The Girl Who Smiled Beads
Ratings11
Average rating4.4
15
Ratings11
Average rating4.4
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war and rape. I would not—could not—live in that tale.” Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years migrating through seven African countries, searching for safety—perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive. When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, ultimately, graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old. In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look beyond the label of “victim” and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms.
Reviews with the most likes.
This is an important and necessary read for everyone - but especially for Americans who find themselves (as I do), so far removed from the wars raging not only in countries far away, but in our own communities. Clemantine Wamariya paints a vivid picture of family, war, violence, lost childhood, and survival. We should take a lesson from her resilience, and be grateful that she survived to tell her story.
A peripheral impression from this vital autobiography is of Clemantine's sister Claire not seeing her as a full person in their experiences together, and how most adults don't treat children with recognition, of having the universal capacity for pain and insecurity and dreams, and as equally building memories and more vulnerably developing selfhood.
What a captivating and thought-provoking memoir. Clemantine tells the harrowing story of her 7 year long journey of escaping the war in Rwanda together with her strong and resourceful sister Claire. In parallel we learn about her arrival in the US and the hardness of what it means to reacquaint yourself with a life of safety. How charity - the economy of givers and takers, saviours and saved - establishes a degrading hierarchy. How anger and trauma go hand in hand, and how families that have been torn apart don't just automatically heal.
How do you maintain identity, that of the inner self and the self in connection with others, in the face of constant upheaval, where circumstances leave you with no choices, no chances to assert your own will (especially as a child)? How do you rebuild identity and connection in the face of resultant trauma?
Vacillated between angry, sad, and numb, reading this book, which feels like an accurate portrayal of the primary emotional states that Wamariya relates.
In telling her story, she flashes back and forth between earlier years as a refugee in Africa, arriving as a refugee in America, and later years as an American citizen processing her experiences and working with refugee aid groups. Manages to stay pretty tense throughout.
For all that it is only the beginning point both in time and geography for this story, it still rocked gullible me to learn the seeds of the Rwandan conflict, the hatred and prejudice that caused so much violence, so clearly linked (yet again) to the rhetoric of racist, eugenicist colonizers who disrupted a previously peaceful nation for their own ends.
Wish I could include here the three pages where she talks about the word ‘genocide', just to make sure that part gets read as widely as possible.
The scope of Wamariya's experiences is hard to hold in my mind (as soft and privileged a life as I've lived): traveling through multiple countries, herded into and escaping from multiple refugee camps and situations of personal jeopardy and dire poverty, all before the age of 12. Her older sister's truly legendary level of resourcefulness and determination. All that they survived to now thrive (?).
And yet their lives are irreversibly altered, years of childhood were obliterated because circumstances would not allow them to remain a child sister and a teen sister. Trauma seems to prevent real communication with her family or loved ones even once reunited, and Wamariya seems to still be in a search of what might help her heal.
It doesn't seem as simple to summarize as either a message of hope or a cautionary tale. It's the story of an individual, and anyone who reads it needs to honour the writer by never forgetting the value of each other's humanity, to respect life and share in community, rather then let differences foster strife, or greed and corruption encourage profit from suffering.
⚠️ Misogyny, racism, child abuse, spousal abuse, details of refugee camp conditions, illness and death of refugees, references to SA
