The Girl Who Smiled Beads

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