Bookreporter.com - STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS by Tracy Kidder

STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS: A Journey of Remembrance and Forgiveness
Tracy Kidder
Random House
Biography
ISBN: 9781400066216

The latest work from Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Tracy Kidder is a stirring account of one man’s remarkable flight from genocidal terror in his homeland of Burundi to the United States and then back home to confront the burdens of memory and reconciliation. The journey of Deogratias (“Deo”) traverses the depths of human depravity and the most exalted heights of altruism and grace.

Kidder’s account encompasses three narrative strands. The first chronicles Deo’s arrival in New York in 1994 with $200 in his pocket and even less command of English, and his slow, often painful assimilation into Western society. Deo is befriended by an airport baggage handler who leads him to an abandoned Harlem tenement on whose façade is fittingly scrawled the word “PEN.” Eventually abandoning the squalid conditions there to take up residence in Central Park, Deo has the good fortune to win the friendship of Sharon McKenna, a former nun he meets while delivering groceries (a job for which he earned $15 a day for 12 hours work) to the rectory of the Church of St. Thomas More on the Upper East Side.

In a series of events so improbable as to partake of the quality of a fairy tale, Sharon helps Deo find a home with Charlie and Nancy Wolf, a sociologist and artist in SoHo, where he spends the next seven years, haunted by nightmares of his homeland. “Again and again, on the perimeter of sleep," Kidder writes, "he was visited by sudden vivid images, of machete and flesh, and by those dreams in which, sooner or later, he had to run and couldn’t move.” During this time he gains admission to Columbia University where he studies philosophy in the hope of fathoming the mystery of human wickedness, enrolls in the Harvard School of Public Health, meets and works with Paul Farmer, the hero of Kidder’s book MOUNTAINS BEYOND MOUNTAINS, and eventually is accepted at Dartmouth Medical School.

The second and most powerful section of the book turns back to recount Deo’s harrowing flight from the Burundi hospital where he worked as a third-year medical student and his narrow escapes from the gangs of machete-wielding Hutu genocidaires. Deo is a member of Burundi’s Tutsi minority, and Kidder’s account (including a brief historical afterword) reveals both the roots and the absurdity of those pseudo-ethnic divisions. For six months Deo is on the run through the mountains and valleys of Burundi, at every step encountering scenes of unspeakable horror, like the wide-eyed baby who stared at him from its dead mother’s breast. “Survival simply had its own momentum,” Kidder starkly observes. Deo eventually was led by a Hutu woman to a camp in Rwanda, where 300,000 of his countrymen sought refuge. In the end, some 50,000 Burundians were massacred in this orgy of violence, although that bloodshed soon would be eclipsed by the slaughter in neighboring Rwanda that followed the next year. In these pages, Kidder does an extraordinary job of channeling Deo’s voice, capturing the terror that beset him as he fled:

“He headed to the southwest, along the valley of the Mubarazi, keeping to woods and brush and tall grass and avoiding all roads. In places, the river’s shallow waters seemed all but dammed with bodies and the valley was littered with them, the corpses and feasting dogs thickening as he approached Kibimba, where just before sunset he saw smoke rising from a building on a hilltop. It was his cousin’s school.”

In the final section of the book, in June 2006 Kidder follows Deo to Burundi to watch his protagonist labor to establish a clinic. It’s a land of crushing poverty (the per capita GDP is $83) and rampant disease, where patients who cannot pay their bills are imprisoned without treatment in hospitals until family members can find the money to free them. Their journey is a powerful one, author and subject visiting endless memorials to the genocide that wiped out members of Deo’s family and drove him from his home. Along the way, Kidder raises provocative questions about the power of memory and the improbable way victims of genocide can summon the will to forgive, contrasting the Western notion that it is healthy to “flush out and dissect one’s memories” with his feeling that “there was such a thing as too much remembering, that too much of it could suffocate a person, and indeed a culture.”

Although less sweeping in scope, STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS stands as a worthy companion to WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES, Philip Gourevitch’s horrific account of the Rwandan genocide. What gives this book its undeniable power is the intense and deeply personal story that lies at the heart of Tracy Kidder's compassionate telling.

--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)

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