These are my notes and quotes from Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder. The book explores genocide, memory, and hope through the story of Deogratis, a young refugee from the Burundian genocide in 1993 (just before the Rwandan genocide).
I wrote my key takeaways elsewhere, for the subscribers of my Future of Conflict series.
Quotes from Strength in What Remains
One of the central themes in the book is around “making space for forgetting”. The dominant narrative in modern Western culture is to “Never Forget” all these horrible tragedies we keep creating for ourselves (and I’m generally on board with that). The book complicates the Never Forget narrative by showing how constantly remembering the tragedies in the near past may contribute to an ongoing sense of alienation and eventual future conflict.
But we have to start from the beginning.
How does this happen?
In a book roughly about genocide, one of the most obvious questions is: “How does this shit happen?” In the case of Burundi/Rwanda, the common idea is that “these people have been battling it out from time memorial”.
This turns out not to be true:
According to a widely respected historian of the precolonial era, Jan Vansina, the meanings of “Hutu” and “Tutsi” changed over the centuries but generally described “relative categories,” not geographical origins or clans or tribes. Certainly, most objective differences between Hutus and Tutsis had disappeared over the centuries before Europeans colonized the kingdoms of Rwanda and Burundi. Hutus and Tutsis spoke the same language and practiced the same religions. They shared the same taste for banana beer and the same proverbs and, for the most part, the same territories. They intermarried, too—more commonly after colonialism, at least in Rwanda. This ensured that by the time of Deo’s youth it was hard to tell Hutus and Tutsis apart simply by looks, stereotypes notwithstanding.
People who mainly herded cattle were called Tutsis, and “Hutu” had come to designate people who mainly farmed the land. There were many exceptions, and it wasn’t as if “Hutu” and “Tutsi” described genetic predispositions for plants and cows, but very broadly speaking, the aristocracy was drawn from the population of cow-owning Tutsis, and their inferiors or dependents were predominantly Hutu farmers.
I interpret it as a calcifying class system which had settled into an oppressive and unstable equilibrium (Tutsis on top, Hutus on bottom) by the end of the 19th century.
Remember, it was hard to tell who was whom:
Some of his classmates openly discussed the ethnic issue. Several made no secret of the fact that they came from Tutsi families who had fled from Rwanda to Burundi during one or another pogrom. They worried openly, saying, “Is it going to happen here?” But Deo didn’t know the classification of most of the others at the school… [H]e thought he could identify some classmates by stereotype. But most people’s looks fell, like his own, in a middle ground. He wasn’t even sure about every neighbor’s ethnicity back in Butanza. Here in Bujumbura, the only way to know for certain was to be told by the person in question, and he wasn’t about to go among his classmates asking, “Are you a Hutu or a Tutsi?”
The distinctions were usual for colonial administrators as a way of conquering and maintaining order. They racialized the division between the two designations and made ethnicity a central fact of life (ie, put it on ID cards.)
Post-colonial conflict entrepreneurs then spent years preparing normal citizens for genocide through a process of creative dehumanization that involved pamphlets, songs, and coded language:
(this is at a medical school in the capaital, Bujumbura)
Deo began to notice what seemed like a new fad around the university and in the city. He would be out walking with student friends, often a mixture of Hutus and Tutsis, at least as far as he could tell, and they would encounter other friends or strangers who would raise one hand to the top of an ear, then make a fist and raise the hand higher, saying as they did this, “Inivo nu gutwi,” which to Deo meant “At the level of the ear.” And then they might say, “Oh, hi!” Deo and his friends would laugh and repeat the gesture. Once in a while he would be sitting with friends on the wall outside the medical school or on the grass outside his dorm, or he’d be standing with friends on the street, and strangers passing by would smile and say, “Susuruka,” “Warm them up.” Deo assumed this was just a new greeting to go with the fist-raising gesture. “Susuruka,” he’d reply, and then do the fist-raise.
It was only much later that Deo was able to make some sense of what had been going on around him outside the medical school classrooms.
Most people probably understood “Inivo nu gutwi” and “Susuruka” as political slogans, or even as Deo did, as new and friendly greetings. It was only later that Deo came to think that “At the level of the ear” was code for a machete’s proper target, and “Warm them up” meant “Pour gasoline on Tutsis and light a match.”
Deo later experienced both of these slogans in actions while fleeing massacres during the genocide.
So if the origin isn’t “ethnic strife from time immemorial”, what is it?
Deo later ends up working for Paul Farmer and looks to economic and social concerns for the answer:
At the school of public health, Deo had heard the term “prevention” used repeatedly. But if there was someone who really understood prevention, he thought, it was Paul Farmer, and prevention not just of disease but of catastrophes like genocide. In his mind, Deo distilled the [Partners In Health] message this way: “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?”
