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

Wamariya’s sister Claire is nine years older than Wamariya. Even in Kigali, Claire, who hates the chores her mother assigns her, does “not want to be slowed down” and has “big plans” (11) to go to college in Canada. She is business-minded, understanding how to save money and how to bargain. From the beginning of their journey as refugees, Claire is responsible for her younger sister. She decides where to hide and when to move on, and she learns when to take risks.

Claire is resourceful and determined not to settle for the dehumanizing life in refugee camps. In their first camp in Ngozi, she uses her skills to obtain a job coaching girls; in other camps, she opens a butcher stand and sells Italian pasta. When they are not in the camps, Claire sells clothing in the market or, wearing the professional outfit she always takes with her, obtains jobs washing clothes or watching cars in a garage. Claire’s industriousness is matched only by her confidence. She shrewdly deals with others as she tries to obtain “the life she deserved” (74). As they travel, she reserves money for bribing people. While in the Ngozi camp, she agrees to marry Rob, a CARE worker from Zaire, because “[t]he only way out was marriage” (74). Whereas Wamariya’s “sense of self-worth [is] so relational” (154), Claire “would not hand over her dignity” or “let you believe that you’d hollowed her out” (66). Where Wamariya repeats her name to strangers to retain her identity, Claire “understood that to have a life she wanted, to hold on to her identity” she “needed to retain that light from within” (66). Wamariya frequently expresses admiration for Claire’s insistence on her own self-worth.

Claire and Wamariya have confrontations over Claire’s desire not to settle—she believes “lingering in a good camp is even more dangerous than staying in a bad one” (135), unlike Wamariya, who prefers to stay where she has learned how to survive. Wamariya also knows she should not expect Claire “to coddle” her (90). While Claire is out earning money, Wamariya is left with Claire’s daughter Mariette and quickly becomes protective of her baby niece through learning how to change her diapers and wear her on her back. Wamariya is angry when Claire does not wash her hands before taking Mariette and does not know how to properly wear her daughter on her back. Wamariya and Claire also disagree about God: While Wamariya questions the existence of God, Claire “maintain[s] order in her world by believing that God had a plan” (106). Though Wamariya acknowledges that she “owes” Claire her life, the two have a “knotted relationship” (260).

Like Wamariya, Claire struggles to overcome strict standards for women. Though her husband Rob is abusive, she includes him in her application to go to America, leaving him only years later. When she becomes pregnant with her son Freddy, she obeys Rob’s command that she return to Rwanda: Though he’s “a tyrant” (155), she was “raised” to believe “she had to do what her husband wanted her to do” (151). That Claire buys chicken gizzards, traditionally reserved for men, with her first paycheck in South Africa suggests subversive rejection of these values (151).

Claire seeks to go to America because she sees it as “the ultimate land of hustling and rewards” (203). In Chicago she works long hours supporting her children as well as her parents and extended family; out of the nearly dozen people who live with her, she is the only one with a job. Claire follows their mother’s treatise that sharing is the only way to achieve equality. Despite not having much money, Claire cooks big meals for her friends and family, stating, “I have food, and I know I will have food tomorrow” (261). She also goes to Rwanda once a year to buy food and cook for orphans. While there, she wears an expensive dress, as if to say to Rwanda, “I am here. I am worthy and valuable. You did not destroy me” (262). Despite their contentious relationship, Wamariya looks to Claire as a model of confidence for her “unwavering sense of her right to exist” (260).

Rob is a Zairean CARE worker who courts Claire when she and Wamariya are living at the Ngozi refugee camp in Burundi. After several marriage proposals, she finally consents and, as promised, he brings her and Wamariya to Zaire to live with his extended family. At first Rob is kind to Claire, and he brings Wamariya presents. As time goes on, he begins abusing Claire, first verbally and then physically, and engages in brazen extramarital affairs. When he becomes a refugee himself after leaving Zaire to remain with Claire, he struggles to adapt to his new life, drinking the last of their water and refusing to carry anything but his own food. Claire is embarrassed by his treatment of her and lies to her parents, telling them she has “married a nice man” (129). She finally leaves him in 2006. She later tells Wamariya that “the degradation of that marriage was worse than the degradation of refugee life” (140).

Wamariya is afraid of Rob and quickly realizes that he does not want her with them. In America she leaves him an angry voicemail telling him he had “failed” to protect them “from so much terror” (126). She also tells him she will forgive him, but that she “will never trust anyone ever again” (127). Claire and Wamariya’s experiences with Rob help mold them into the people they are and illustrate their vulnerability as young girls fleeing genocide on their own.

