Deos life in these years was grueling and unjust, but it was not an unfamiliar story to me in fact I was reminded of the fictional Biju in Kiran Desais The Inheritance of Loss. Between scenes of him carrying groceries up to ritzy apartments and suffering the casual racism of doormen and customers, Kidder interweaves scenes of him as a boy carrying stacks of cassava on his head over the steep hills between Butanza and the lake, moving with his family into hiding when ethnic tensions flared, attending primary school and picking eucalyptus leaves with which to be beaten for being late, and then finally attending medical school in Bujumbura.Īs I read through this portion of the book, I admired the story itself but was frustrated with the telling of it. The flophouse becomes so bad he soon finds it more comfortable to sleep in Central Park. He finds a job delivering groceries on the Upper West Side, but he doesnt make enough for his own food, much less enough to pay for a doctor to treat his poor health. A Senegalese baggage handler in the airport befriends him and settles him into a filthy, dangerous flophouse in the Bronx. As Kidder tells about Deo making his way in New York, he flashes back to Deos former life in Burundi. The first half of Strength in What Remains takes place in 1994, when Deo was pretty much catapulted into New York by an acquaintance who had obtained for him a business visa and $200 in cash. Tracy Kidders solution to this paradox is to twist the chronology of Deos story in his telling of it. Yet to not talk about the thousands of people brutally slaughtered throughout his country is to allow those events to vanish.
But how can he remember the people he lost in the massacre and tame his own horrendous memories if Burundian culture prohibits even speaking the names of the dead? To gusimbura someone, to talk about them after they have died, is profane because it reminds people of loss, bringing something bad from the past into the present.
He is a Burundian Tutsi who has survived the 1993 genocide to start a new life in America, and he is inescapably haunted by what he has just been through.
A biography of a survivor of the Burundian genocide, from the bestselling author of Mountains Beyond Mountainsĭeogratias Niyizonkiza faces a paradox at the beginning of Tracy Kidders book.
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