Strength in What Remains

The Burundian concept gusimbura is very important to this text. Specifically, gusimbura is the notion that it is bad to bring up people who have died, or horrible events of the past, because doing so is forcing the person who lived through the horror to relive bad memories all over again. To have this effect on someone is to “gusimbura” them.

Tracy Kidder first learns about gusimbura when traveling in Africa with Deo; Deo advises Kidder not to bring up Clovis, Deo’s school friend who died. Interestingly, despite the intention of gusimbura, Deo inevitably must confront events from his past upon his return to his homeland. Doing so helps him to heal and be able to move forward. 

Drawn from the work of political scientist Peter Uvin, “structural violence” has to do with imminent hardship within the daily lives of disadvantaged people, including poverty and lack of resources, as well as their sense of inferiority and exploitation at the hands of the nation’s small elite. This violence—experienced in terms of pain, hunger, illness, and degradation—can manifest at any time in physical eruptions of violence such as war or genocide.

In the case of Burundi and Rwanda, the genocide took the form of ethnic conflict. Kidder and Deo both acknowledge the ethnicities involved—Hutu and Tutsi—are arbitrary by their definitions; they seem like caste differences subsequently strengthened by French and Belgian colonial administrators. Therefore, the reader can see this ethnic conflict as a modern phenomenon. Moreover, it is interesting that although Rwanda and Burundi were ruled, respectively, by Hutu and Tutsi regimes at the time of the genocides, they never warred with one another.