89 pages • 2 hours read
Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth WeilThe Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 5-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Wamariya recalls how she learned from Claire “never to accept gifts” (65) and to be “indebted to no one” (65). In 1995, in the refugee camp in Burundi, Claire, convinced that “to hold on to her identity” she must “retain that light from within” (66), gets a job coaching sports. Wamariya learns to wash their clothes in the river. She frequently visits an elderly couple who tell her fantastical stories and forage on farms “with a code” (70), leaving a vine or a seed for the farmers to replace what food was taken.
Around Christmas, Claire contracts dysentery and spends days near death. Wamariya, only seven years old, is terrified that she will die, but Claire survives.
Rob, a Zairean CARE worker, professes to be in love with Claire, who at 16 years old is wary of men. Claire consents to marry him so she and Wamariya can leave the camp, which is not “the life she deserved” (74). Claire and Wamariya move to Uvira, Zaire, where Rob’s family lives. Wamariya “want[s] to go back” but does “not know where” (78). Eventually she is determined to “survive here” (79).
Wamariya enjoys her life in Zaire. Among those living in the house are Rob’s aunt Mama Dina and Rob’s mother Mama Nepele. People in Uvira are generous and friendly. On weekends people dress in colorful clothing and play music in the streets.
When she is 17 Claire gives birth to her daughter Mariette, and Wamariya becomes possessive of her niece, refusing to let anyone else take care of her, even Claire, who does not “seem to want this life” (86).
After a few months, as in Rwanda, electricity and water are cut off, and people do not dare venture out. Claire takes Wamariya and Mariette and goes by boat to Kazimia to stay with some of Rob’s family. Wamariya is devastated. She believes she “made a mistake in Uvira” (89) by feeling close to people and decides not to do so again.
Soon, Kazimia too descends into “terror” (91), and they, along with 50 others, take a boat across Lake Tanganyika to escape. When the boat begins to sink, people throw their belongings overboard. Wamariya prays for God to let the boat make it to shore so Mariette and the children do not die; she promises she “would die anywhere but here” (92).
Chapter 6 Summary
Wamariya is offended by the word “genocide” because it cannot embody the experiences of the millions who endure it. The word serves only “politician[s] sitting in the UN discussing [it] with all the other politicians in suits” (94).
In April 2004, when she is 16, Wamariya is transfixed by Night by Elie Wiesel. In the book, Wiesel “expresse[s] thoughts [she] was ashamed to think” (95). She particularly relates to how he describes “the devotion and resentment” he feels toward his father, believing these feelings to be similar to her feelings about Claire. Wamariya appreciates that Wiesel describes questioning the existence of God.
Wamariya learns the history of the 1994 genocide. She learns about how the Hutus began speaking about the Tutsis as “subhuman insects” and “cockroaches” (97), and how the hatred between these two cultural groups was instigated by the Belgians, who when colonizing Rwanda introduced eugenics, claiming the Tutsis “were more like Europeans” (96) and therefore superior. After the president’s plane was shot down, Belgian soldiers remaining in Rwanda were executed, and “UN peacekeepers left” (99). Wamariya points out the hypocrisy of nations insisting the Holocaust would happen “never again,” believing they figured “Africans could kill each other if [they] wanted” (99). When these events are discussed in school, Wamariya’s fellow students look at her.
On a class trip to Antietam Civil War battlefield, Wamariya is amazed that 23,000 people were killed in one day. At the Vietnam Veterans Memorial she weeps thinking of the civilians who are not memorialized. Around her, her classmates, who “did not identify with the dead” (105), take photographs. At the Holocaust Memorial Museum her identity card follows the story of a man who was killed in the Sobibór extermination camp.
The movie Hotel Rwanda comes out in 2004, and her classmates begin asking her questions. She is frustrated by their “entitlement” and their belief that they have “the right to [her] pain” (106). She feels the questions are “evidence of their inability to see [her] as fully human” (106).
When Wamariya speaks to a high school class, she describes her life “as an adventure” to avoid their “pity” (107). The students ask her banal questions. Wamariya feels that she is “disappearing” into her “exotic” story, that she is “consumed” (108).
