TRANSIENT ANCHORS

Ndacayisaba chronicles his life from surviving as a war refugee from Burundi to earning a doctorate in medical biophysics at the University of Southern California.

In 2008, while the author was waiting to depart Brussels on his first-ever airplane trip, a flight attendant asked him to come to the front of the aircraft. He wondered if authorities suspected that he, a refugee from Burundi, was a terrorist because of the color of his skin. The attendant then tactlessly told him that a fellow traveler had complained about his body odor; he was given a small bottle of perfume, whose odor the author detested. This humiliating moment immediately establishes the sense of panic and displacement that the author frequently felt during his experience as a refugee. Ndacayisaba’s striking narrative goes on to chronicle his arrival stateside and his subsequent education and scientific career in California. He also loops back to his younger years in Burundi, where violent conflict between the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups raged. In 1993, he writes, his father was beaten to death by a group of Hutu men, leading to his surviving family members spending time in a refugee camp: “The memories never really leave; they just sink deeper, becoming part of who I am,” Ndacayisaba reflects. At the end of each chapter, photos act as signposts of various stages of life, including when the author experienced snowfall for the first time. Such poignant details amid day-to-day accounts of everyday life are the memoir’s greatest strength. Overall, this account of Ndacayisaba’s remarkable achievements also meaningfully reflects the larger immigrant experience. One has a sense of coming full circle when the author tells of traveling to Rwanda to see his family for the first time in more than a decade before he returned to America to speak at his doctoral ceremony.

A well-crafted, continent-spanning remembrance of one man’s search for the American dream.