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 19th 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.
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| Clemantine Wamariy |
