The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

Wamariya is only six years old when her parents send her and Claire to her grandmother’s house three hours away to escape the genocide; shortly after, she and Claire are forced to flee her grandmother’s house, marking the beginning of a six-year journey through seven African countries. They assume their parents are dead, only to be reunited with them after 12 years. Wamariya describes the exhaustion of walking miles across the countryside, the desperation of hiding from soldiers and immigration officers, and the fear of those who would take advantage of them. She also describes the physical horrors of refugee camps, where food is often scarce and inedible, sanitation is near impossible, disease is rampant, and suffering is commonplace. She sees dead bodies in the camps and in rivers. She spends much of her day waiting in line for food that will make her sick. She becomes so “consumed with survival” that she forgets how to “enjoy pleasure” (76). Her body becomes a burden, the necessary care she must take of it “a never-ending battle” (58). They are forced to live with strangers, accept charity, and take great risks to cross lakes and take midnight bus rides.

The pain of being a refugee is not only physical. Wamariya desperately misses her parents and her brother; she and other refugees search for their loved ones, wondering if they survived. In a camp where one is identified merely by a unit number, “[y]ou had to try to hang on to your name” and “to stay a person” (42). Despite telling people her name so as not to forget who she is, Wamariya loses herself anyway, drifting further and further from the little girl she was in Kigali. As she and Claire travel around the continent, Wamariya feels like “a feather, molted and mangled, drifting through space” (113). Later, when she and her family are reunited, they struggle to connect, for “[n]one of [them] were the same people who’d lived together in that house in Kigali” (129). Being a refugee steals Wamariya’s humanity and her identity. It also steals her hope: She writes that being in a refugee camp is being “in a horrible groove” in which “nothing gets better” (73). Even worse, refugees are blamed for their own suffering. They are seen as being victims “due to some inherent, irrevocable weakness” (118).

Wamariya’s experiences make being vulnerable in new relationships difficult. She grows to love her life in Uvira, Zaire, and to be comfortable with Rob’s family, and she is devastated when they are forced to move, unwilling to begin life with new people once again. She decides she “made a mistake in Uvira” (89) and that she will not make herself emotionally vulnerable again. When she moves to America, she struggles to accept kindnesses because she and Claire have learned to be wary of people offering charity—people inevitably demand repayment at the most inconvenient times—and because she is overwhelmed by the excess of food, comfort, and luxury of her peers. She also feels alienated because her peers cannot imagine the pain she has endured. When she speaks to a high school class, she deliberately describes her life “as an adventure” because it “conveyed nearly nothing” (107), to avoid being burdened with their pity. When the students ask her superficial questions and make insensitive comments, she feels “consumed” by her story, as if to the students she is “foreign” and “exotic” (108). At Yale she offends fellow classmates by scolding them for speculating about hypothetical situations she has actually lived through. Her frustration with being objectified continues as she grows into adulthood: Though she finds satisfaction in speaking for the Holocaust Museum and other organizations, she knows she is expected to “assume this identity: Oprah’s special genocide survivor” (160). She is reluctant to talk about her story because she does not want to be objectified, her experiences minimized; however, internalizing her suffering makes her feel angry and lost.

Wamariya’s memoir is subtitled A Story of War and What Comes After. It describes the experience of being a refugee and, afterward, the struggle to rebuild one’s life and reconcile the past and the future.

Claire and Wamariya differ in their approach to surviving as refugees. Whereas Claire continuously wants to move, anticipating danger and fearing growing comfortable in a life that is less than what she deserves, Wamariya prefers to remain where she has established routines. Claire, as the older sister, takes the initiative to seek work or start black market businesses to earn what money she can, leaving Wamariya behind to tend to the fire or watch her children. Claire’s ingenuity frequently helps ensure their survival. She marries Rob because, in a life where “[t]here is no path for improvement” (73), marriage is “a ticket out” (74). In Ngozi she sings the one English song she knows so she will be given a job. In Dzaleka she bargains with a man to buy a goat, and she sells the meat to other refugees. In Maputo she buys pasta from a man in town and resells it for a profit in camp. Claire keeps one nice outfit at all times so she can look nice when seeking work; she learns to find someone who can translate for her and knock on doors, a tactic that lands her a job washing clothes in South Africa. Claire recognizes early that survival depends on self-sufficiency and flexibility: She is “determined to hold on to a shard of independence and not to be pitied” (193). Meanwhile, Wamariya learns where to do laundry and whom she can rely on, and she is hesitant to move to new places where she must learn how to survive all over again.

