The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

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Description

“The plot provided by the universe used to be filled with starvation, war and rape. I would not—could not—live in that tale.”
 
Clemantine Wamariya used to be 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, in search of safety—forever hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They didn’t know whether their parents were dead or alive.
 
When Clemantine used to be twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the USA; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long safe and provided for Clemantine, used to be a single mother struggling to make ends meet, whilst Clemantine used to be taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She gave the impression to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, in the end, 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, this is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms.

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