The girl who smiled beads book club guide discussion questions, quotes, plot points, related links

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes Next by Clemantine Wamariya1

Clemantine’s Childhood

Clemantine started noticing little things change during her childhood: “First I was forbidden to play in the mango tree… Next I was forbidden to play with my friend Neglita… The radio was on all the time, a horrendous hiss… Houses were robbed, simply to prove that they could be robbed. The robbers left notes demanding oil, or sugar, or a TV. I asked the adults to explain, but their faces had turned to concrete, and they nudged me back into childish concerns.” Pg 19­20

Clemantine noticed that their curtains were always drawn, her father stopped working past nightfall, they never had any dinner guests, her mother stopped going to church, her and her siblings all slept in the same room as it had the smallest window, and their electricity and water weren’t reliable. Pg 21

Clemantine and Claire left for their grandmother’s house in Butare (south of Kigali near the Burundi border). While at their grandmother’s, they heard a knock on the front door and she had all of the children run out and escape. Pg 23­25

“We walked for hours, until everything hurt, not toward anything, just away. We rubbed the red­brown mud and eucalyptus leaves on our bodies so we could disappear. Pricklers grated my ankles. We walked up and over and around and down, so many hills. We heard laughing and screaming and pleading and crying and then cruel laughing again.” Pg 25 “It’s strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out. No other place takes you in.

You are unwanted, by everyone. You are a refugee.” Pg 29

“Everywhere you looked you saw people turned to stone. If you touched them, they’d crumble to dust. So they remained still and silent, trying not to shatter. You cannot tell the story: I lost my children, husband, my whole family ­ I have no idea where on earth I am .” Pg 43

Lice ran rampant in the refugee camps ­ they invaded their bodies, clothing, and tents. Pg 44

Clemantine tried to maintain order while at the refugee camps. She tried to keep the smaller children clean and clothed: “Parents complained to Claire: Your younger sister is terrorizing our kids . I could not help myself. I couldn’t stand the naked two­ and three­year olds. They looked to me like strays ­ filthy, unloved, drooling, bugs crawling on their faces, flies around their eyes that nobody bothered to swat away.” Pg 48

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The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes Next ­ Doubleday Canada ­ April 24 2018 ­288 Pages

They mainly ate maize for every meal. They found a farmer nearby who helped grind it into a flour. Once a month they received a vitamin and a biscuit. Pg 49

Claire wakes up with dysentary one morning. Symptoms are gruesome: “Someone wakes up with a fever. Throws up. Their bowels explode. They scream and scream until they’re too weak to scream. They shit blood. By night all the water has drained from their body and they’ve lost seven pounds.” Pg 70

At age 17, Claire is being pursued at the refugee camp by Rob. He tells her he wants to marry her and she can go to school. She asks him if he thinks she’d be better off pregnant while miserable at the camp. Pg 73

“Pleasure. I could barely remember how to enjoy pleasure. For a year I’d been so consumed with survival ­­ though not that, really. I was consumed with something much smaller and more banal: making it through the day.” Pg 76

Claire marries Rob. They temporarily move to Uvira, Zaire and live with Rob’s family. They forget for a bit what refugee life was like. Pg 82

At age 8, Clemantine takes care of her niece, Mariette, all day while Claire goes out. She becomes very protective of Mariette: “I changed Mariette’s diaper fifteen times a day. I wanted her bottom to be dry, very dry. I worried we didn’t have enough powder. I didn’t want Mariette to get a rash… I allowed most on one to touch her. When Claire returned at the end of the day, I asked, “Have you washed your hands?” before I allowed her to nurse.” Pg 91

Claire, Clemantine, Rob, and Mariette flee from Zaire and end up Tanzania. They are refugees once again. Pg 109

“In a refugee camp, she knew well, others were invested in your suffering. Their jobs and self­worth depended on your continued abasement, on your commitment to residing in a social stratum below them, the same old neocolonial scheme. Many were American and Canadian; some were educated Africans, like Rob. You could see the surprise in aid workers faces when you upended their worldview by revealing that you, a refugee, spoke five languages or had aced calculus or ran a successful accounting firm.” Pg 117

Claire creates a black­market economy in the refugee camp from selling italian pasta. Pg 135

They leave for South Africa as it was rumored it was easy to make money there and get a job: “{Claire} had a routine by now. You go. You find someone who speaks the language. You put on your best outfit and you knock on doors asking for opportunity, never for money. You work hard.

