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923 reviews for:
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After
Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil
4.25 AVERAGE
923 reviews for:
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After
Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil
4.25 AVERAGE
medium-paced
dark
emotional
sad
fast-paced
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Chronic illness, Cursing, Death, Domestic abuse, Emotional abuse, Genocide, Gore, Infidelity, Physical abuse, Racism, Torture, Toxic relationship, Violence, Blood, Excrement, Grief, Death of parent, Murder, Pregnancy, Abandonment, Sexual harassment, War, Injury/Injury detail
challenging
emotional
informative
medium-paced
On “genocide”: “I did not understand the point of the word genocide then. I resent and revile it now. The word is tidy and efficient. It holds no true emotion. It is impersonal when it needs to be intimate, cool and sterile when it needs to be gruesome. The word is hollow, true but disingenuous, a performance, the worst kind of lie. It cannot do justice--it is not meant to do justice--to the thing it describes.”
“It can't explain a child playing dead in a pool of his father's blood. The experience of a mother forever wailing on her knees. It cannot explain the never-ending pain, even if you live. You cannot bear witness with a single word".
“All those countries that ended World War II by saying ‘never again’ turned their backs.”
“It can't explain a child playing dead in a pool of his father's blood. The experience of a mother forever wailing on her knees. It cannot explain the never-ending pain, even if you live. You cannot bear witness with a single word".
“All those countries that ended World War II by saying ‘never again’ turned their backs.”
“Our minds are malleable. Our minds can be possessed - possessed so gradually that we don’t even realize we’ve lost control.”
"The word genocide cannot articulate the -person experience—the real experience of each of the millions it purports to describe. The experience of the child playing dead in a pool of his father’s blood. The experience of a mother forever wailing on her knees. The word genocide cannot explain the never-ending pain, even if you live."
"There’s no label to peel and stick that absolves you, shows you’ve done your duty, you’ve completed the moral project of remembering. This—Rwanda, my life—is a different, specific, personal tragedy, just as each of those horrors was a different, specific, personal tragedy, and inside all those tidily labeled boxes are 6 million, or 1.7 million, or 100,000, or 100 billion lives destroyed. You cannot line up the atrocities like a matching set. You cannot bear witness with a single word"
last one
"I know it is a privilege to have the safety, time, comfort, and education to try to shape my experience into something coherent, to think critically and creatively about my life. There’s a difference between story and experience. Experience is the whole mess, all that actually happened; a story is the pieces you string together, what you make of it, a guide to your own existence. Experience is the scars on my legs. My story is that they’re proof that I’m alive. Your story, the meaning you choose to take when you listen to me, might be different. Your story might be that my scars are my fault and I should feel shame.”
"There’s no label to peel and stick that absolves you, shows you’ve done your duty, you’ve completed the moral project of remembering. This—Rwanda, my life—is a different, specific, personal tragedy, just as each of those horrors was a different, specific, personal tragedy, and inside all those tidily labeled boxes are 6 million, or 1.7 million, or 100,000, or 100 billion lives destroyed. You cannot line up the atrocities like a matching set. You cannot bear witness with a single word"
last one
"I know it is a privilege to have the safety, time, comfort, and education to try to shape my experience into something coherent, to think critically and creatively about my life. There’s a difference between story and experience. Experience is the whole mess, all that actually happened; a story is the pieces you string together, what you make of it, a guide to your own existence. Experience is the scars on my legs. My story is that they’re proof that I’m alive. Your story, the meaning you choose to take when you listen to me, might be different. Your story might be that my scars are my fault and I should feel shame.”
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
I’m not rating the content… this is a memoir and is deeply respected. Rating memoirs always gives me the ick. How can I give “stars” to someone’s real life experiences? The only thing that gives me pause is nonlinear structure in nonfiction. It confuses me sometimes and feels unnecessary when telling a story in a memoir style. Additionally, I purposefully use audiobook format in memoir so that I can hear the literal voice of the author, which I did not get here.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Death, Genocide, War
Short book, very compelling autobiography of a refugee and survivor of the Rwandan genocide.