Tracy Kidder quotes historian Peter Uvin to formalize Deo’s intuition:
A virtual library of treatises on the Rwandan genocide has been published, and a relative handful on Burundi. As I read, I felt drawn especially to the work of Peter Uvin, a scholar with long experience in both countries. In several articles and in separate books about each country, he attempts a synthesis not just of the events that led up to catastrophic violence, but also of the political, social, and economic forces at work. While careful to say that no single factor can explain each country’s violence, he tries to depict the essential settings of the slaughters—that is, the lives of the peasant majorities.
For this, Uvin borrows the term “structural violence.” Violence, that is, of the quotidian kind, the physical and psychological violence of poverty, the type of violence that had surrounded Deo all through his childhood and adolescence. Hunger and disease and untimely death. Exclusion from the means to a better life, especially exclusion from secondary school and college. And examples of what the peasant majority was being excluded from—portly men in suits, foreign development workers and their privileged Burundian and Rwandan counterparts riding through dirt towns in SUVs. I thought of Deo’s descriptions of easy arrogance among fellow high school and university students. There was the violence of widespread unemployment, the plight of many young men who were prime recruits for armies and militias. There was rampant and blatant corruption, and complete impunity for those who practiced it—and impunity also for the soldiers who killed and the officers who gave them their orders.
In his book about Burundi, Uvin describes what he calls “the micro-politics” of the country’s long war, not just the competition for power among national elites, but the facts of life in urban neighborhoods and on rural hills. The justified grievances of the Hutu majority. The increasing segregation of the two ethnicities, and the ever-growing fear between them, which made violence, especially preemptive violence, a rational strategy for self-defense. The ability and willingness of local elites to organize and foment violence.
Uvin writes: “In societies where the rule of law is close to nonexistent and security forces are neither effective nor trusted, small groups of people willing to use violence can create enough chaos and fear to force everyone into making violent choices.”
Like anybody who believes in a benevolent divine force, Deo has to wrestle with the problem of evil. I like his response because it embraces the sloppiness and greyness of all our interactions with the non-material world.
(This passage takes place at a genocide memorial)
We were surrounded by towering columns. The place was vast, dark, and mysterious. We talked quietly. I had the impression it was in this place and in his other sanctuaries that Deo had reconciled his experience of genocide with his belief in God. He liked to frame his solution jocularly: “I do believe in God. I do believe in God. I think God has given so much power to people, and intelligence, and said, ‘Well, you are on your own. Maybe I’m tired, I need a nap. You are mature. Why don’t you look after yourselves?’” Deo would pause, then say, “And I think He’s been sleeping too much.”
So there’s real material disparities between people, a God that’s sleeping too much, and hard-working conflict entrepreneurs:
The Rwandan genocide was a carefully planned case of scapegoating, launched by a government of the majority against a powerless minority. Burundi’s mass violence was an ethnic civil war between a minority government and rebels drawn from the majority, a war between two equally powerful armed factions. In Rwanda, ordinary people killed mainly out of prejudice. In Burundi, it was mainly out of fear. These were different catastrophes, Uvin insists, not to be conflated. But they had essential ingredients in common: “Social exclusion and the ethnicization of politics… are the two central elements to violent conflict in Burundi and Rwanda that, like electrons, spin around a core of massive poverty and institutional weakness.”
Those are huge forces and can be daunting to confront. Gandhi and other apostles of non-violence show us that success is possibly but often costly.
Hope in Solidarity
Here’s how one priest — Abbé Zacharie Bukuru — trained his students into solidarity during the civil war:
He had forbidden the students their radios. Night after night he had cloistered them and let them talk, intervening only now and then to limit the invective between the Hutu and the Tutsi boys. The proof that this had worked arrived in a dreadful way. “Hutu, Tutsi were everywhere here together, praying together. We were an example of unity,” Zacharie told me. He added, “They wanted—how do you say in English—eradicate this example of living together.” By “they” he meant the contingent of rebel Hutu militia which, on the morning of April 30, 1997, came out of the mountains and descended on the school, like the wolf on the fold.
The soldiers busted open the doors to the dormitory, and their commander ordered the students to divide themselves: “Hutu brothers over here, Tutsi cockroaches there.”
The children simply refused to comply, even knowing it would lead to indiscriminate murder.
The Hutus would not abandon their schoolmates. The soldiers tried to kill them all. It was said that some of the dying boys quoted Jesus on the cross, crying out to God to forgive their killers because they didn’t know what they were doing. There were 150 students at the school. Some were wounded, and many escaped.
In all, forty students were murdered.
This is very Gandhian and rests upon humans understanding their true life and valuation is moral, not physical. Tough sell for most of us.
