Gaël Faye | Petit Pays

In the song ‘Petit Pays’, Gael Faye employs Burundi to express both his love for his native land and his grief oat the political anguish he suffered in the 1990s, at the same time as the whole region was left horribly bloodstained by the Rwandan genocide. ‘Petit Pays’ is the same title that Gaël Faye chose to give to his first novel, published three years after the song, that also received critical and public acclaim.

About

Born in Burundi in 1982 of a Rwandan mother and a French father, Gaël Faye fled his country in 1995 because of the civil war and the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda. Music allows him to exorcise his pain and his displacement. Singer-songwriter Gaël Faye was born in Burundi in 1982, of a Rwandan mother and a French father. In 1995 he reluctantly left his home country, then in the grip of a civil war, to move to France. This stage of his life was marked by a need that never left him: to exorcise all the feelings linked to a life that has been uprooted through his words. Between 2010 and 2011, Gaël Faye played all across France. Ten years after having written the lyrics to ‘A-France’, which opens the album 'Pili-Pili' with a butter croissant, he presented 15 songs looking back over his journey and telling the story, with a mixture of nostalgia and indignation, of his childhood in Burundi, his arrival in France, his loves and his struggles. His second album, 'Lundi méchant', was released in 2020. Gaël Faye is also the author of the novel 'Petit Pays', which has received numerous awards and been adapted for film.