The Girl Who Smiled Beads Quotes

“I've seen enough to know that you can be a human with a mountain of resources and you can be a human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“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 nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“I could no longer discern what was real and what was fake. Everything, including the present, seemed to be both too much and nothing at all.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“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.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“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. Claire and I always looked for the sharers, the people who just said, “I have sugar, I have water. Let’s share”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“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 that you respect and I value the things you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion—anything, really—comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination. The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“When you don't belong to a country, the world decides that you don't deserve a thing.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“Two people in pain are magnets, repelling each other. We cannot or will not reach across the space to connect.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“When you're traumatized, your sense of self, your individuality, is beaten up. Your skin color, your background, your pain, your hope, your gender, your faith, it's all defiled. Those essential pieces of yourself are stolen. You, as a person, are emptied and flattened, and that violence, that theft, keeps you from embodying a life that feels like your own. To continue to exist, as a whole person, you need to re-create, for yourself, an identity untouched by everything that's been used against you. You need to imagine and build a self out of elements that are not tainted. You need to remake yourself on your own terms.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“The word genocide is clinical, overly general, bloodless, and dehumanizing.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“I did not understand the point of the word genocide then. I resent and revile it now. The word is tidy and efficient. It holds no true emotion. It is impersonal when it needs to be intimate, cool and sterile when it needs to be gruesome. The word is hollow, true but disingenuous, a performance, the worst kind of lie. It cannot do justice--it is not meant to do justice--to the thing it describes.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“Taking care of loved ones in my world was not based on affection. It was based on the fear of losing them.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“The colonists, the aid workers, the NGOs -- they're all in a single progression: paternalistic foreigners, assuming they are better and brighter, offering shiny, destabilizing, dependence producing gifts. How can one accept anything from so-called rescuers when their predecessors helped your people destroy one another?”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“You had to try to hang on to your name, though nobody cared about your name. You had to try and stay a person. You had to try not to become invisible. If you let go and fell back into the chaos you were gone, just a number in a unit, which was also a number. If you died, no one knew. If you gave up and disintegrated inside, no one knew.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“Maintaining my body had been so much work, so costly. Protecting it had been a never-ending battle. It was not a source of joy. I had been dragging it around for thirteen years, trying to keep it from harm. I felt like it stood in my way.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“When we share, you are not using your privilege to get me to line up behind you.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“In my version of the story, the girl walks the earth and she is always safe, undeniably strong and brave - a dream, a superstar, a goddess of sorts. I needed to believe those things were possible and that they might be true about me too.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“I think back to this often I’m 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 want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion - anything, really - comes from a poverty of mind, poverty of imagination. The works is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“I found an essay in a book called Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, in which every time the men go off to war they lose all their language. When they return home they can’t describe to their families what they saw, so they go back to war to learn the words again.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“I did not even really know how to access that once-safe place with the outdoor kitchen, the red roof, the birds-of-paradise. Nostalgia was a destructive exercise, a jab at a still-tender wound, stitched up poorly.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“Each of us is so much grander, more nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and what comes After

“All those countries that ended World War II by saying never again turned their backs.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“But people need to know, people need to say to themselves, ‘I cannot do this thing because this thing is unforgivable. I cannot decide my wife is a cockroach. I cannot decide my neighbor is a snake. I cannot kill my wife. I cannot kill my neighbor. I cannot make others less than human and then kill them. This is unforgivable. This will never be forgiven.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“I wanted to retain the right to disappear. Remaining in place, nesting -- it sets off fears that somebody would yank me away. To counter it, I had to flee. I had to reassure myself that I still knew how to escape.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“Before the Belgians arrived and colonized Rwanda, Hutus and Tutsis lived in peace. But colonization is built on the idea that we are not the same, that we don’t possess equal humanity. The Belgians imposed their cruel ideology: their belief that people with certain-sized skulls and certain-width noses were better and smarter than others, that they belonged to a superior race. This ideology leached into the Rwandan psyche and caused the country to self-destruct.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion—anything, really—comes from a poverty of mind, 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.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and what comes After

“You know those little pellets you drop in water that expand into huge sponges? My life was the opposite. Everything shrank.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“You had to remember your unit number—not a given at age six. You had to try to hang on to your name, though nobody cared about your name. You had to try to stay a person. You had to try not to become invisible. If you let go and fell back into the chaos you were gone, just a number in a unit, which also was a number. If you died, no one knew. If you got lost, no one knew. If you gave up and disintegrated inside, no one knew. I started telling people, I’m Clemantine, I’m Clemantine, I’m Clemantine! I don’t want to be lost. I’m Clemantine!”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

“Often adults said to me, “You’re so strong, you’re so brave.” But I didn’t want to be strong, I didn’t want to be brave. I wanted a fresh, fluffy brain, one that was not tormented by wars and fear. I wanted to backtrack in time to a world of innocence, to regress into the landscape of The Boxcar Children. It was so nice there.”
― Clemantine Wamariya, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After