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BookBrowse Reviews Strength in What Remains: A biography of a survivor of the Burundian genocide, from the bestselling author of Mountains Beyond Mountains

Strength in What Remains
A journey of remembrance and forgiveness
by Tracy Kidder
Paperback, May 2010,
304 pages.
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Deogratias Niyizonkiza faces a paradox at the beginning of Tracy Kidder’s book. He is a Burundian Tutsi who has survived the 1993 genocide to start a new life in America, and he is inescapably haunted by what he has just been through. But how can he remember the people he lost in the massacre and tame his own horrendous memories if Burundian culture prohibits even speaking the names of the dead? To gusimbura someone, to talk about them after they have died, is profane because it reminds people of loss, bringing something bad from the past into the present. Yet to not talk about the thousands of people brutally slaughtered throughout his country is to allow those events to vanish.

DeoTracy Kidder’s solution...
Beyond the Book
The Burundian Genocide
The 1993 Burundian genocide (which preceded the 1994 genocide in Rwanda) traces back to the end of Belgian colonial rule in the 1950s and 1960s and the first Berudian genocide of 1972. Burundian history fits, like interlocking puzzle pieces, with that of its northern neighbor, Rwanda (map of Central Africa).

Like in Rwanda, Hutus make up about 86% of the population in Burundi, with only about 13% Tutsis (the remaining 1% are Twa pygmies). Unlike in Rwanda, where the Hutu majority took power, the small Tutsi elite in Burundi held onto government and military positions after independence. In April 1972, there was a bloody Hutu uprising which prompted an even more grisly retaliation by the Tutsi military. The Tutsis systematically killed...
This review was originally published in September 2009, and has been updated for the May 2010 paperback release. Click here to go to this issue.
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