The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After in Our Shared Shelf

Apr 25, 2018 Lacey Louwagie rated it really liked it

Shelves: memoir, 2018-pop-sugar-challenge

When I was reading this book, I kept thinking about pop culture's (now waning) obsession with dystopias. I wanted everyone who had ever "enjoyed" the vicarious horror of a dark fantasy world to read this, to realize that such dark horrors are not just of the imagination and for our entertainment. The world is full of people who have lived through the unspeakable, who have had their childhoods and psyches shattered by things that I can't even bear to look at on a TV or computer screen. This is ju ...more

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May 02, 2018 Allison James-Garcia rated it it was amazing

"I think back to this often in trying to make sense of the world - how there are people who have so much and people who have so little, and how I fit in with them both. Often I find myself trying to bridge the two worlds, to show people, either the people with so much or the people with so little, that everything is yours and everything is not yours. I make to make people understand that boxing ourselves into cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion - anything, really - comes from a pov "I think back to this often in trying to make sense of the world - how there are people who have so much and people who have so little, and how I fit in with them both. Often I find myself trying to bridge the two worlds, to show people, either the people with so much or the people with so little, that everything is yours and everything is not yours. I make to make people understand that boxing ourselves into cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion - anything, really - comes from a poverty of min, a poverty of imagination. The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves.

Survival, true survival of the body and soul, requires creativity, freedom of thought, collaboration. You might have time and I might have land. You might have ideas and I might have strength. You might have a tomato and I might have a knife. We need each other. We need to say: I honor the things you respect and I value the things you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me. Nobody is better than anybody else. Nobody is who you think they are at first glance. We need to see beyond the projections we cast onto each other. Each of us is so much grander, more nuance, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves.:

"...I've seen enough to know that you can be human with a mountain of resources and you can be human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way. Everywhere, and especially at both extremes, you can find monsters. Its at the extremes that people are most scared - scared of deprivation, on one end; and scared of their privilege, on the other. With privilege comes a nearly unavoidable egoism and so much shame, and often the coping mechanism is to give. This is great and necessary, but giving, as a framework, creates problems. You give, I take; I take, I give - both scenarios establish hierarchy. Both instill entitlement.

The only road to equality - a sense of common humanity; peace - is sharing, my mother's orange. When we share, you are not using your privilege to get me to line up behind you. When we share, you are not insisting on being my savior."

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