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siria 's review for:
The Girl Who Smiled Beads
by Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil
The Girl Who Smiled Beads is a powerful recounting of Clementine Wamariya's experiences as a refugee who together with her sister, Claire, fled the genocide in their native Rwanda in 1994. Interspersed with memories of her time in a series of refugee camps in various countries across southern Africa is a recounting of Wamariya's experiences after she, Claire, and Claire's young children were granted asylum in the United States in 2000.
Wamariya is fiercely resistant to any facile framing of her story. She doesn't want to be uplifting or inspirational; she doesn't want to be pitied or to perform the role of "grateful refugee." Instead, with determined honesty she documents how both her time in the camps and her time being raised by a white Evangelical family in the middle-class Chicago suburbs gave her different kinds of trauma and alienation to wrestle with. A vivid exploration of the human cost of war.
Wamariya is fiercely resistant to any facile framing of her story. She doesn't want to be uplifting or inspirational; she doesn't want to be pitied or to perform the role of "grateful refugee." Instead, with determined honesty she documents how both her time in the camps and her time being raised by a white Evangelical family in the middle-class Chicago suburbs gave her different kinds of trauma and alienation to wrestle with. A vivid exploration of the human cost of war.