April 1994. The narrator, Milan, is 12 years old and lives in Versailles between a French father and a Rwandan mother who has never spoken to him about her country or her family. The genocide in Rwanda, which he sees on television, does nothing to change this: “My mother’s past was a closed door”.. Yet, four years later, she offers to accompany Milan to Rwanda, where she has some unfinished business. There, he discovers that he has a grandmother and a young uncle who survived the genocide. Another survivor, a childhood friend of his mother’s who lost all four of her children in the massacres, has just had a baby: life is stronger than hate.

Between tenderness and revolt

Milan will return to Rwanda. As a law student, he wrote his dissertation on the people’s tribunals set up to try genocide perpetrators. Then, like the author, he settled there permanently. Over the years, he watched, listened, took notes and described a bloodless, rural country that had developed and…