Chapter 7 Summary
After their trip across the lake, Wamariya and the other refugees arrive in Tanzania. They are brought to a refugee camp in Kigoma, which is surrounded by officers and does not have enough bathrooms. There are no tents; people must sleep on the ground. After Rob helps them escape, they go into the city of Kigoma to join more of Rob’s family, including his mother, who left Zaire. Rob begins to mistreat Claire. When immigration police begin rounding up refugees, Claire decides they should leave.
Wamariya, Claire, Rob, and Mariette board the bus to go to a safer camp in Malawi. Wamariya feels like “a feather, molted and mangled, drifting through space” (113). Her one comfort is a Mickey and Minnie Mouse backpack bought for her in Zaire, in which she stores special items. They make it into Malawi only after Claire and Rob are beaten by soldiers; Claire must bribe them to stop.
They arrive at the Dzaleka refugee camp, where a woman shows Wamariya where to wash clothes and shower. When Rob fails to get a job, he turns his anger to Claire and Wamariya.
Claire refuses to be the victim refugees are assumed to be and sets out to make money. She sells their belongings and manages to become “a black-market butcher” (120). Wamariya learns how to wear Mariette on her back and take care of her in the camp.
Wamariya is devastated when Rob and Claire decide they should leave. She has learned “how to survive” (121) in the Dzaleka camp and feels “rage” over this decision. As they walk to the bus stop, Wamariya is angry that Claire does not know how to carry Mariette properly. Wamariya is hungry and afraid of Rob, but Claire does not seem to care. Claire herself is afraid of Rob, who, now a refugee himself, hits Claire and drinks their remaining water.
They cross into Mozambique and wait at the bus stop. After they disembark at Tete, Wamariya realizes she left her backpack on the bus, but everyone is too afraid to go back and retrieve it for her.
It is 1996 by the end of Chapter 7.
Chapter 8 Summary
In 2005 Wamariya brings a backpack containing a lavender pillow given to her by Mrs. Thomas and a photo of her niece and nephew onto the stage at school. She is performing an improvisation in which she expresses herself to her classmates using only these objects. As she pretends to do her homework like a typical teenager, she realizes she is “revealing nothing” about herself (126). She takes out her cell phone and calls Rob, leaving him a voicemail telling him he has failed to protect them and while she can forgive him, she “will never trust anyone ever gain” (127). Her teacher calls her off the stage, and her “classmates avoided” her from that point on (127).
By coincidence, Claire meets a woman who knew their uncle in Rwanda, and Claire calls him. He is stunned to learn that she and Wamariya are still alive and informs her that her parents have lost their house and business and no longer have a phone. They arrange for his wife to visit them the next day with her phone. The next day Wamariya goes to Claire’s apartment, though she does not like to go there because Rob hits, verbally abuses, and cheats on Claire. Claire has an awkward conversation with their mother, who faints. She also learns that their brother Pudi is alive. Wamariya realizes that they are different people from those who lived together in Kigali so many years ago. Though she always wanted to tell her mother about what happened to her, she decides “not to tell her anything at all” (129).
Chapter 9 Summary
Wamariya learns how to be “self-sufficient” and not accept help from anyone because people “believe they have the right to take advantage of you later” (130).
After the devastating loss of her backpack, Wamariya, Claire, and others wait as the men walk into the city of Tete. When the men do not return, nuns bring the women to the prison where the men have been taken by immigration police. Starving women and children are locked in a windowless room together. A kind immigration chief, after listening to Claire’s story, gives them bus fare to Maputo, the capital of Mozambique, where there is another camp. Wamariya gathers that Rob does not want her with them anymore.
The camp in Maputo, which is run by Italians, is “surprisingly nice” (133). They have food and toothpaste, and Wamariya is glad “to be treated like […] a normal person with normal human needs” (133). She begins to feel safe. She and Claire are amazed to hear that some people have been in the camp for more than 15 years. Claire buys Italian pasta from the refugees to sell to a vendor in town at a profit. Though Wamariya wants to stay, Claire believes that “lingering in a good camp was even more dangerous than staying in a bad one” because they will be tempted “to believe this life was okay” (135).
