Clemantine Wamariya

The Girl Who Smiled Beads is a powerful recounting of Clementine Wamariya's experiences as a refugee who together with her sister, Claire, fled the genocide in their native Rwanda in 1994. Interspersed with memories of her time in a series of refugee camps in various countries across southern Africa is a recounting of Wamariya's experiences after she, Claire, and Claire's young children were granted asylum in the United States in 2000.

Wamariya is fiercely resistant to any facile framing of show more her story. She doesn't want to be uplifting or inspirational; she doesn't want to be pitied or to perform the role of "grateful refugee." Instead, with determined honesty she documents how both her time in the camps and her time being raised by a white Evangelical family in the middle-class Chicago suburbs gave her different kinds of trauma and alienation to wrestle with. A vivid exploration of the human cost of war. show less

There are a lot of survivors' accounts of terrible events. I found this one took a rather different stance; the narrative of THEN (fleeing the Rwandan genocide as a six-year old in the care of her teenage sister) is intercut with the very different NOW. After six years moving between refugee camps in Africa, they gained residence in USA. And while her sister's later life - working as a cleaner, bringing up her three children alone - is more typical of the immigrant experience, the author show more found herself adopted by an achieving American family, studying at Yale, giving speeches.

Throughout there's a very definite focus on getting to grips with her inner self; the difference between what westerners deem a refugee to be versus the reality. And the fact that each of us must make sense of what life gives us, tell our story in the way that works for us.
She complains to her sister: "When you share about our experiences, you always say 'I'. You don't say 'we'. We were together." "But you know", Claire said, "when I remember our experiences, I'm alone."

She tells of the 'fairytale' moment when the Oprah Winfrey show managed to find her parents and bring them to USA to be reunited after twelve years apart. And how the magic actually translated into silence later: "they didn't know me and I didn't know them, and the gap between us was a billion miles wide."

Authors of memoirs often come across as saintly, long suffering victims. I felt the author here, was a real person...not a sweet, grateful 'refugee' - I'm not actually sure I particularly liked her as a person - but certainly an erudite, thoughtful individual who had (with her endlessly resourceful and determined older sister) come through unimaginable horrors to forge a new life. show less

This is the story of Clemantine and Claire who were on the run through the Rwandan massacre in 1994. The story is horrifying and sad. “Children are resilient”. This is such a common adage, but anyone who thinks that a child separated from their parents will fully recover that trauma is sorely mistaken.

“The word genocide cannot explain the never-ending pain, even if you live.”

“I did not feel lost, as “lost” implies that there’s a place where you will feel found and that, for show more me, did not exist. I was just a feather, molted and mangled, drifting through space. I tried to maintain the illusion that I kept in my mind a legible map, that I could find my way home. But whenever I tried to think back through the landmarks we’d passed, I just saw people screaming. I heard the sounds of guns and bombs and felt fire.”

The child of this story experienced that toxic stress from the age of 6 in war-torn Rwanda. No matter that she eventually made it to the US and received all kinds of financial privilege, the experience of her childhood colored her view of the world forever. What she has chosen to do with that toxin in her body is what has distinguished her and might someday make her whole.
I would love to hear Claire’s voice in this memoir. Her story is very different. She was responsible for Clemantine beginning at age 15 thrust into the adult role of provider and protector. She was torn from her teenage years of dreams for the future into adulthood with overwhelming responsibilities. She was a hero in my book.
"I felt disregarded, unseen, by the one person in the world who knew. “When you share about our experiences,” I said to Claire, “you always say I. I. You don’t say we. We were together. “But you know,” Claire said, “when I remember our experiences, I’m alone.”

There is so much more in this book as Clemantine finds her way to adulthood. She openly describes her angst and her emotional struggles. She tells her truth. I take her at her words.

I recommend this memoir if you are seeking to understand the experience of a child refugee torn from her family and constantly filled with fear and deprivation. Your heart will break, but you will see her emerge on the other side, not fully whole, but surviving and striving. I would love to hear from her again in another twenty years. Hers, as everyone's, is an on-going story. show less

It feels disrespectful to "really like" a book that outlines a refugee's experience of wandering through seven different countries and struggling to fit in, find herself, to relate with her family. There's no happy ending, no full closure or moral here. It's a slightly detached but real account of the serious struggles a child has and always will have from her experiences of growing up with nothing, not even love or safety.
What I appreciate about the book is that it helped me see a glimpse show more of what it could be like to be a refugee. Obviously this is one story, told as an adult thinking back to a childhood, and told by someone who eventually "escaped" that world (though it never leaves her) and finds American success. Her pain is real, her relationships are all very hard. She does not know how to handle the brokenness. And who does? She does conclude with realizing it is essential to turn her experience into a narrative for herself. We need to see our lives as a story.
I appreciate the peek into a life that is not my own, an experience I cannot relate to. It leaves me feeling helpless, because I can do nothing to make any of it better. And if I don't recognize that I can't take Clemantine's story and apply it to other refugees, then I've not understood the book either. For example, Claire (her older sister and the only one who went through a similar experience , at least superficially) does not have the same story, the same way of dealing or living. Her mother has a totally different approach again. No one will deal with it the same way. We want simple answers and explanations, to draw lines from A to B. This book tells us that is not possible.
Not a simple read, (not graphic), not an easy situation to digest or accept. But a part of our world. show less