Top 5 Summer Book Pick: Strength in What Remains

Award-winning author Tracy Kidder uncovers the challenges faced by a young African medical student as he confronts his past in Strength in What Remains.

As we drove through southwestern Burundi, I felt as if we were being followed by the mountain called Ganza, the way a child feels followed by the moon. The road climbed through deeply folded countryside. We would round a corner, and another broad face of Ganza would appear.

Then my companion, Deogratias, would order the driver to stop. Deo would get out of the SUV and stand on the shoulder of the pavement, aiming his camera at the mountain. Deo wore a black bush hat with a dangling chin strap. To people passing by, in the crowded minibuses and on the bicycles laden with plastic jugs of palm oil, he must have looked like a tourist, a young, rich, black-skinned man from somewhere far away.

Standing beside him at the roadside, 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 and dotted with tiny houses roofed in metal or in thatch. Above them rose the flanks and the domed top of Ganza, all but treeless, barren of houses. In Kirundi, Ganza means "to reign," and the name evoked the kings who once ruled Burundi. The little nation, centuries old, straddles the crest of the watershed of the Congo and Nile rivers, just south of the equator in East Central Africa. It is bordered by Tanzania to the south and east, by the Democratic Republic of the Congo across Lake Tanganyika to the west, and by Rwanda to the north. It's a landlocked and impoverished country with an agrarian economy that exports excellent coffee and tea and not much else—a land of dwindling forests that still has lovely rustic landscapes.

Deo could hardly take his eyes off Ganza. He was thronged by memories. All the summers of his boyhood, he and his older brother had toiled over the mountain, climbing impossibly steep paths, their knees shaking under the loads balanced on their heads. Back then, the land out there had all been thickly forested, and in the trees and under them he used to see chimps, monkeys, even gorillas. They were all gone now, he said. But there had been so many monkeys then! One time he and his brother sat down to rest partway up another mountain, and a host of monkeys surrounded them, like a gang of little thugs, harassing them, trying to take their sacks of cassava, even slapping them in their faces! In the end there was nothing for him and his brother to do but run away, leaving the cassava behind.

When he told me this story, Deo laughed. It was what I'd come to recognize as his normal laugh. It had the same bright, surprised, near-soprano sound as his voice when he greeted a friend and cried out, "Hi!," the "Hi!" drawn out as if he didn't want it to end. His English was accented with French and Kirundi and sprinkled with misplaced emphases—as in "I am laughing when I think about it." And many of his phrases had a certain hybrid vigor, a fresh extravagance: "I want to get it out of my chest." "Run like a thunderstorm." "I had to bite my heart."

Deo grew up in the mountains east of Ganza, in a tiny settlement of farms and pastures called Butanza. He had returned to Burundi several times over the past six years but had avoided Butanza. He had not visited it for nearly 14 years. Now he was going back. He seemed happy to see Ganza again, but when we drove farther east toward Butanza, he grew quiet.

After a while we turned off the paved road onto dirt roads. The dirt roads grew narrower. Finally, as we bumped along up a steep, rutted track, Deo said we were getting close. He said that when we arrived, we would climb on foot to the pasture where, years ago, his best friend, Clovis, took sick. We would visit the very spot, he said. He added, "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.

"Reminding them of something bad?"

"Yes. It's so 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.

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STRENGTH IN WHAT REMAINS: A JOURNEY OF REMEMBRANCE AND FORGIVENESS BY TRACY KIDDER (RANDOM HOUSE)

From Reader's Digest - August 2009

Originally in Strength in What Remains

 

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