Rwanda - The Girl Who Smiled Beads

Country: Rwanda
Book: The Girl Who Smiled Beads
Author: Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth Weil
Publication Year: 2018
Genre: Memoir

We have to talk about Rwanda. In doing so, we have to talk about genocide.

We’ve talked before about the tendency in western media to think of Africa only in terms of war and famine. However, the murder of 800,000 people over a ten month period in 1994 is important. We can’t and we shouldn’t avoid talking about it any more than we can avoid talking about other acts of mass murder: the Holocaust, the Belgian Congo (see: Sweden), the Balkans and the Killing Fields of the Khmer Rouge. None of these events are unconnected. If we talked about them more, we might prevent them happening with the depressing frequency with which they still occur.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads is Clemantine Wamariya’s memoir about surviving the Hutus slaughter of the Tutsis; of fleeing Rwanda with her sister and being driven through slums and refugee camps in Burundi, Zaire (now Congo), Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania and South Africa; of gaining refugee status and making a life for herself in the United States.

We have, of course, been here before. Individuals who survived unspeakable horrors in Afghanistan (see: Afghanistan), Cambodia (see: Cambodia), Vietnam (see: Vietnam) and Zimbabwe (see: Zimbabwe), and found refuge in the United States. We will see this again and again before the end of this project We can only hope that by the time we end, America will return to being a place of safe refuge.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads takes a dual narrative structure. Alternating chapters describe Wamariya’s life growing up in America from the age of 12. The other half recounts fleeing Rwanda from the age of 6. The latter is a tale of survival. The former is a tale of survivor’s guilt.

There is hope amongst the horror. The book opens with Wamariya and her sister, Claire, being reunited with their family on The Oprah Show. That appearance makes them famous enough in Rwanda to be able to secure visas to bring their family to America. Wamariya goes on to talk about her experiences at other events organised by Oprah and later working for the Obama administration.

At the other end of the spectrum is the trauma of Wamariya's early life. Walking past innumerable bodies she was too young to understand were dead. Being upended countless times, just when her life seemed to be achieving some kind of stability. Experiencing even more conflict and the selfishness of her sister’s husband; a Congolese aid worker who pursued the teenage refugee until she agreed to marry him. Of attending school sporadically when not looking after her sister’s children or being on the move to yet another country.

One can only imagine what such early trauma does to a child. Or to a grown adult. It is only when she achieves relative stability in America, spending the week with a foster family and staying with her sister at weekends, that Wamariya starts to understands what she has survived.

 
At school, she reads Elie Wiesel’s Dark (an author we will very much be talking about when we come to Romania) and comes to see his experiences at Buchenwald as inseparable from her own. Writing an essay on Dark brings her to the attention of Oprah. It is as one of 50 young essayists chosen to meet Wiesel on The Oprah Show that she is reunited with her family. We really do make our own luck.

What separates The Girl Who Smiled Beads from other memoirs we have looked at in this series is that Wamariya doesn’t seek to underplay her experiences or present herself as a stoic survivor. She goes through perfectly understanding feelings of anger and anxiety; of shutting herself off from her family and the world at various points. The frustration at being treated as some sort of side show is relatable. Her admission that therapy didn’t help is refreshing.

One of the most important chapters (Chapter 6) is the one in which Wamariya talks about the word genocide. She hates and reviles the word, she says. It is a clinical, dehumanising word. A neat, tidy thing for a sprawling, monstrous series of acts. When people dismiss what happened in Rwanda as being like the Holocaust, she writes:

“No, I want to scream, it’s not like the Holocaust. Or the killing field in Cambodia. Or ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. There’s no catchall term that proves you understand[…] You cannot line up the atrocities like a marching set. You cannot bear witness with a single word.”

She is right, of course. Language is imprecise. Language is a dull instrument with which to carve out our experiences. Two hundred and seventy five pages isn’t enough to describe a life, especially one that has seen such things. One word isn’t enough to describe the murder of millions of people.