You don’t steal.” Pg 146­148

“{Claire} was also never willing to sell her body, which I was now old enough to realize was a miracle. I did not judge the other women and girls around me, who wore too much makeup and heels to advertise their trade ­ they had nothing and needed to survive.” Pg 193

“All the women in the compound were afraid of {Rob}, though the truth is almost all the women were afraid of almost all the men. Women were used to the idea that they would suffer, that they would feel low.” Pg 200

The Politics

The Hutus vs the Tutsis Pg 97

We Wish to Inform You We Will Be Killed with Our Families ­ Phillip Gourevitch

“Almost eighty years before the genocide, the Belgians colonized Rwanda and infected the country with their cruel, bogus science of eugenics. Before that, Rwandans lived together in relative peace. Then the Belgians racialized the country. They measured people’s noses and skulls. They created and consulted pigmentation charts, dividing the citizens into Tutsis, Hutus, and Twas.” Pg 98

Once the Belgians created the three Rwandan ethnicities, they established identity cards and created social and political policies designed to create turmoil among the ethnicities. Pg 98

The Belgians left the country but their hatred had already started to spread. The rest of the world stayed out of the Rwandan conflict: “All those countries that ended World War II by saying never again turned their backs. We Africans could kill each other if we wanted. We were not anybody else’s problem.” Pg 99

Night ­ Elie Wiesel

Life in Chicago

After Clemantine and Claire arrived in Chicago, they had a hard time trusting strangers: “Everyone was so nice, awash in a sense of purpose. But I was so bruised and so mistrustful of others that I didn’t understand why.” Pg 36

One of their host families tried to help Clemantine make sense of her past by drawing her family home. Clemantine couldn’t participate: “I did not cooperate. I could not. I did not feel, not yet, that she knew what she was asking of me. I did not want to scratch back through my memory. I did not even really know how to access that once­safe place with the outdoor kitchen, the red roof, the birds­of­paradise. Nostalgia was a destructive exercise, a jab at a still­tender would, stitched up poorly.” Pg 39

Clemantine went from being invisible to “this strange creature: an American teenager.” Yet she wasn’t like her classmates since she didn’t have a traditional parent set­up. No one checked if she did her homework or went to school conferences or took her to the doctor, etc.. Pg 53

Clemantine moved in with the Thomases and Claire’s live became more chaotic. Claire’s marriage was ending, she had multiple jobs, and was raising 3 children. Pg 56

After 9/11, Clemantine had a hard time showing sympathy to Mrs. Thomas. She told her: “ This happens to people everywhere .” Mrs. Thomas was shocked. Pg 57

“I clipped obituaries out of the Chicago Tribune and kept a list of the names of the dead. I resented and envied the acknowledgment. These dad were lucky enough to be memorialized and mourned. Here they were, named individually in the paper, each with a specific job, family, and hometown.” Pg 58

“I don’t know if I want to have children. In Rwanda, if you’re female, you are born with a great value… Because of your body, when you marry, your family will get cows. Because of your family, when you marry, your family will get land. Even for a city girl in Kigali, this holds true. Yet at any moment the value of your body can be stolen. You can be ruined ­ konona , that’s the Kinyarwanda word for rape… Once you’re ruined, that’s it, that’s what the word tells you. The damage is permanent. You have no value and you will never get it back. The evil that was done to your body is now intrinsic to your being.” Pg 60­61

“I did not understand the word genocide then. I resent and revile it now. The word is tidy and efficient. It holds no 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.” Pg 93

The sisters find out that their parents are still alive and living in Kigali but that their lives have dramatically changed: their father lost his business, they no longer had a home. Pg 129

