Strength In What Remains By Tracy Kidder

Between Remembering and Forgetting

The book Strength In What Remains by Tracy Kidder, tells the journey of Deo, from his escape from Hutu-Tutsi genocide in the mid-1990s to the United States and back to Burundi. In his journey, Deo struggle’s against his memories of the genocide, he was faced with two different ways of dealing with his memories, to forget or to remember. In the first half of the book, Deo follows the Burundian concept of forgetting about the past, this is due too the unwillingness of victims to recall and, thereby, relive the violence and pain of their recent history. But as he went through his journey, he realizes that although he wants to forget his past tragedies, he was unable to do so. In the second half of the book,

Deo was taught by his family since an early age about Gusimbura. Gusimbura is the idea that it is bad to bring up people who have died, or horrible events of the past, because you are forcing someone to relive bad memories all over again. He was also taught not to dredge up the past, the story of “What Killed You, Head?” symbolizes talking about something so unpleasant that discussing it means raising a controversy that will turn back against the teller himself. We were able to see the effects of Gusimbura and the talking head in the early chapters of the book. When Deo was dealing with Sharon, he thought about gusimbura a lot of times, making him reluctant to ask for help. When Sharon asked him to write a brief account of his life “ He didn’t use the real name of anyone in his family, he omitted many details and changed others, and he completely altered the geography of his life” (57). Deo thought that although Sharon’s help can help make his situation better, She was digging up too much of his past, which goes against the idea of Gusimbura and the talking head. He felt that announcing that he is a Tutsi could not only endangers him, but his other relatives or friends in Burundi. We see that although his cultural belief can be an obstacle in thriving on his journey, his belief protected him from talking too much about his private information, as it was dangerous to talk too much about himself when Burundi was still

He had seen the extremes of both sides impact his countrymen and himself. While other people might not be able to forgive the Hutu’s for what they have done. Deo was able to let it go, his experience have made him more sensitive to violence rather than vengeful. In the PIH, Deo found a philosophy of preventing. “By all means, let’s do prevention! Prevent people from suffering! Don’t wait for people to feel like their lives are not worth living. Once they feel that way, how are they going to feel about another person’s life?” (155). Through this philosophy, Deo was able to strike a balance between remembering and forgetting. He does not forget enough that he does not learn anything from it, and he does not remember too much to be trapped inside his own memories. This is evident when a woman came to him to apologized to him for something that happened in Deo’s past. “’What happened happened,’ Deo said to the woman. ‘Let’s work on the clinic. Let’s put this tragedy behind us, because remembering is not going to benefit anyone” (259). The Deo in this moment have able to make peace with his past through taking action and helping others. His past memories have stop haunting him, and he realized that dreading of the past would not amount to anything. He was able to focus on his goals of maintaining his clinic to help his