A single death, as Stalin’s psychopathic saying goes, is a tragedy; a million is a statistic. It is also predicated on who are the victims and who are the perpetrators. You only have to look at the differing coverage of Russia’s bombing of Ukraine and Israel’s bombing of Gaza to see this. The difference in language. Active and accusative in one case. Passive and negative in the other.

What I didn’t know before reading this book is that the distinction between the Hutus and the Tutsis isn’t tribal, like much of the rest of Africa, but arbitrary. The Belgians, who, as Wamariya notes, did incalculable damage for such a small country, brought the full force of 19^th  century race theory to bear upon their central African colonies. They measured the skin tone and facial features of the people and divided them into three groups, the majority Hutus, the minority Tutsis and the even smaller Twa peoples.

Depressingly, Rwanda has tried to use this as an excuse to downplay the killings. It wasn’t our fault, they say: it was the Belgians who did this. Belgium and the rest of western Europe have more than enough for which they deserve condemnation. It is estimated Belgium killed 10 million Congolese during the colonial era and we will certainly discuss those atrocities again when we come to the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo. 

Yet Belgians did not carry out these killings. Rwandans did. It was a premeditated act. It was planned for years through propaganda and the stockpiling of weapons. The careful dehumanising of the Tutsi people by describing them as cockroaches and snakes. How could Clemantine Wamariya not find an analogue for what happened to her and her people in the writing of a Jewish concentration camp survivor? Rwanda is not the Holocaust. Yet the language on which both atrocities were constructed is the same.

Rwanda would like the world to think that everything is better now (with its 'Visit Rwanda' slogans plastered on the shirt arms of various European football teams'). Human rights organisations and electoral monitoring agencies tend to disagree. Rwanda is a de-facto one party state. The British government spent millions of pounds trying to set up a camp there to which to send asylum seekers. The change of government (ours, not theirs) thankfully ended the plan. No doubt much of the money ended up in back pockets at both ends of the transaction. 

One would hope an acceptance of the facts of the (with apologies to Wamariya) genocide, if not the responsibility for what happened, means the cries of ‘never again’ will be repeated, as they were after the liberation of the concentration camps . Though we continue to use that slogan in Europe, even as it happens again and again with our knowledge, consent and support.

As for Clemantine Wamariya, she seems to have come to terms with her experiences. No one ever gets over death, whether it be the loss of a parent, a sibling or a nation. We just grow accustomed to them not being here. ‘Time heals all wounds’ is an offensive cliché. Some scars never heal. They only harden.

Clemantine Wamariy

 

Nicaragua - La mujer habitada/El infinito en la palma de la mano

Country: Nicaragua
Book: La mujer habitada/El infinito en la palma de la mano
Author: Gioconda Belli
Publication Year: 1988/2008
Genre: Fiction

For people above a certain age, mention of Nicaragua stirs up memories of the Sandinistas, the Contras and the Iran-Contra scandal. Punk fans came to know the Sandinistas through The Clash album (Sandinista). For people on the left, Nicaragua was a rare example of a Latin American country standing up to the aggression of the United States and winning.

The reality, as so often, is less clear cut and Nicaragua is a sad reminder that revolutions rarely change anything for the vast majority of the population who engage in them. Often all that happens is that those in power are replaced with the social strata immediately below them. Little else changes.

We see this in the revolutions of France, America, Russia, India, as well as countless smaller countries. The same disparity between rich and poor remains. Only the faces at the top table change. George Orwell’s brilliantly parodies this in his political fable, Animal Farm.

For anyone who wasn’t alive or self-aware in the 1980s, the brief history of Nicaragua is as follows. Like most Latin American counties, Nicaragua was colonised by the Spanish in the early sixteenth century after Columbus first explored the coastline in 1502. Nicaragua became an independent republic in 1838.

Between 1912 and 1933, Nicaragua was occupied by the United States as it looked to build a canal through the territory, before it switched its focus to Panama. The withdrawal of US Marines was followed by military dictatorship under the Somoza family that lasted from 1937 until 1979 with the victory of the Sandinista National Liberation Front.

Although the new government was initially supported by the United States under the administration of Jimmy Carter, the election of Ronald Regan changed matters. The Regan administration supported the Contra rebels, funnelling millions of dollars into their activities, in which they committed the usual kinds of atrocities one finds in guerilla warfare (the Sandinistas also committed such acts). The CIA provided much logistical support.

