African Writing Online; Many Literatures, One Voice; AW BookBrief; Strength in what remains; Tracy Kidder

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with Vamba Sherif

I was returning home after 20 years, and the man who was driving me there turned out to be an ex-rebel. The last time I saw Kolahun, my birthplace in Liberia, was in 1990 ...

Poetry

Fiction

Cover Interview

Strength in what Remains
Tracy Kidder
Profile Books 2010
ISBN 978 1 86197 8578

Tracy Kidder’s Strength in What Remains is
an adventure story that the reader will not
wish on his worst enemy, being a refugee’s
survival story that spans the mid-nineties’
genocidal slaughter of innocents in Burundi
and Rwanda.
In that sense, this book is part of the
burgeoning apocalyptic genre of Genocide
Literature in the Africana library. But in at
least one other respect, this non-fiction stands
out: it’s tight focus on its principal character,
the resourceful Burundian medical student,
Deogratias Niyizonkiza.
This focus permits the book, despite the
horrors of war and visits to the infamous Murambi
memorial, to acquire its hero’s indefatigable
hope. Deo, a country boy whose medical
internship is rudely interrupted by the war,
spends months crashing through the jungle
with only corpses for company. He eventually
finds himself in New York, with $200, no
English and not a single contact.
This inspirational book is a testament
to friendship as much as war. It documents
Deo’s journey from homelessness in Central
Park, through Columbia University, to Village
Health Works. This is the trail-blazing clinic
that he founded in Burundi, which treated
20,000 people (including AIDS sufferers) in
its first year — most of them from the ethnic
group he had once fled from. Now, if only he
can forget the baby he last saw in the Burundian
bush, sucking on the dead mum’s breast...