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

Jun 19, 2018 Denise Cormaney rated it it was amazing

This book will stay with me forever. I normally avoid books like this because they're just too hard to read, but I'm so glad I got over myself; her story is especially relevant now. If you are privileged enough to have been born in the West while the Syrian refugee crisis is happening and children are being held in cages at our US borders...well, we need to bear witness to these stories. We cannot become numb, and we cannot lose sight of what can happen when we forget our common humanity.

Having This book will stay with me forever. I normally avoid books like this because they're just too hard to read, but I'm so glad I got over myself; her story is especially relevant now. If you are privileged enough to have been born in the West while the Syrian refugee crisis is happening and children are being held in cages at our US borders...well, we need to bear witness to these stories. We cannot become numb, and we cannot lose sight of what can happen when we forget our common humanity.

Having said all that, this book isn't especially graphic or horrifying. It doesn't need to be. Just hearing the basic outline of her story is enough to send your heart reeling. In fact, I got the sense that she might not have been ready to write this memoir quite yet. She is clearly still grappling with her life experience, from being a happy six year old child in a happy family in Rwanda to being separated from her parents and brother, migrating through seven African countries and their refugee camps with her sister, to finally ending up in the United States and getting a Yale education. The narrative jumps around in time, but you get the sense that is her real life experience, even today: one minute she is a young woman living in San Francisco flying on private jets to speak at national conferences, the next minute she is a scared little girl who fears everything she knows and trusts will be ripped away from her. It is the fabric of who she is.

She talks about Elie Wiesel's book Night and how much it meant to her; she read it countless times, and it was the first time she saw her experiences reflected back to her. So many people in America with kind and loving intentions tried to reach out and help her, but she couldn't let them in because they didn't understand her pain. Reading this book was her first experience in feeling truly seen. I love how this speaks to the importance of books (or any art, really). There is such power in reading someone's experience, seeing yourself reflected and saying, "Me too. I thought I was the only one."

The opening pages of the book tell how she first saw her parents during a surprise reunion on The Oprah Winfrey Show, 12 years after being separated from them during the Rwandan genocide. (I gotta say, Oprah doesn't look so good here.) She was invited onto Oprah's show because she was one of fifty winners of a high school essay contest about Elie Wiesel's book Night; Wiesel was a guest on that show. I'm so glad she got to meet him and speak with him at other conferences! The power of books! I have to wonder if other traumatized people will read her book and feel similarly seen.

There were a few passages in the book that really stood out to me:

"It's strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out. No other place takes you in. You are unwanted, by everyone. You are a refugee."

"In the middle of that first night in the pastor's house, when I woke to go to the bathroom, I climbed the stairs, opened the refrigerator, and stared. I'd seen huge refrigerators like this one only in magazines, and on TV. I was amazed and impressed, and I could not stop thinking that if only our neighbors in the slum in Zambia could see this, they'd be so appalled. How could one place have so much excess while in another, just a plane ride away, people starved? Freddy had twiggy arms and a big round tummy from being malnourished. His body, here, now, would be fed and fixed. There were so many Freddys in the world."

I wish this young woman well. I cannot imagine going through what she's been through and seeing what she's seen. I hope our country will continue to provide safety and opportunity to refugees seeking asylum from war and violence. I hope we never forget how privileged we are by the sheer luck of where we were born. I hope we never forget our common humanity. ...more

3 likes · Like · see review

Apr 02, 2019 Amy (Bossy Bookworm) rated it really liked it

Shelves: immigrant-life, memoir-biography-autobiography, africa

Wow. Wamariya writes beautifully and brutally honestly about her journey of fleeing from Rwanda and through six other African countries—with her tough, hustling older sister Claire—during and after the Rwandan genocide. She recalls her experiences through her childlike point of view, which allows for a painfully pure set of painful memories, betrayals, horrors, and sometimes a steeled numbness. She shares her views of the world, her often jarring experiences in the US—with her sister and family ...more

Like · see review