The Girl Who Smiled Beads Summary
Clemantine_Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil

The Girl Who Smiled Beads Overview

Clemantine Wamariya's first person memoir, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, traces Clemantine's struggle to survive the Rwandan genocide. After fleeing her hometown of Kigali, Rwanda, Clemantine and her sister Claire wandered through seven African countries over the course of six years. Even after moving to America, Clemantine experienced a profound sense of dislocation. The narrative's fractured structure enacts Clemantine's disjointed childhood and adolescence, and her search to piece together the fragments of her past. The text explores themes including, survival, loss, and identity.