After being brought to the screen and on stage, the best-selling novel by the novelist and singer is adapted into a comic strip. Gaël Faye grew up in exile in Burundi in what he calls a “family of silence” In 1995, at the age of 13, he had to flee the country, a year after the genocide of the Tutsis which left 800,000 dead and whose thirtieth anniversary has just been commemorated in Kigali.
Adapting such a personal story into comics was no easy task, says Franco-Polish Marzena Sowa, who re-read the novel “at least twenty times” to “dissect” each passage and choose those which she would have to do without to construct a story. She also experienced family silences and a life troubled by politics, which she also chronicled in the graphic novel. The comic focuses on the sometimes carefree life of young Gabriel, and has devoted a few panels to the massacres in Rwanda.