In Chapter 1 Wamariya describes her mother as “short and curvy and regal and poised” (10); she has “bright white teeth with gaps between them, which Rwandans consider beautiful” (10). She and Wamariya’s father married “against his family’s wishes” (10). In Kigali her mother has a beautiful garden; she also takes her daughters to visit elderly people so they can clean their houses. Her teaching them to visit their elderly neighbors is partly what inspires Claire and Wamariya to befriend their elderly neighbors in the Ngozi refugee camp. Wamariya writes that her mother’s discipline is “strict and understated” (16) and that she dresses according to the “Catholic-Rwandan-postcolonial ethos” that “[y]ou want to stay as invisible as possible” (12). Wamariya’s mother “would try to discourage [her] curiosity” (12) because girls “were supposed to be reserved” (13). Her mother’s teaching that when a woman sleeps with a man, she gives him something she can never get back is the reason Claire does not resort to prostitution when she is a refugee.

When the genocide begins, Wamariya’s mother instructs Claire and Wamariya to pack a bag and take a van three hours south to the Burundi border, where their grandmother lives. The sisters do not see their family again for 12 years, when they are reunited on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Wamariya thinks of her mother frequently and yearns to tell her everything that is happening to her. However, when they finally on the phone, Wamariya is struck by the damage time has done to their relationship and decides to tell her nothing at all. When Wamariya’s parents move to America, her mother frustrates Claire by being picky with food and trying to manage the house in her own style; however, she remembers her grandchildren’s birthdays, and “[h]er punishments grew soft” (145). Wamariya occasionally attempts to ask her mother what happened to her during those 12 years, but her mother’s disturbed expression makes her refrain from asking again. Wamariya is unsettled by how different her mother looks from what she remembers and how no lights or makeup “could restore the time we’d lost and the relationship we could have had” (145).

Wamariya attempts to bridge the gap between them by taking her mother on a trip to Europe, but it is fraught with awkwardness and miscommunication. Wamariya grows frustrated that they seem to be on different sides of “a giant chasm” (260). However, when at the Basilica of Saint Paul, her mother thanks Saint Brigid for reuniting her family. Though Wamariya does not share this comfort, she is “happy to be beside her” mother (263). This suggests that, like her journey of identity, Wamariya’s journey reconnecting with her mother is not complete but on a positive path.

After moving to America, Wamariya is brought to the home of Mrs. Thomas and her family, who live in a suburb of Chicago. Wamariya lives there during the week to attend Christian Heritage Academy. Mrs. Thomas, whose oldest sons are in college, is Wamariya’s “American mother.” From the start, Mrs. Thomas goes out of her way to make Wamariya feel comfortable and safe. She sets her up in a beautiful bedroom, and she picks her up from school in the same place each day because she knows Wamariya’s fear “of being lost or left behind” (56). Her husband, a lawyer, helps Wamariya obtain her identification so she can go on a trip to Washington, DC, with her class. Mrs. Thomas offers Wamariya support throughout her time in high school and goes to Connecticut with her to help her set up her room at Hotchkiss. After college, Wamariya decides not to return to the Thomases’ house, for it is time to move on. However, she remains ever grateful for their support.

Mariette, Claire’s first child, is born in Zaire when Claire is 17 years old. Wamariya becomes quickly attached to Mariette and frequently cares for her when Claire is working. Wamariya learns to give her baths and change her diapers, seeing her as “a doll, my doll” (86). She is “obsessed” with “keeping her clean” (86). Wamariya is possessive of Mariette and, as they cross Lake Tanganyika in a sinking boat, she promises God she will die any way he likes if he lets Mariette live. As they travel across Africa, Wamariya continues to take care of Mariette and learns the best way to tend to all her needs in each new location. Mariette is her “world” and her “every day” (151). However, Wamariya is not “a gentle protectress,” and she is not excessively affectionate: her “job was to shield” Mariette “from harm and death” (237).

In America, Wamariya watches as Mariette grows to forget their life as refugees. When Mariette complains Wamariya is hurting her as she fixes her hair, Wamariya thinks Mariette does not know what pain is. She also scolds Mariette for refusing to help her grandmother wash the dishes; Mariette responds that she is “not [her] grandmother” and that she doesn’t “even know her” (181). Mariette and her siblings “lived in a different universe” (157), living in public housing and absorbing “the slang and style of their black friends at school” (157). Eventually, Wamariya decides to start Mariette “on the path [she] had followed” (238) and helps her go to college.