The murkiest, yet most well known, episode in this story came in 1983, after Congress voted to cease funding to the Contras. Individuals within the US government, most famously Colonel Oliver North, clandestinely sold weapons to Iran and used that money to continue funding the Contras.

Although many believed the Regan administration, and even Regan himself, was directly involved in the scandal, no link was ever proven (if you want to find evidence, you have to actually look for it, which was never going to happen). What is perhaps less well known is that the CIA then continued to support the Contras by helping them traffic crack cocaine into the United States.

The tragedy of Nicaragua is perhaps best exemplified by Daniel Ortega. A member of the Sandinistas, he became President of Nicaragua in 1985. He was voted out of office in 1990 in favour of the United States preferred candidate, Violeta Chamorro.

In 2007, at the age of 61, Ortega became president for a second time. He has been President ever since through corruption and the dismantling of Nicaragua’s democratic institutions. Since February 2025, he has shared the presidency with his wife, Rosario Murillo, an act which itself speaks volumes. It should be noted that despite being opposed by the United States during his first stint as President, America has broadly supported Ortega’s administration since he became a dictator. Como siempre. 

Nicaragua is a lesson in how damaging the polarisation of politics can be and how naïve people on the left tend to see things. After all, Ortega was problematic from the start. The land reforms instigated by the Sandinistas in the 1980s resulted in the forced expulsion of 10,000 indigenous people from their ancestral lands. There have been several accusations of sexual abuse against Ortega, including from his own step daughter. And as we have already noted, the Sandinista National Liberation Front committed atrocities, even if not on the scale of the Contras (the Contra war is estimated to have killed 30,000 people).

It is perhaps a fact of the post 9/11 world that those on the left are now less inclined to support armed opposition groups like the Sandinistas: A recognition that Mau’s pronouncement that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun is dangerous nonsense. Countries with a history of revolution often develop into more equitable societies as a result (compare France with the UK for instance), but at what cost? It’s a basic principle of physics that things which undergo a rapid change in one direction are likely to swing back the opposite way just as fast. Lasting change happens incrementally, because democracy, real, actual democracy, happens at a glacial pace.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. What does any of this have to do with Gioconda Belli? Well, nothing. And everything. Belli become a member of the Sandinista movement in 1970. She was forced into exile (not for the last time) in the mid-70s before returning to Nicaragua shortly before the Sandinista victory in 1979. She became their press liaison officer in 1982 and Director of State Communications in 1984.

In the 2010s, Belli became a vocal opponent of Ortega’s dictatorship, which resulted in her being stripped of her Nicaraguan citizenship in 2023. She currently lives in exile in Madrid. She is not the first Reading the World writer forced into exile in Spain (see: Afghanistan and Uruguay).

Belli’s first novel, La mujer habitada, published in 1988, harks back to the era of the Somoza dictatorship. Part magical realism, part political intrigue, the main narrative takes place in a thinly disguised Latin American country under the dictatorship of the ‘Gran General’. Lavinia, an architect, is hired to redesign the General’s country home. She is a somewhat reluctant member of the National Liberation Movement (Movimiento de Liberación Nacional). As work on the house progresses, so does a plot to assassinate the General.

They say write about what you know. As well as being a member of the Sandinistas, Belli trained as an architect. Maybe there is a whiff of wish fulfilment here. Though the book was written a decade after the fall of the Somoza regime. The assassination plot doesn’t go according to plan. Given how much build up occurs to its execution, this should come as little surprise to the reader.

The book is framed through the narrative of an indigenous spirit. This is where I'm afraid my intermediate Spanish comprehension, which, while good enough to understand and appreciate the novel’s broad strokes, is too unsophisticated to appreciate the subtleties of this character, breaks down. Though I do also wonder whether Belli, as the daughter of a well to do Nicaraguan family, isn’t guilty of cultural appropriation, especially given the forced expulsions of indigenous peoples by the Sandinista government. I honestly don’t know the answer to that question.

