The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

Wamariya’s beloved nanny Mukamana allows Wamariya to dictate the plots of her stories, always asking, “And then what do you think happened? Can you guess what happened next?” (15). As she grows older, Wamariya appreciates that Mukamana accepted “whatever plot [she] chose” (210), especially in reference to the story of the girl who smiled beads, for she is inspired to claim her own agency. Wamariya frequently returns to the question of what happens next as she rebuilds her identity and struggles to create her own narrative.

In the Ngozi refugee camp Wamariya is comforted by the fantastical stories told to her by Mucyechuru and Musaza, and she frequently visits them to beg for more stories. Their stories, which feature girls who fall inside the earth and oceans that lift and let you walk underneath, offer an escape into a world of possibilities. Wamariya continues to feel comforted by stories in America. In high school she is moved by Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night, which verbalizes some of her experiences and shows her she “wasn’t crazy” (101). Her observation that Wiesel “view[s] himself without pity, shame, or sentimentality” (101) helps her manage her own story. At Yale she reads the book On the Natural History of Destruction by W. G. Sebald. Inspired by Sebald’s imaginative use of time and space, and the way his protagonist “tries to piece together his life story” (224), Wamariya realizes that “we live in all times and places at once” (224), that our personal narratives will emerge through careful and thorough contemplation of our memories.

In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, stories represent unlimited possibilities in plot and in perspective, and Wamariya takes something from every story she reads. The hope offered in stories is reflected in her enjoyment of Disneyland, which is “a triumph of imagination, a testament to the possibility of assembling a self and saying to yourself, What do you think happened next? and then making that story come true” (226). In her yearning to find “a narrative that felt coherent and complete” (263), she misses Mukamana, who guided her with stories. This memoir is Wamariya’s first step to becoming her own storyteller.

Wamariya describes how time seems interminable and meaningless as a refugee. In the Ngozi refugee camp, Wamariya spends hours walking to the river to do laundry and waits “five hours in line for maize and five hours again for beans” (43). Time not spent in line is spent “with detached lethargy because all there is to do at a refugee camp is kill time” (79). She and Rob’s family spend hours waiting out violence in Zaire, which makes her feel as if time is “a box, claustrophobic, no way out” (172). Hours pass as she waits for Claire in the market in Lusaka, Zambia, but “time didn’t matter” because their lives have “no value,” and “there was no relevance to hour our hours were spent” (190). Because they are without home or identity, refugees’ time is insignificant. Like their interchangeability and their reduction to numbers, the unimportance of their time dehumanizes them.

As she grows older, Wamariya struggles to make sense of time and to place her experiences within a timeline. For Wamariya, time “refuse[s] to move in an orderly fashion;” she sees her life as “the pages of a book [that] lay scattered,” the events of her life “fragments, floating” (33). When she thinks of the genocide, “[t]ime melted and oozed” (99). In response, she “documents” herself by collecting objects from various points of her life, hoping that if she “can just find the right arrangements of the pieces” (34), her life will be “beautiful” to her (33). Time also “opened such a gap” (181) that it prevents her from connecting with her family when they are reunited. Wamariya further depicts the disjointedness of time by alternating her narrative between her time as a refugee and her adjustment to life in America. The frequent 20-year jumps recreate a feeling of being lost in time. Headers at the beginning of each chapter tell readers in which year the chapter takes place, further reiterating the jumble of time.

Wamariya begins the process of organizing time in a Yale course on W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction. Because Sebald does “not intend to provide enough information” (222) and “tells his story through a gorgeous haze” (224), Wamariya discovers “that we all live in all times and places at once” (224) and that her feeling adrift in time is not wrong. She learns to use her memories to create her narrative: she “just need[s] to ask the right questions and look for answers with a discerning eye” (226).

Wamariya enjoys watching Oprah’s television show as she helps Claire clean houses in South Africa. Though she cannot understand Oprah’s words, she “love[s] the way she walked out into the audience” and “the way she held herself when she sat” (154). Years later, Wamariya and Claire are reunited with their family on Oprah’s show after Wamariya wins a high school essay contest. Their appearance on the show becomes a defining feature of their lives. Claire is recognized in Rwanda for having been on the show, and Wamariya finds some comfort in being known as “the Oprah Girl” (215). Winfrey also invites them to South Africa to appear at the Oprah Winfrey Academy for Girls. Their father proudly shows a photograph of their family on Oprah’s show when he appears at the American embassy in Kigali, which helps him obtain a 10-year visa.

Throughout the memoir Oprah is presented as beneficent and strong, a force of power and goodwill. That the book opens by recounting their appearance on her show indicates the impact she has on their lives. However, Wamariya also recognizes that the family’s televised reunion was melodramatic and staged, a “million-viewer spectacle” in which her pain is “consumed by the masses” (7). She also realizes that, in her role as a public speaker, she is expected to “assume” the “identity” of “Oprah’s special genocide survivor” (160). Though Wamariya’s appearance on Oprah’s show reunites her family and opens opportunities for her to tell her story, it comes at the expense of sincerity, which she seeks to regain along her journey.

