Point of View

Clemantine Wamariya writes The Girl Who Smiled Beads from her first person point of view. By employing the first person, Clemantine claims narrative authority over her own story, using her own words and voice. In Chapter 6, when Clemantine was in eighth grade, she read Elie Wiesel's book Night for the first time. She says she was "alarmed and comforted by the book, because Wiesel "expressed thoughts [she] was ashamed to think" and "truths [she] was afraid to acknowledge" (95). Each time she had tried to understand her story through conversation she "had been shut down" (96). When she asked questions, her mother, father, and sister all told her, "You talk too much" (96). The result was a profound sense of dislocation and confusion. Clemantine was kept from understanding what she experienced, from revisiting her memories in order to make sense of them in the context of her evolving...