With that caveat, it’s a good book that captures the era and the fear in the streets of the military government. It is also a study in how people get drawn into the causes and criminal activity of family members. Lavinia’s husband is the one who is involved with the National Liberation Movement, but when he hides a compatriot shot by the police, Lavinia is drawn into their web. Her boss at the architectural firm is also part of the movement, who strong arms her into helping plot the General’s assassination.

La mujer habitada was Belli’s first novel and it should be treated as such. However, comparing first novels we have considered during this project, it’s a strong effort. And unlike, say, Yambo Ouologuem (see: Mali) or William Conton (see: The Gambia), Belli did go on to write further novels.

Skipping ahead twenty years, the second Belli novel under consideration, El infinito en la palma de la mano, is a different beast altogether. Taking its title from William Blake’s poem, Auguries of Innocence, the book is a retelling of the Garden of Eden story:

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

As someone who has written about William Blake in the past (see: Bruce Dickinson: The Chemical Wedding), I appreciate the reference. Blake himself took Biblical stories and contemporary events and reimagined them out of all recognition. See, for instance, his narrative poems, America: A Prophecy and Europe: A Prophecy, which are mythologised accounts of the American and French Revolutions, in which giants like Albion, Orc and Enitharmon fight for supremacy.

Belli does something similar, taking the story of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden and reintroducing elements that were edited out of the Biblical version. The story, of course, predates the Bible by centuries and, like many tales found in the book of Genesis, ultimately comes from Sumerian myth, filtered through the Babylonian empire to much of the Mediterranean world. The creation story where God makes man out of mud or clay, for instance, is a Sumerian tale found in both the second chapter of Genesis and in the Greek myth of Prometheus.

With El infinito en la palma de la mano, Belli essentially take Eden and moves it from the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, all the way to the jungles of Central America. It becomes less a suburb of Baghdad and more a national park in Costa Rica.

This gives a different flavour to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, where instead of wondering through the desert, they instead find themselves in dense, verdant jungle. The Eden story at the end of the day is a coming of age tale. The God who watches over Adam and Eve and walks with them in the garden is a thinly veiled parental figure, raising his charges to maturity. The expulsion, which the more zealously religious see as the greatest injustice to befall mankind, is in fact a perfectly normal part of becoming an adult and starting out on one’s own. It is one more version of the hero’s journey, as outlined in Joseph Campbell’s landmark work, The Hero With a Thousand Faces.

Again, my Spanish is perhaps too unsophisticated to appreciate all of the references and it is definitely a book I want to revisit once my comprehension improves a little more. I think I picked up on most of the themes.

The Garden of Eden story, of course, does not end with the expulsion, but with Cain’s murder of Abel and that act too is played out in the jungles of Central America. Adam and Eve had other children and they are implicated in Abel’s death. Rather like John Steinbeck’s version of the Genesis story in East of Eden, the story is fleshed out considerably from the thin gruel found in the Bible. Having read the book in the last year, it is surprising to find how many of its most famous and most widely propagated stories are narrated in no more than a few sentences. It takes writers like Belli and Steinbeck to make them seem compelling.

There is another line from Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, that perhaps appealed to the author of El infinito en la palma de la mano:

A dog starv'd at his master's gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.

Indeed, the poem is filled with lines of condemnation for Blake’s age and for ours. Perhaps El infinito en la palma de la mano is not so much about the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, and more an escape from our crumbling civilisations: to return to the wilderness and begin the process once again, free from the corruption that has befallen the state.

Men like Ortega promise change and invariably bring more of the same. There is nothing new or special in that. He is one more revolutionary using the mass of the people to get himself elected and then turning around to take a flamethrower to the ladder on which he ascended. There are simply too many like him to list here, but we can guarantee that for each new country we visit it, we will find history littered with their crimes and broken promises.

On the other hand, men like Ortega are mortal. Eventually they die and their power dissipates. Their hand picked successors are rarely able to consolidate power (North Korea being an exception). Nicaragua will survive Ortega. Then, like Belli’s Adam and Eve, it can step from beneath that paternalistic hand and remake itself. 

Gioconda Belli