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.
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-
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November 1, 2017
In 1994, six-year-old Wamariya fled genocidal violence in Rwanda with her older sister, Claire, and spent the next six years moving through seven African countries before landing in America. This raw-to-the-bone memoir grew out of an Association of Magazine Media Ellie Award finalist posted on the blog Medium, and Wamariya is known to Oprah watchers.
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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March 1, 2018
Record of a childhood in flight from war and terror."I hated that I had to eat," writes Wamariya. "I hated my stomach, I hated my needs." Growing children are always hungry, but the author, forced at the age of 6 to flee her native Rwanda during the genocide of 1994, was for years as a refugee never able to satisfy those elemental needs. Intercut with her chronicle of experiences in a series of refugee camps are moments from her new life in America, where she landed at the age of 12, adopted into a welcoming home in a bit of fortune that she did not trust: "I was callous and cynical....I thought I could fool people into thinking that I was not profoundly bruised." She had reason to worry, for on a six-year trail that passed through one African nation after another, she witnessed both generosity and depravity coupled with the constant worry that the older sister with whom she had fled would decide that she was too much of a burden and abandon her. She did not: Her sister's presence through one fraught situation after another is a constant. Wamariya's experiences adjusting to life in a country where, her sister declared, beer flowed from faucets and people owned six cars at a time are affecting, and there are some Cinderella moments in it, from being accepted to Yale to appearing on Oprah Winfrey's show. But more, there are moments of potent self-reckoning; being a victim of trauma means that "you, as a person, are empty and flattened, and that violence, that theft, keeps you from embodying a life that feels like your own." The work of finding home and feeling safe--it's something that every foe of immigration ought to ponder; in that alone Wamariya's narrative is valuable.Not quite as attention-getting as memoirs by Ismail Beah or Scholastique Mukasonga, but a powerful record of the refugee experience all the same.COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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Starred review from March 19, 2018
Wamariya, a human rights advocate, and Weil, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, tell the powerful story of Wamariya’s experience fleeing Rwanda after the genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group began in 1994. While visiting her grandmother at age six, Wamariya and her older sister, Claire, were told to sneak out of the house after they heard a knock on the front door. For the next six years Wamariya and Claire crossed through at least seven countries, separated from their parents and living in refugee camps; when Wamariya was 12, they were granted asylum in the U.S. and landed in a safe home in Chicago. Wamariya was an ambitious student and even became interested in cheerleading. After graduating high school, she attended Yale, where she came to terms with the horrors she endured and read the works of Audre Lorde and W.G. Sebald (who taught her that “we live in all times and places at once”). At last, the sisters were reunited with their parents in 2006. This book is not a conventional story about war and its aftermath; it’s a powerful coming-of-age story in which a girl explores her identity in the wake of a brutal war that destroyed her family and home. Wamariya is an exceptional narrator and her story is unforgettable. -
Starred review from June 25, 2018
Miles’s nuanced, emotional reading makes listening to Wamariya’s haunting life story an unforgettable experience. As a six-year-old child in Rwanda, Wamariya and her older sister, Claire, were forced to flee the Rwandan massacre without their parents. The sisters struggled to survive on their own for six years as they traveled through seven African countries, endured horrific refugee camps, and found brief periods of safety staying with distant relatives—only to have the war and violence descend on them, too. Finally the two make it to America and settle in Chicago where a family takes in Wamariya and provides for her, while her sister struggles as a single mother. The audio edition concludes with recorded commentary by Wamariya, giving listeners the opportunity to hear the author’s voice, but the main narrative is read by veteran voice actor Miles who fully embraces the role of Wamariya and easily enthralls listeners. Miles’s voice alternates between calmness, fear, anxiety, rage, and contemplativeness, as she sifts through Wamariya’s memories and helps convey the author’s complicated emotions. The sterling narration makes for a powerful audiobook. A Crown hardcover. -
March 15, 2018
When Wamariya was six years old, she fled the Rwandan massacre, guided by her 15-year-old sister, Claire. At once heartbreaking and hopeful, her story is about power and helplessness, loneliness and identity, and the strange juxtaposition of poverty and privilege. Wamariya navigates the two sides of her life: that of a child struggling to survive with a sister barely older than herself during the Rwandan genocide, and that of a refugee in America, attending the best schools, cared for by an adoptive family, and learning to find herself in the aftermath of hate and horror. She pays special attention to the experience of being a child in war: the sense of displacement; the yearning for home, comfort, family; the end of childhood. These themes run throughout this memoir like the beads the author returns to when describing her journey. VERDICT This beautifully written and touching account goes beyond the horror of war to recall the lived experience of a child trying to make sense of violence and strife. Intimate and lyrical, the narrative flows from Wamariya's early experience to her life in the United States with equal grace. A must-read.--Gricel Dominguez, Florida International Univ. Lib., Miami
Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
- The Minneapolis Star Tribune "Gripping . . . It is our human tragedy that there will always be war, and that there will always be displaced people. Memoirs that show exactly what that means, exactly what the toll is, are vital."
- Real Simple "Heartbreaking and honest, this important memoir explores the lasting effects that trauma and destruction have on an individual and emphasizes the human ability to overcome it all and build a new future--even when that new life comes with horrors of its own."
