Tracy Kidder’s “Strength in What Remains”
Tracy Kidder’s new book, “Strength in What Remains,” tells the story of Deogratias. In 1994 Deo is a third-year medical student when the Rwandan Genocide spreads to Burundi—his hometown. He is able to escape and travels to America, arriving in New York City with no English and little money. Halfway through the book, Kidder reveals more of Deo’s past. New York Times Book Review writer Ron Suskind describes a particularly powerful scene. As Deo flees yet another refugee camp, he sees a baby “sitting on the lap of his dead mother in a banana grove,” but he can only “stagger away, overcome with despair, and collapse into a heavy sleep.” He is woken by a Hutu woman the next day who “pulls Deo from the brush, discovers he’s a Tutsi and then, at extraordinary risk, saves him from beheading by telling Hutu guards that he’s her son.”
- What insights do you glean from reading a book like this that you might not get from other media sources?
- How might teaching a book such as “Strength in What Remains” complement a Facing History and Ourselves class? What Facing History themes do you recognize in the review?
- Suskind writes that “many readers may have indistinct images of what actually happened in Rwanda and Burundi, where around a million people died. Through Deo’s eyes, we see how the all but indiscernible differences between Tutsi and Hutu make a harrowing mockery of the supposed distinctions of ethnicity.” What is ethnicity? Why do people make distinctions between “us” and “them”?
- Suskind writes that “Deo’s experience can feel like this era’s version of the Ellis Island migration – a story, then and now, of trauma and forward motion.” Do you agree with this statement?