As she moves from one camp or city to another, and as she grows up in America and attends Yale University, Wamariya continues to ask herself, “How do I survive?” (158). As a refugee, Wamariya is “consumed with survival” (76) and with “making it through the day” (76); she must not only keep her body alive and healthy but also retain her identity. Even in America, when in new and frightening situations, she affects her “toughest, most defended refugee mindset” (179).

Wamariya describes the different ways people survive the traumas they experience as refugees. Her mother trusts in God. Claire clings to faith and to forgiveness, and she refuses to cede her independence (193). Men who feel emasculated sometimes abuse their wives, “overcompensat[ing] with wild displays of rage, open affairs” (200). Wamariya’s attempts to survive emotionally, to live with her memories and to assimilate in a new place where she feels alienated and objectified, endure long after her physical survival is ensured.

Claire and Wamariya learn that they must depend on themselves to survive, without relying on help from others. Claire warns Wamariya that “[t]here are no gifts” (65) and to never accept them, “especially from men” (65). As a refugee, Wamariya “had to be impermeable, self-sufficient,” and she “didn’t trust or accept help” because after helping you, people feel that “they have the right to take advantage of you later” (131). As a result, she finds “[t]he kindness and gift-giving” of their American benefactors to be “overwhelming” (39). When Wamariya and Claire arrive in America, they are wary of kindness because they have learned the importance of “surviv[ing] indebted to no one” (65). Wamariya is “contemptuous and cold” (58) with those who would help her, suspecting they are helping merely so they can “sleep at night” (58). She resists forming close friendships with other girls partly because she has learned that people are often nice before “they want to kill you” (64).

The Girl Who Smiled Beads contains many examples of kindness offered without ulterior motive, both during Wamariya’s time in Africa and after she moves to America. As refugees the sisters are the recipients of kindness offered willingly and without expectation of return. In Ngozi elderly refugees tell Wamariya stories and bring her into the forest to collect tomatoes. In Uvira people welcome them and give them clothing; Mama Nepele, noticing Wamariya misses meals, puts a plate aside for her. At the Dzaleka camp a woman shows her where to do laundry and where to shower. Linda, in South Africa, offers them meals, clothing, and company. A woman at the Lusaka market offers them water and shade from the sun. Once in Chicago, Wamariya and her family are taken in by the Beckers and the Beasleys, and church families donate food. The Thomas family adopts Wamariya as one of their own children. Though Claire has “an intuitive sense of the postcolonial aftershocks” in which “outsiders” went to Africa to “save” and “enlighten” (141), she convinces Wamariya, also wary of “the whole dynamic of giving and receiving” (140), to ask her boyfriend’s father to help them bring her mother over from Rwanda; the father, in turn, pays for their mother’s ticket. These examples indicate that goodness exists despite evil but that people are the same everywhere.

Wamariya describes how women are not only forced into restrictive standards but are also sexually objectified, their bodies weaponized and exploited. As a child, Wamariya is taught that women should stay invisible. Her mother, who had “absorbed the potent Catholic-Rwandan postcolonial ethos,” encourages Wamariya “to be proper” (12) and to squelch her curiosity, for girls are “supposed to be reserved” (13). As she grows, Wamariya learns that girls “are born with great value—not because of who you are […] but because of your body” (60). A girl’s value can be “stolen” by rape, which leaves a girl “ruined” and “destroyed” (61). Wamariya writes that she works hard “to erase that language of ruin” and that she “will not live in that story of ruin and shame” (61).

