By Jackie McGlone

HOW DIFFICULT is it to kill a man? This is the question people are forever asking French-Rwandan hip-hop star, composer and author Gael[umlaut on e] Faye, whose devastating novel, Small Country, centres on a child’s perspective of the Burundi civil war and the bloodbath of Rwandan genocide that destroyed the idyll of a once-carefree, gloriously mischievous childhood.

An international bestseller, Petit Pays was published in France in 2016, where Faye was awarded the prestigious Prix Goncourt des Lyceens[acute accent first e]. His magnificent debut novel, around which he will take a musical voyage at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, has been sold to more than 30 countries.

Despite having been asked that banal question hundreds of times -- presumably because his 11-year-old protagonist, Gabriel, becomes a participant in the carnage -- Faye’s eyes still widen in disbelief as he tells me that some readers believe fiction is fact. “I say, ‘No, I made it up!’ Yes, my book is based on truths but that is not one of them. I have never killed a guy. Of course some of the material is based on my own life, but it is not autobiographical; it is not a memoir. My own life is much, much more complex than Gabriel’s. To tell things exactly as they happened is not very interesting, because you always want to be too precise.

“When I write, I am looking for freedom -- I do not want to be a prisoner of my own story,” he says softly, when we meet at his British publisher’s London flat, during a brief trip from Paris. He and his family have been living there lately, although their home is in Rwanda.

Has he found freedom? “It takes time -- it is difficult to forget the feeling of fear,” replies Faye, who exudes an almost preternatural calm. He is, I think, the most centred person I have ever interviewed, despite having, like Macbeth, supped full with horrors, seeing neighbour brutally slaying neighbour and losing many family members. As has his French-Rwandan wife, Violaine, a nurse, whom he met at a United Nations International Day of Reflection on the 1994 Genocide of the Tutsis.

The couple are deeply involved in the rights group, Collectif des Parties Civiles pour le Rwanda (CPCR), which aims to prosecute suspected Rwandan perpetrators of the carnage now living in France. So far, three local mayors from Rwanda have been found guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide. “They have been given life sentences. In Paris a new trial is about to commence -- we have to catch these killers.

“Each year on April 7 those who survived commemorate the lost. Like everyone who witnessed the slaughter of 1994, we remain traumatised.” But, he adds, the genocide may have cruelly taken away but it has given. “It wasn’t the happiest way to meet someone and to fall in love... You think you have lost everything but life is stronger than that,” he smiles. “We are blessed.”

He and Violaine have two daughters, Susannah (8) and Louisa (4), and they have built a home in Kigali.

“I never thought I would go back,” he confesses. When he was 13, during the worst of the conflict, his French father, Patrice -- “a complicated man who is in love with Africa and fills his house in Togo with thousands of poisonous reptiles” -- despatched him to Paris, where Faye’s Rwandan mother, Assumpta, has lived since the couple divorced when Faye was three-years-old.

“You see why I can’t write about my life? It is too exotic! My mother has been through so much -- she’s gone from a refugee camp to a flat in Versailles! She lives near a castle, but she will never discuss her life with me. She is traumatised by her own story. ‘We need to move forward,’ is all she says. I lived with her before I went to university in Paris to study finance -- I wanted my independence although I really wanted to read Philosophy. I lived out of a suitcase. For ten years I folded my clothes into it every night, thinking I would go home tomorrow.

“In 1995, I returned to Rwanda briefly -- one year after the genocide. It was like cows,” he says in his beautifully fractured, French-accented English. Cattle in an abattoir? “Yes, a slaughterhouse. You could smell death everywhere. I thought it would be impossible to live there again. Now, my daughters go to school there, they have many friends. They love this small country. For me, it is life.”

Nevertheless, he writes of his anguish in his hugely popular song, Petit Pays, a cry for his beloved country, which gives the title to his novel and which has had almost three million hits on YouTube:

“One bitter evening between suicide and murder/ I scribbled these sentences with the flat end of a felt-tip...” Telling of seeking “some refuge of peace/ When Africa is transformed into a corpse...”

He will perform this rap, among others, including traditional Burundian and Rwandan songs, when he appears in Edinburgh, bringing his remarkable novel to musical life. “It will be an evening of storytelling. My country has a strong oral tradition. When someone died in the family, we would sit around, eat a lot and tell stories. We laughed a lot, too.” (There is much humour in Small Country, particularly a disquisition on the differences between Tutsi and Hutu noses.)

Burundi-born, Faye turns 36 this month and is mega-famous in France, a superstar. He’s tall and handsome, with a fine Tutsi nose and caramel-coloured skin. Friends who have seen him perform in Paris report that he’s electrifying on stage and the Edinburgh-based poet, who translated the song Petit Pays for me, is full of admiration for the poetry of his rhythmic raps.

“A superstar? No! No! No!” Faye exclaims. “If people say that -- oh, it was the BBC? -- it’s probably because I mix two genres, writing and songs. But Gael the novelist and Gael the rapper are the same person. For me, Small Country is not a story of war and genocide -- it is a story of the lost paradise of childhood, which many people experience. I do not use my own family in the story because I want to be totally free. I do not want to be the poster boy of this story. I want other writers’ voices to be heard because there are very few Rwandan or Burundian novelists. I tell young people there that they must write their stories. They need to find their own voices.”

Finding his own voice has not been easy. “When I was a kid, I asked adults around me -- many aunts and uncles -- to tell me what happened, why we were in exile in Burundi and why we were refugees. The only answer was silence, so I always felt lost.”

Every day Faye writes a poem. “I began writing poetry when I was a kid. Poetry is my passion. I got into rap because I wanted to be part of the teenage group.” Already at work on his next novel — “about music, about a rock star, not me!” — one day he’ll write an epic novel about the genocide. “It will span a century because it was not only in 1994 that we had genocide. Our family was marginalised for 40 years. We had many pogroms, always a story of violence. When I ask what became of my great grandfather or my grandfather, they say, ‘He was killed.’ It is the same for my wife. It’s important for us not to forget, to keep family alive for our children.

“The killers now say this slaughter never happened. There is this revisionism! We survive although we are not at peace. When I write songs about this, they are a warning. We must be vigilant. In African literature you either have a black point of view or a white viewpoint. Small Country is the first novel about Burundi. It is also about someone like me who is mixed-race. I don’t like that English word. In France we say metis[acute accent on e]. You do not hear from this hybrid in African literature so that is another first.”

Will his daughters read Small Country one day?

“Susannah has already read it. She is eight going on 28! People were talking a lot about it and her teachers wanted signed copies. ‘Dada, I want to read it,’ she said. I told her she was too young, although she shares her name with my wife’s grandmother, who died on the first day of the genocide. Susannah read the first part herself, then I read the second part, about the war, to her. When I read the last sentence, she said, ‘It is not so scary or sad.’ Then she started to cry, saying, ‘Dada, I don’t know why I am crying.’”

Well, I tell Faye, I cried too when I read the final haunting, hopeful sentence of this superb book.

Small Country, by Gael Faye, translated by Sarah Ardizzone (Hogarth Press, £12.99). Gael Faye is at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on August 26.