Wamariya fondly remembers how, before the genocide, she and her older brother Pudi used to climb a mango tree in their front yard. When they stood on the branches, the tree became her “whole world” (10). Wamariya describes the innocence of her childhood—how she liked to eat ice cream and cake, how she did not understand death, and how her father punishing her for being too loud was “the most cruelty [she’d] ever seen” (17). Her tree-climbing represents this happy, innocent time. When she is a refugee, Wamariya misses Pudi, who used to comfort her by telling her the bombs they heard outside were merely thunder; when she is living in Zaire, she thinks longingly of Pudi and how she would watch him climb the trees. When she discovers Pudi has died, Wamariya regrets never telling him that he helped her “understand a world I would never understand” (137). In the final chapter Wamariya tells a tale of her life as if it were one of Mukamana’s stories, describing two little girls who used to climb trees with their brother before “[t]he sky turned orange and the earth turned gray” (264). Climbing trees is an activity she enjoys before her trauma, with the brother she misses. It represents a time before the world became confusing and harsh.

As a child in Kigali, Wamariya does not understand death. When her mother’s friend dies, Wamariya is told she has “responded to God” (13), and Wamariya wonders if people can reject God’s invitation and remain on Earth. This innocence contrasts with the violence she encounters as a refugee. At first, when she sees bodies in the water, she believes they are sleeping. However, it is not long before the meaning of death becomes clear. In the Ngozi refugee camp she avoids the latrines, which are near a ditch where bodies are buried; she also witnesses people dying of dysentery and injuries. Death is now everywhere around her, and her existence is consumed with survival.

In America Wamariya continues to grapple with the violence she has seen. As she learns the history of the genocide she escaped, she tries to piece the “world back together,” but “the idea of one group of people killing another group of people—people they lived with, people they knew—that chunk of knowledge could never fit itself in my mind” (97). Trying to understand why people kill each other is “like trying to store a tornado in a chest of drawers”—something impossible and “categorically, dimensionally, fundamentally wrong” (97).

She is forced to reassess the world once again when she visits Antietam National Battlefield, where she is stunned by how many people were killed in one day, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, where she learns that her belief that she “now inhabited a better world” is “a fantasy” (105). At the Remembrance Day ceremony in Rwanda years later, she is unnerved by the reenactment, which sends people into sorrowful frenzies. She acknowledges that “[t]here was no way to do this—to gather the country for a few hours to remember nearly a million lives exterminated and the millions more destroyed” (233). Rwanda must also learn how to move on with its newfound understanding of violence.

The Girl Who Smiled Beads does not attempt to explain why people commit atrocities against each other or how we can process this knowledge. It is, the book suggests, part of the human journey.

Wamariya grows up with religion: her mother is Catholic, and Rob’s aunt Mama Dina prays loudly every day in Swahili. In contrast with Wamariya’s mother, Mama Dina “invoke[s] angels” and “chastise[s] evil spirits,” speaking “to God directly” (79) and even calling him “Dad.” In the sinking boat on Lake Tanganyika, Wamariya borrows both women’s prayers, praying to the saints her mother prayed to and, in the fashion of Mama Dina, promising “God that if [they] made it to the other side he could kill [her] any way he wanted” (91-92) as long as he spared the children.

When Wamariya reads Elie Wiesel’s Night, she is fascinated by Wiesel’s “willingness to question the existence of God” (100). While everyone in her life trusts in God’s “wisdom,” she herself wonders, “Yet how could God exist?” (100). Claire “maintain[s] order in her world by believing that God had a plan” (106), and her mother thanks Saint Brigid for safely returning her daughters, but Wamariya “envie[s]” the “comfort” of those of faith (262). She also questions why of all the saints her mother worships, “none of them had skin that looked like hers” (100). Wamariya cannot “shut out the reality of the 800,000” (106) killed in the massacres, and so she must find her narrative and maintain order in her own way, and is appreciative of Elie Wiesel’s contention that people must remember and move forward despite God’s cruelty and humanity’s destruction.

Wamariya and others use clothing to humanize themselves after the dehumanization faced in the Rwandan genocide. Wamariya describes how, in Zambia, she put on her best dress and walked around the block to show that the world “cannot make [her] crumble” (202). When she speaks in front of audiences, she wears five-inch heels to “confound people’s expectations” that she is a victim and “to be admired and loved” (240). In Europe she buys her mother new clothing to make her “feel special” and “know her worth” (254). As a refugee, Claire keeps one nice outfit to show she is “a smart, enterprising young woman” who needs “no pity, no permission” (148). When Claire returns to Rwanda to feed orphans, she wears an expensive dress to show the country she is “worthy and valuable” and that it “did not destroy” her (262). Both sisters are excited to move to America because “straightaway they buy you shoes” (205). When describing how she is “now privileged” (158) in the Thomases’ house outside Chicago, Wamariya mentions her J. Crew and Abercrombie & Fitch clothing. Clothing is a status symbol, and Wamariya and Claire both use it to maintain a sense of identity along their journey.