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A review by beckimoody29
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya
4.0
This isn't a book you "like" -- it is hard to read with its almost dispassionate descriptions of war and life as a refugee. Yet it is a book that I think should be read widely. There is a quote that really hit me from the book where Clementine is wrestling with understanding the word "genocide":
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. (p. 95)
Many of the greatest tragedies of our history are too incomprehensible in their entirety. We need to be able to see the individual before we can ever hope to comprehend. I am so glad that the author chose to tell her part of the story.
Mechanically, it goes back and forth from the war years to her life in America. I think it is a good format as I think it would be too depressing to tell the story chronologically. This is a very real book -- characters are both good and bad, even the author. Neither is it all gloom and doom -- there are people who offer food and shelter, officials who bend rules, new dresses, and a Mickey Mouse backpack. Throughout is a tough love that survives and holds on to hope for a better world.
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. (p. 95)
Many of the greatest tragedies of our history are too incomprehensible in their entirety. We need to be able to see the individual before we can ever hope to comprehend. I am so glad that the author chose to tell her part of the story.
Mechanically, it goes back and forth from the war years to her life in America. I think it is a good format as I think it would be too depressing to tell the story chronologically. This is a very real book -- characters are both good and bad, even the author. Neither is it all gloom and doom -- there are people who offer food and shelter, officials who bend rules, new dresses, and a Mickey Mouse backpack. Throughout is a tough love that survives and holds on to hope for a better world.