A Tale of a Tutsi

Strength in What Remains – Tracy Kidder

As is the custom of his people, Deogratias has a single name. As the family tells it, his mother looked upon her tiny newborn and cried, “Deo gratias!” and that is how his name became “Thanks be to God.” He prefers to be called Deo, caring not at all that, to those who speak Latin, he asks to be called “God.” Deo was born into a deceptively simple society, the son and grandson of cowherds who’d always assumed that his destiny, too, was to be a cowherd. Life had other plans for Deogratias, however, plans he welcomed: Deo would become a doctor. So when he finished secondary schooling, Deo entered his tiny country’s one medical school. He wanted to be a doctor to help his people you see; to build a clinic near his village where the sick and the injured could find comfort. Then life took a different turn. As Deo served his internship in a village near the border, however, ethnic violence erupted. It was October, 1993, and that country was Burundi: the desperately poor central African nation next door to Rwanda. Deo remembers his classmates whispering among themselves before the violence began; puzzling through the slogans they shared: “At the level of the ear!” and “Heat him up!” all advice on how to kill the hated enemy. Deo just didn’t realize that he was the enemy… And so he fled, dodging men (and women) wielding guns and machetes, transistor radios pressed to their ears as some unseen voice chanted the same instructions to its followers over and over.

You need to know that Deo is Tutsi; an ethnic “fact” he had only recently learned in 1993 – a fact that colors his being to this very day. Deo spent not just those first long and violent October days, but the next six months fleeing for his life. He witnessed scenes of unspeakable brutality: massacre, mutilation, and degradation; all based on a belief that Tutsis are different from Hutus.

Deo must have been born under a lucky star: in 1994, after six months hiding from his Hutu neighbors, he flew from Burundi to New York City on a faked business visa. When he arrived in the States, he spoke not a word of English; only French and his native Kirundi. For the next year, Deo survived by squatting in an abandoned tenement; living in the forest of Central Park; delivering groceries twelve hours a day, six days a week for fifteen dollars a day. He survived because people noticed the slender young man with the unquenchable thirst for knowledge and the unstoppable drive to become the doctor he’d planned to be. He survived because the strength of his character and of his will impressed people – people with the means to see his dream come true. Within five years, Deo was a student at Columbia University on his way to a medical degree.

This is his story – and it is the story of Burundi: the two are inextricably intertwined.

The William Wordsworth poem Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood gives us the familiar phrase, “splendor in the grass” (the title of the 1961 Oscar-winner written by William Inge and directed by Elia Kazan). Later in the same stanza of his poem, however, Wordsworth speaks to the darker side of human emotion:

“…Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind…”

It is from this same ode that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Tracy Kidder takes the title of his latest work; Strength in What Remains. The saga of Deo’s escape from Burundi and his “rebirth” as an adopted American are more than simple history; more than some sort of modern success story. It is also a stark depiction of cultural differences – not merely the hypertribalism that led to the mass murders in Rwanda and Burundi, but of other, simpler differences. Deo’s native Kurundi has a word for which there is no English equivalent. No strike that, there is an English equivalent for the word – there is no American equivalent for the practice. It’s a culture that either lacks or suppresses the victim mentality that so seems to characterize our society. The word is gusimbura:

“…And when we get to Butanza we don’t talk about Clovis.”
“Why?”
“Because people don’t talk about people who died. By their names, anyways. They call it gusimbura. If for example you say, ‘Oh, your granddad.’ And you say his name to people, they say you gusimbura them. It’s a bad word. You are reminding people…” Deo’s voice trailed off.
“You’re reminding people of something bad?”
“Yes It’s hard to understand, because in the Western world…” Again, Deo left the thought half finished.
“People try to remember?”
“Yah.”
“Here in Burundi, they try to forget?”
“Exactly, he said."

That entire concept seems as alien to our society as the word itself: gusimbura…

Tracy Kidder might well have yanked his readers’ heartstrings in writing Strength in What Remains by playing to their emotions; he chose not to. It would have been unutterably simple to have cast Deo’s story as some great rags-to-riches triumph with overtones of Horatio Alger. After all, Deo arrived in New York without a word of English and only two hundred dollars to his name; yet he ended up a student at a prestigious university, a student who returned to a tiny village in a backwards country as a hero. Kidder, however, laid out Deo’s story in simple, straightforward prose; avoiding those bloody details that both titillate and disgust. Where necessary, he called upon scholarly explanations of the Hutu/Tutsi conflict, which he writes is rooted in European colonialism instead of ethnic differences. Instead of concentrating on the horrific violence – obviously, his narrative cannot completely ignore it – Kidder chooses to concentrate on the stories of people who sheltered Deo and helped him escape. It’s the people to whom he owes his life that Deo honors in his return to Burundi, in his creation of a clinic in a small border town.

Kidder is clearly in awe of his Burundian friend. It speaks from the pages of the first half of Strength in What Remains where the author recounts the incredible resolve of this young man. He was barely out of his teens when he escaped the violence in Africa, only to be dropped unceremoniously into – and eventually thrive within – a culture so foreign that he might as well be among Martians. As a young refugee, he learned English (a damnably difficult language) to matriculate at a prestigious university. Kidder’s admiration for Deo is just as obvious in the second half, which recounts a 2006 journey the two men took to Burundi. Deo returned to his native land in hopes of bringing healthcare to one of the poorest nations on Earth. Yet in recounting the story of Deo’s flight and the following fifteen years, Kidder does not toss about superlatives. He chooses instead to matter-of-factly recount Deo’s history and his vision. Deogratias is a humble man, and Kidder respects that humility. Simply put, Strength in What Remains is the story of a remarkable young man, elegantly told.

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