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A review by boipoka
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya
4.5
This book will stay with me for a long time. It was a strange and unforgettable feeling, reading this book.
I had kind of gone in expecting a refugee memoir that'll set a broader context. I know nothing about the Rwandan genocide - and expected to learn something about that event and it's aftermath. But this wasn't that kind of book - Clemantine takes strong exception to generalizing her experience, and she (rightly) believes the onus of educating us is not on her. This book is a deeply personal, and _individual_ memoir - tightly focused on one child's experience of fleeing the Rwandan genocide, her thoughts and struggles.
This is a messy and untidy book. Not much is explained about the context of the genocide - there's one short paragraph where she covers Belgian colonization and the Huti/Tutsi division, and another where she says that's the neat story the modern Rwandan government has created. It's never really clear where she stands on this - whom, if anybody, she blames for this. There's a lot of rage about how the aftermath of the genocide was handled, esp. the "forgive and forget" approach to moving on - but the author seems as incapable as anybody else of coming up with a way forward. A lot is unclear in this book, lots of questions unanswered (I was most curious about her current relationship with her faith and god) and the whole story is extremely fragmented. All this would have likely annoyed the crap out of me in fiction - but it somehow worked here. The fragmented story felt realistic - a stressed child isn't likely to have formed very many coherent memories after all. And the "modern" chapters, reflecting on the past and giving us some updates, did help clarify some things at least.
It helpt that the writing is really great, and Clemantine's raw emotions bleed though the narrative. I really appreciated it. I came away with very complex feelings about the author - while I have a lot of sympathy for what she had to go through, and the utter destruction of her childhood, I also don't _like_ her very much. And honestly I think that's the great success of this book - it made me think of her as a complete human being, rather than a victim of circumstances who is to be pitied and coddled.
I had kind of gone in expecting a refugee memoir that'll set a broader context. I know nothing about the Rwandan genocide - and expected to learn something about that event and it's aftermath. But this wasn't that kind of book - Clemantine takes strong exception to generalizing her experience, and she (rightly) believes the onus of educating us is not on her. This book is a deeply personal, and _individual_ memoir - tightly focused on one child's experience of fleeing the Rwandan genocide, her thoughts and struggles.
This is a messy and untidy book. Not much is explained about the context of the genocide - there's one short paragraph where she covers Belgian colonization and the Huti/Tutsi division, and another where she says that's the neat story the modern Rwandan government has created. It's never really clear where she stands on this - whom, if anybody, she blames for this. There's a lot of rage about how the aftermath of the genocide was handled, esp. the "forgive and forget" approach to moving on - but the author seems as incapable as anybody else of coming up with a way forward. A lot is unclear in this book, lots of questions unanswered (I was most curious about her current relationship with her faith and god) and the whole story is extremely fragmented. All this would have likely annoyed the crap out of me in fiction - but it somehow worked here. The fragmented story felt realistic - a stressed child isn't likely to have formed very many coherent memories after all. And the "modern" chapters, reflecting on the past and giving us some updates, did help clarify some things at least.
It helpt that the writing is really great, and Clemantine's raw emotions bleed though the narrative. I really appreciated it. I came away with very complex feelings about the author - while I have a lot of sympathy for what she had to go through, and the utter destruction of her childhood, I also don't _like_ her very much. And honestly I think that's the great success of this book - it made me think of her as a complete human being, rather than a victim of circumstances who is to be pitied and coddled.