Deo also ends up working at a hospice. I’m generally a sucker for hospice wisdom, and I see it connecting to the Gandhian point about what’s worth pursuing with the time we’re alive (and what’s not):
Deo vividly remembered the hospice in New York where he had worked. That had been a place, of course, where everyone was dying. He had sat beside the patients and talked with them. In his mind, he placed himself in their deathbeds, remembering times when he was fleeing and had felt as they must now: “I probably have maybe a minute for the rest of my life, to be alive, and then I’ll be gone.” He’d sit down beside a patient’s bed and say, “Tell me about your life. Tell me something you enjoyed.” Talking to them so that they could die the good death, he imagined. Many burst into tears. Mostly, they said they felt guilty, for having accomplished nothing compared with what they had planned, or for getting divorced, something they regretted now when they could no longer even try to repair the break.
Memory and Gusimbura
In Brazil they have saudade, in Germany they have schadenfreude, and in Burundi they have gusimbura:
There once was a man who went out walking. On the trail, he met a head rolling across his path.
He started bothering the rolling head with questions: “What killed you, head?”
The head replied: “Would you keep going and stop reminding me of unpleasant things? I died a hero, but you will be killed by your own tongue,”
The man continued his walk. When he arrived at his destination, he told the people there: “Do you know what I saw? I met a rolling head on my way here, and I asked it: ‘What killed you, head?” And it replied: ‘I died a hero, but you will be killed by your own tongue.”
The people told him: “If you don’t show us this talking head, we will kill you.” And the man said: “Let’s go. If you don’t find the head talking, do whatever you want to me.” And the people said: “Let’s go!”
When they came upon the head, the man started talking to it, but the head said nothing. The man insisted, but the head did not say a word. Upset because the man had lied to them and wasted their time, the people beat him. They beat him until he was unable to walk. After they had left, and the man was writhing on his back on the ground, the talking head laughed at him and said: ‘Didn’t I tell you that you would be killed by your own tongue?””
Kidder is clearly aware of the benefits of memorial sites, and comes from a culture that reveres them:
They were a means of keeping a history that had to be known. The fact that mass slaughters hadn’t been prevented in places all over the world—and weren’t being prevented now—didn’t argue against these attempts to preserve the memories of former massacres and the hope they represented, that someday “Never Again” might seem like more than a pious, self-enhancing platitude. And surely these sites had great value for many survivors, as public recognition of their suffering, as places to mourn their murdered friends and families. Surely the sites were psychologically useful for some, as they seemed to be for Deo.
But through his time with Deo and his relentless visit to genocide memorials, he starts to see complexity:
A lot of Western thought and psychological advice assume that it is healthy to flush out and dissect one’s memories, and maybe this is true. And yet for all that, I began to have a simultaneous and opposite feeling: that there was such a thing as too much remembering, that too much of it could suffocate a person, and indeed a culture. Our tour of sites began to seem relentless. Observing Deo’s endlessly renewed sorrow, I found myself thinking that there was something also to be said for a culture with a word like gusimbura.
Gusimbura is encountered early in the book, when Deo tells Tracy about a childhood friend who died, and then warns him not to say the man’s name when they go to visit his village:
He said that when we arrived, we would climb on foot to the pasture where, many years ago, his best friend, Clovis, took sick. We would visit the very spot, he said. Then he added, “And when we get to Butanza we don’t talk about Clovis.”
“Why?”
“Because people don’t talk about people who died. By their names, anyways. They call it gusimbura. If for example you say, ‘Oh, your granddad,’ and you say his name to people, they say you gusimbura them. It’s a bad word. You are reminding people…” Deo’s voice trailed off.
“You’re reminding people of something bad?”
“Yes. It’s so hard to understand, because in the Western world…” Again, Deo left the thought half finished.
“People try to remember?”
“Yah.”
“Here in Burundi, they try to forget?”
“Exactly,” he said.
To gusimbura is to intentionally stir up painful memories and reopen emotional wounds. There are obvious drawbacks to doing so. And there are proposed benefits… but how real are they?
In a cultural moment where rulers with authoritarian tendencies all over the world (USA, Italy, India, Hungary, El Salvador, Tunisia, etc.) are creating and using scapegoats to consolidate power, how much has remembering and “Never Forget” techniques gotten us?
Are there better techniques to prevent future holocausts and genocides? That seems to be the key question behind the book.
Finally, a kind of reconciliation:
One day a woman approached Deo with her head bowed and said, “You don’t know me, but I want to say that I am so sorry for what happened.” Deo suspected that she was confessing to some offense against his family during the war. Her words worried him. If people thought he planned revenge, they might try to kill him first. But it seemed to Deo that Kigutu was becoming a “neutral ground,” a place where Tutsis from the mountains and Hutus from the lakeside could mingle without fear. A place of reconciliation for everyone, including him. And he hoped he wasn’t dreaming. “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.”
Ankur Shah Delight: Community and Conflict 