Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder

25 Mar 2010

Strength in What Remains
Tracy Kidder
Profile Books, Paperback, pp.304, ISBN 978 1 86197 857 8, March 2010.
Price: £15.00

Mardi Stewart

Strength in What Remains is the true story of Deogratis, a young African medical student from Burundi, who survived the genocides of 1993/4 in Burundi and Rwanda and escaped to New York. The hardship of Deo’s story does not simply end with his escape from Africa. When he arrived in New York, he spoke only French and learned to speak English by haunting bookshops and libraries. His refugee status led to difficulties which differed from that of his war-torn homeland but were nonetheless full of fear, poverty and danger. His life seemed without hope, comfort or reason which led to a contemplation of the peace of death.

The narrative flows backwards and forwards from childhood to exile, from life as a medical student in Burundi to delivery boy in the USA. The end of the book recounts his journey, in the company of the author, as he revisits Burundi and remembers the happiness of childhood and, later, the barbarism of killing and constant fear. This book is a study of one young man’s philosophy in the changing perspectives of his life from childhood to his return to Burundi early in the twenty-first century.

Deo’s story is powerful and absorbing, shifting from happiness to heartbreak but always returning to hope. Deo leaves us as he fulfils his lifelong ambition to run a clinic in Burundi. This significant achievement echoes the determination, tenacity and strength which Deo shows throughout. As the facts of his life unfold, Deo’s story pinpoints and examines important issues surrounding the human condition. The author himself, as he retraces Deo’s steps with him twelve years after his escape, brings his own thoughts to bear on the memories which are revisited on Deo’s retrospective journey.

One of the issues which engage Deo and later, the author, is the presence of God and sustaining faith throughout barbaric and mindless killing. How could God condone the cruelty and violence which haunts this book? From Deo’s point of view, his survival renders his belief credible but is it credible for those who did not survive?

The genocides in Burundi were centred on the conflict between the Tutsis and the Hutus. The Tutsis were considered socially superior, which suggests that the killing was rooted in class difference and prejudice. In childhood Deo, a Tutsi, remembers his father’s anger as he tried to find out more. His father responded by telling Deo to. ‘Shut up,’ saying ‘This is prejudice! Shut up! Who is teaching you this?’ It is implied that a lack of knowledge about the situation and refusal to discuss the roots of the problem contributed to the escalation of the Tutsi/Hutu divide. Lack of communication, which haunted Deo in New York, because he could not communicate, seems to have been crucial in the Tutsi/Hutu divide.

Ignorance of wider global issues is shown when Deo, on his flight from Burundi, thinks that Dublin, where the plane makes a stop, is New York. This incident accentuates how helpless Deo really was when removed from his own environment. An intelligent young man was reduced so much in status in America that he said, ‘And here I am, being treated as someone who has a primate brain. God, take my life.’

But Deo did survive and although he slept in Central Park with vagrants and drug addicts, he gradually met people who helped him on his way. The turning point came when he was taken in by a childless couple who remained his friends and benefactors as he set out to attain his goal: becoming a doctor and belonging. The struggle was long and hard but Deo’s story is not one of hopelessness but of courage nd an overwhelming ambition to succeed.

Strength in What Remains is not a simple documentary. It is written in an engaging and perceptive style and, while not given to excessive descriptive passages, the atmosphere of both Burundi and the USA is movingly captured. The author describes his first impressions of Burundi thus., ‘ The road climbed through deeply folded countryside’ and ’ I could look down on narrow valleys of cultivated fields and up at steep hillsides, some covered with grass, others quilted with groves of eucalyptus and banana trees.’ This peaceful image, reminiscent of a primitivist painting is uncomfortably at odds with the hatred that once dominated the society.

The strength of this work is in the analysis of human emotions which pervade it, lifting Deo’s story from a factual documentary to an in-depth analysis of the human condition as experienced by Deo, commented on, and observed by Kidder.