The Girl Who Smiled Beads, A Story of War and What Comes After By Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil 276 pp. Crown Publishers, 2018
I have been wanting to read Clemantine Wamariya’s memoir “The Girl Who Smiled Beads” since it was published in 2018. Now that I’ve finally finished it, here are my thoughts. The 276-page book is both inspiring and controversial.
The title itself comes from an old Rwandan folktale called “Umukobwa Useka Amasaro Agaseseka” that Wamariya’s beloved childhood nanny, Mukamana, often told her when she was a little girl playing happily in her courtyard in Kigali, unaware of the turmoil to come.
Wamariya’s story begins with her happy childhood in Rwanda, abruptly disrupted at six when she and her sister, Claire, escaped the 1994 genocide. Their journey through the harsh realities of refugee life took them across Africa: Burundi, Congo, Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, and South Africa.
Each place brought its own hardships, and now and then some human kindness, such as the generosity of a Congolese woman, Mama Ndebele, who tenderly braided her hair, and a wise elder in a Burundian refugee camp who distracted children from the “cholera-rotten latrine” with stories.
The memoir chronicles not only Wamariya’s journey through these places but also her psychological and emotional one. The narrative weaves through her resettlement in the United States under a program for genocide survivors in 2000, her adjustment to life in a Chicago middle school, and her eventual rise to Yale University. Her story caught the attention of influential figures, including Oprah and President Obama, and she has become a model of resilience and hope, especially for young girls navigating the aftermath of trauma.
Wamariya is a gifted storyteller, and the book is hard to put down. She is very good at showing complicated emotions in the middle of war and displacement.
However, the memoir is controversial for its intentional omission of key context. Throughout her childhood journey across Africa to her ultimate US resettlement and celebrity spotlight, Wamariya never says whether she and her family were Tutsis, the group targeted in the genocide, or moderate Hutus. This omission is significant given the memoir’s implications that she is a genocide survivor, a claim never directly stated but implied through public appearances and the book’s framing.
Furthermore, the early chapters portray the genocide as generalized chaos, lacking clarity on perpetrators and victims. In reality, the genocide against the Tutsi was a meticulously organized extermination campaign, with Tutsis of all ages and genders as the primary targets based solely on their ethnicity. Extremist Hutus had predrawn target lists, set up checkpoints to identify Tutsis through ID cards or physical traits, and used radios to incite violence against all Tutsis. This calculated, systematic genocide contrasts with the chaotic fog of war that the memoir misleadingly evokes. The same vagueness extends to Wamariya’s family’s experience during the genocide. Although they all survived, the book says nothing about their experiences or backgrounds, which could have provided valuable context.
Wamariya’s account of traveling from Kigali to her grandmother in Butare during the genocide without incident contrasts sharply with the experiences of those targeted. This suggests her family may not have been direct targets of genocide. She also admits that she learned about the genocide against the Tutsi not from family or personal experience but from Philip Gourevitch’s book.
Some critics, myself included, find these omissions misleading. Describing the genocide as a chaotic war, without naming its systematic, targeted nature, leaves readers confused about what really happened. For Rwandan readers especially, the absence of such details raises doubts about the memoir’s authenticity in depicting the ruthless, meticulously orchestrated extermination of Tutsis that occurred in 1994. Some genocide survivors also formally raised concerns about Wamariya’s account of the genocide shortly after the memoir was published.
Still, the memoir shows the human side of refugee life, which politics often hides. Wamariya’s descriptions of life in refugee camps, her childhood memories in Kigali, and her adaptation to a new life in an affluent Chicago neighborhood are vivid and engaging. Claire and Mukamana, the nanny who told Wamariya Rwandan tales, bring warmth to the story.
Wamariya also reflects on the word “genocide” and how little it can say about what she lived through. The book stays deliberately vague on this, perhaps to make things easier for Western readers who know little about Rwanda.
In the end, despite what it leaves out, “The Girl Who Smiled Beads” is a moving story of a remarkable girl shaped by hardship, and it puts a human face on refugees. End.
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