Chapters 5-9 Analysis
As the person closest to her, Claire has a profound influence on Wamariya, who not only admires Claire’s fortitude but also depends on her for survival. From the beginning of their journey, Claire is responsible for Wamariya’s welfare and must make decisions on where to go, who to trust, and how to hide from danger. In Chapter 1 Wamariya explained that Claire, “even at fourteen, could look out for herself” (9) and that she “knew confidence was currency” (9). Claire’s confidence and resourcefulness help her and her sister survive. She teaches Wamariya not to accept gifts and is wary of marrying Rob because she knows girls can be targets. In Ngozi she learns to trade with locals and uses ingenuity to get a job. In Zaire she sells purses. When they leave Kigoma, she sews her money into her pants, leaving out “just enough to bribe people as needed” (113). In Maputo she begins selling pasta for profit. She is also astute in sensing when it is time for them to move on.
Wamariya admires how Claire “would not hand over her dignity” (66). Unlike Wamariya, Claire does not feel the need to repeat her name out loud because “she understood that to have a life she wanted, to hold on to her identity […] she needed to retain that light from within” (66). After being beaten trying to enter Malawi, she refuses to show fear, unwilling “to let anybody limit her sense of her own possibilities or determine her self-worth” (115). Throughout their journey, Claire remains “immovable, unswayed” (115); later, Wamariya notes that she “maintained order in her world by believing that God had a plan” (106). Claire’s determination to be self-sufficient is perhaps nowhere more evident than in her refusal to drink a tincture Wamariya brings her after she nearly dies of dysentery.
It is precisely this strength, however, that opens a rift between the sisters. While Claire prefers to move frequently, Wamariya prefers to stay where it is familiar. The constant moving makes Wamariya feel like “a feather, molted and mangled, drifting through space” (113). She cries when they go to Zaire, wondering, “How do I survive here?” (79). She is furious when Claire makes her leave Dzaleka because she “knew how to survive—who to borrow soap from when I laundered the clothes, how to sterilize diapers” (121). To Claire, surviving means moving up, making sacrifices to ensure they will benefit later. To Wamariya, who frequently is left with Mariette as Claire seeks work, survival means the comfort of familiarity, even if it’s not ideal. That Claire “didn’t care” (122) if Wamariya was hungry, tired, or afraid of Rob only exacerbates this this tension.
Survival, and the various ways people cling to it, is a theme in The Girl Who Smiled Beads. Even those who survive are irrevocably changed. Wamariya explains that living in a refugee camp is like being “in a horrible groove” and that “nothing gets better” (72). She forgets “how to enjoy pleasure” because she is “so consumed with survival” (76). They are further dehumanized by the fact that that there is nothing to do but “kill time” (79). After the devastation of leaving those she loved in Uvira, Wamariya decides she will never again make the “mistake” of “letting anybody get close” (89). She believes she “will never trust anyone again” (127) after being “failed” and “abandoned” by Rob (126). She learns to be “impermeable, self-sufficient” (130), and to never accept help, for lending a favor made people “believe they have the right to take advantage of you later” (130).
In America, Wamariya seeks to make sense of her experiences by looking to literature and history. She learns about the history of the Rwandan genocide and how the dehumanizing language directed at the Tutsis made the killings seem justified. She is mesmerized by Elie Wiesel’s Night, which seems to put to words her own thoughts on hunger, resentment, and lack of identity. Like Wamariya herself, Wiesel became no more than “a body” and “a starved stomach” (100).
Though these experiences help her gain historical context, she describes being unnerved by the realization that she may not be living now in “a better world” (105). America, she writes, “told itself that it did not have wars at home” (105). However, at the Antietam Civil War battlefield, she learns that 23,000 soldiers died or were injured in one day. She weeps at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as she ponders civilians who will never be memorialized. She struggles to accept these horrors because “the idea of one group of people killing another group of people” is “categorically, dimensionally, fundamentally wrong” (97), as difficult as “trying to store a tornado in a chest of drawers” (97). She is further disillusioned by the realization that the same nations who insist the Holocaust would happen “never again” did not step in to stop the Rwandan genocide, for “Africans could kill each other if [they] wanted” (99).
While many people in America are kind to her, she also faces dehumanization there, albeit of a different kind. Though she does not merely “want to be that Rwandan girl” (107), classmates’ questions suggest they feel they have “a right to [her] pain” and that they see her “life as a movie” (106). A mocking comment about being unable to shower as a refugee minimizes her experience, and classmates’ taking photos at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial while she herself weeps illustrates how those who have not known war and genocide see it as more abstract. Wamariya begins to feel as if she is “disappearing” into her “exotic” story (108), leaving her identity tenuous as it was in Africa.
