to understand what their origin is and whether it is possible to remain neutral in a situation where everyone demands of you to determine who you are and with whom you are.

- And who are you? French, Tutsi, Burundian, Rwandan?

- I am French, I am Rwandan, I am Burundian. I do not see any distance or contradiction between these three components of mine. I do not want to separate the We Are All Rwandans m in myself. And when they ask me who I am, I answer that I have two children, I write books and songs, I am a husband - that is who I am.

- Yes, but there are situations when you need to decide. If France and Rwanda play, who will you be?

- For the one that will play better. But if there is a war ... I will be for the country on whose side the truth will be. In 1994, the French army fought in Rwanda against the Rwandan Patriotic Front. And the truth was not on the side of the French. The RPF are the children of Rwandan refugees who came to reclaim their country and end the genocide. And the French were allies of the regime, which just staged the genocide. In this case, but only in this case, I am on the side of Rwanda. fr

Historically, Tutsis and Hutus have lived in Rwanda. There were more Hutu, but the Belgian colonial administration staked on the Tutsi. After the declaration of independence, the Hutus came to power, pogroms began, part of the Hutus fled to neighboring Uganda and Burundi. In 1993, Tutsis from the Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded Rwanda. In 1994, the Hutus in power in the country unleashed genocide, killing about a million people. The RPF soon occupied most of the country.

- The protagonist's uncle joined the Rwandan Patriotic Front, returned to Rwanda, found that his relatives had died, and lynched the murderers. For which he was shot by his own superiors.

- This is a story I made up. Although I had uncles and aunts who went to fight in the RPF. And yes, there were many stories when returning people found murdered relatives and began to take revenge. And the RPF handed them over to a tribunal and shot them, because it was necessary to end endless revenge.

- I heard that it is now forbidden to talk about genocide in Rwanda.

- No that's not true. We have a lot of talk about the genocide, every year from April to June there are weeks of remembrance. And on April 7, the next anniversary of the beginning of the genocide, the president always makes a speech. What you can't talk about is

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