Claire calls to tell Clemantine that their brother, Pudi, is sick with meningitis and soon passes away: “I lay back on the mattress and cried an ocean of tears. So many people had been lost, so many people killed. Pudi was the first person that we mourned.” 137

“Claire had an intuitive sense of the postcolonial aftershocks, the lingering effects of outsiders coming in to save , enlighten, and modernize Africa. The colonists, the aid workers, the NGOs ­ they’re all in a single progression: paternalistic foreigners, assuming they are better and brighter, offering shiny, destabilizing, dependence­producing gifts. How can one accept anything from so­called rescuers when their predecessors helped your people destroy one another?” Pg 141

The Oprah Show + After

Clemantine submits an essay to Oprah and is one of many winners. At the taping of the show, Oprah singles out Clemantine and asks if she was ever able to find her parents. Oprah surprises her and her sister, Claire, by bringing her parents out for an on­camera reunion. Pg 1­6

After the taping, The Wamariya family goes back to Claire’s house. Clemantine on her new siblings: “I sat on Claire’s couch, looking at my new siblings, the ones who’d replaced me and Claire. They looked so perfect, their skin unblemished, their eyes alight, like an excellent fictional representation of a family that could have been mine. But they didn’t know me and I didn’t know them, and the gap between us was a billion miles wide.” Pg 7

In 2014, Clemantine travels back to Kigali for an event commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide. She was the youngest in the group and the only Rwandan. Pg 229

Clemantine started speaking in public often: “The transaction that resulted from sharing my story often bothered me. Some wanted to help me, and could not stand the idea that I was not defeated. Panic flashed across their faces when I suggested to those who considered themselves more powerful than me that the transaction could go both ways. That I could help them too.” Pg 241

Clemantine treats her mother to a trip to London as a means to reconnect. She challenges her mother on her religious beliefs. Pg 258­259

“I owe {Claire} my life. Every time I need to summon my toughest, most self­actualized persona, I channel her. She has such control, an unwavering sense of her right to exist, a bedrock belief that that her story, no matter how dark, matters just as much as anyone else’s, and she instilled that value in me.” Pg 260

Discussion Questions

How has the Oprah show changed Clemantine and Claire’s life?

“It’s strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out. No other place takes you in.

You are unwanted, by everyone. You are a refugee.” Pg 29 Has this book altered or affirmed your personal stance on refugees today? How and why?

Discuss Claire.

“All of Uvira started calling her (Claire) dada , the Swahili word for sister. That terrified me. Our grandma had told us: you lose your language and you disappear .” Pg 85 What is the significance behind language and how has it impacted Clemantine and Claire?

After finishing the book, how do you feel about the word ‘genocide ?’ (See page 92 for reference). Has your perception of the word changed at all?

Do you think the Rwandan genocide can be compared the Holocaust or the Cambodian killing fields? Again, has your perception changed at all since finishing the book?

Discuss life as a refugee: the food/nutrition, the search for livelihood, the living conditions, the emotional and psychological impact.

“In a refugee camp, {Claire} knew well, others were invested in your suffering. Their jobs and self­worth depended on your continued abasement, on your commitment to residing in a social stratum below them, the same old neocolonial scheme.” Pg 117 Discuss.

Literature has had a great impact on Clemantine’s life and helped form her worldview ­­ which authors have influenced her and how do you see their ideals and worldview show up in Clemantine’s memoir?

When Clemantine is in high school, she wants to model. When she graduates college she spends a great deal of time public speaking. What does “being seen” mean to her?

How does Clemantine view religion? How has that changed as she’s grown older and matured?

Discuss the Rwandan fable about the girl who smiled beads and why you think that was chosen as the title of this memoir.

“Rwandans believe we’re comfortable with silence. But silence accommodates hate.” Pg 246 How does silence accommodate hate?

Related Articles

Vogue ­ In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, an Astonishing Memoir of Childhood as a Rwandan Refugee

Washington Post ­ A moment on ‘Oprah’ made her a human rights symbol. She wants to be more than that.

NYT ­ The Courage of Small Things