JANUARY 8, 2020 – This month’s selection for my book club is Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder. It follows the extraordinary geographic and psychological journey of “Deogratias,” a native of Burundi in Central East Africa, who survives horrors and overcomes setbacks that would have crushed any normal person. His story is replete with good and evil, hope and despair, heartbreak and redemption. Much of it takes place in Manhattan.
The backdrop of the story is the genocide in the early 1990s that swept through Burundi and its immediate neighbor to the north, Rwanda. I can’t think of another human horror as mind-boggling as the machete murders between Hutus and Tutsis, whose differences were largely figments of myths perpetrated by German and Belgian colonists.
The reader is given ample impressions of evil witnessed by Deo but the armchair observer is also told of random encounters and circumstances that saved Deo’s life, in Burundi, Rwanda, and America. Most of the book, however, is about Deo’s inner response to all the horror, upheaval, injustice, and suffering, and also to all the love, luck, and kindness that found its way into his life.
“God” comes up—as a topic, not as an actor—as the concept must in any account of human extremes as jolting as the one told here by Kidder. The deeper one goes into the story, the more one realizes just how unfathomable are the hearts, minds, and souls of human beings. One begins to think that if aliens have found their way to this planet and done any sort of investigation into our species, they surely have gotten the hell away as fast as their knowledge of physics allowed. For good measure, those aliens erased on their way out, all traces of their presence and method of escape.
Once to safety, perhaps the visitors allowed themselves some laughs as they peered back at us trying to peer out at them. Or maybe those frightened aliens were “God” after all, so flummoxed by what transpired after Adam and Eve in the Garden, He or She or the Universal “It” simply gave up on the whole experiment to try something else somewhere else. And maybe that something, somewhere is the ultimate object of astronomical search.
What I’m beginning to think I know that I didn’t think or know before I read this book is this:
First, “Tutsi” and “Hutu” are what “Vikings” and “Packers” are to people in my neck of the woods: if you’re a rabid football fan, the mere mention of one name or the other can send you into a crazed state of being; if you’re not any kind of football fan, neither “Vikings” nor “Packers” sets you off one way or the other.
Second, a kind of “God” exists in each of us, as each of us comes to define “God.” But just as in Star Wars, people can go to the Dark Side.
Third, you should never guess about a person until you know their story.
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© 2020 Eric Nilsson
