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Strength in What Remains
a Journey of Remembrance
and Forgiveness

written by Tracy Kidder, reviewed by Claudia Hinz

In Burundi, mothers choose “bitter” names for their children, Excrement or A Hungry Street Dog, so that Death will turn his back on the infants and not be tempted to snatch them from their mothers’ arms. Deo’s mother brazenly names her son, Deogratias, meaning “thanks be to G-d”, a propitious name, a blessed name, and then war erupts. Years later, Deo is separated from his family and on the run through fields of slaughter in Burundi and Rwanda. Strength in What Remains (Random House) is the story of Deo’s escape from genocide and his new life in the United States. Within two years of arriving in New York City, Deo goes from sleeping on the ground in Central Park to beginning studies at Columbia University and moving in with total strangers, who provide him with a weekly allowance and the means to get his buck teeth fixed, so that Deo may smile a great, big American smile.

“Are you you?” Deo’s father asks incredulously over the phone, long distance from Burundi. It is a valid question. Is Deo still Deo, the boy who carried sacks of cassava barefooted over fourteen miles of mountain passes? Is this the same Deo who attends an Ivy League School in America? Pulitzer Prize winning author Tracy Kidder seeks to reconcile these two histories. By what serendipitous or providential turns did this African refugee end up in medical school in the U.S? Kidder looks to the angels in Deo’s life, his circle of supporters, the church worker who got him clothes and medicine, the couple who took him in off the streets, and later, the volunteers in Boston who find work for him.

Determined to unearth and dissect Deo’s memories, Kidder follows him back to Africa. They stand together at the sites of bloodshed in Burundi and Rwanda but Deo does not want to talk about what happened. Even in moments of terrible despair, he resists the urgings of his American friends, who beg him to see a psychologist. Deo does not want to be emptied of the images he carries: the frantic baby in the sprawling arms of his dead mother, the boy with pneumonia, hacking away high in a tree where he is hiding from Hutu rebels, and all the other people Deo could not stop to help as he ran for his life. You do not speak of these things, Deo tells Kidder, and you do not speak the names of the dead. In Burundi, there is a word for this silence, gusimbura, because “reviving painful memories (is) worse than inconsiderate.”

Kidder is at his best as a storyteller when he steps out of the story. His preoccupation with “remembrance and forgiveness,” the book’s subtitle, distract from Deo’s story, and this is Deo’s story. What Kidder does well is bring us Deo’s experiences in Burundi during and after the genocide, its communities banding together to “rebuild out of the bones of victims.” Equally compelling is Deo’s vision of our own country, its startling munificence and wealth and its great poverty and division.

Kidder shows us the ugly and discriminatory practices of the grocery store in New York City, where Deo is employed. And later, in one of the most illustrative passages of the book, Deo rides the subway from one end of the city to the other, and we see and smell the rude geography of race: “the whiteness” and “the perfume of the women” in Midtown, and the “blacker and poorer” people uptown and downtown, and Deo says, “I realized I didn’t fit anywhere.”

At the end of Strength in What Remains, we grasp the contradiction that Deo can never find his place in the United States, and yet it is the United States, his American education and network of support and resources, that he brings back to Burundi to build a medical clinic. When people walk for miles to lay eyes on the clinic in Kugatu, it is, as one African man says, “to see America.”

Claudia C. Hinz is an independent writer of prose and poetry. She lives in Oregon with her husband and three children. The tower on her nightstand includes The Help by Kathryn Stockett, a new translation of Crime and Punishment, The Anthologist, by Nicholson Baker, and her 11-year-old daughter’s favorite book, The Mysterious Benedict Society, written by Trenton Lee Stewart, illustrated by Carson Ellis.