Claire also absorbs messages of traditional womanhood. She refuses to prostitute herself because their mother “talked in her Catholic way” about “how when you sleep with a man he takes something from you” (193). When Rob tells her return to Rwanda when she’s pregnant with her second child, Claire obeys, believing “she had to do what her husband wanted her to do” (155). Her struggle to break free of restraints placed on women is demonstrated in her buying chicken gizzards, usually reserved for men, when she receives her first big paycheck. By eating the food representative of men’s control over women, Claire feels that she is eating “victory” or “power” (151).

As a refugee, Wamariya learns that girls and women are targets and that she should never “trust or accept help, especially from men” who would then “feel you owe them” (130). In Zaire she listens as the women discuss what the soldiers “do to women” (168). Wamariya writes that “[r]ape is the story of women and war, girls and war, hundreds of thousands of mothers, daughters, sisters, grandmothers, cousins, and aunts in my country alone, hundreds of millions across the world” (246).

Wamariya’s experiences make it difficult for her to trust men; she tries to “reclaim [her] power” so she does not “fear men or need them to protect” her (246). When her boyfriend Ryan tells her he loves her, Wamariya believes he is “imposing his will” (246); she is hesitant to marry him because marriage, in her eyes, is “about possession” (252). Rebuilding herself as a strong woman who rejects patriarchal subjugation is one more way Wamariya must reconcile her past and her present.

One of Wamariya’s struggles in America is associating with her peers, who have been sheltered from the trauma she has experienced. Wamariya is bewildered by her teenaged peers, who seem to laugh randomly and do not have to do any chores. She is upset by the excess of food in the refrigerator, for she is reminded of the children in Zambia who do not have any food at all. She grows frustrated when her nieces and nephew spend their time watching television and refuse to help their grandmother wash dishes. She is taken aback by insensitive questions, and while she cries at the Vietnam War Memorial, her classmates, unmarred by the death she has witnessed, take photographs like tourists. However, she recognizes that in living with the Thomases in an affluent neighborhood, she herself is privileged in contrast with Claire, for she “had started to forget what it was like to suffer, to worry about basic needs” (158).

Wamariya faces privilege head on while at Hotchkiss, when a philosophy professor poses a “thought experiment” involving whether a ferry captain should throw a young or old passenger overboard when the boat begins to sink. Having actually survived a journey on a sinking boat, Wamariya is horrified that classmates see it as “an abstract question” (182) and asks “what gives [them] the right to even talk” (183). As someone who has “picked bugs out of [her] feet,” she does not want to be “lectured about human ethics by a man in corduroys” or listen to the musings of students “who knew nothing but comfort and were headed to careers at Goldman Sachs” (184). At Yale Wamariya finds that few black students can relate to her experiences. In the Afro-American Cultural Center, students whose parents are “financially stable enough to send them to twelve years of school” are frustrated when she discusses “the less seemly parts of African culture,” believing her comments to represent “a white man’s view of the African mess” (214). Wamariya often feels lost and misunderstood, disconnected from those to whom the suffering of war is abstract.

In her public speaking engagements, Wamariya faces not only minimization but also exploitation. She finds that some people are disappointed that she is “not defeated,” for it prevents them from being “more powerful” (241). She notes that when Aleppo is under siege, “[t]he world cared deeply about refugees” for only “thirty seconds” (242) because a photo of a drowned child goes viral on social media. In these incidents, the common thread is the lack of true understanding of what genocide entails and a profession of caring that belies a superficial grasp of reality.

Wamariya believes that “[w]ith privilege comes a nearly unavoidable egoism and so much shame,” and that “the coping mechanism is to give” (178). Unfortunately, giving often leads to a “hierarchy” that “instill[s] entitlement” (178). The solution, she states, is sharing, for only through sharing does one avoid using privilege to curry favor or enact a savior fantasy.