The Girl Who Smiled Beads

November 1, 2017

In 1994, six-year-old Wamariya fled genocidal violence in Rwanda with her older sister, Claire, and spent the next six years moving through seven African countries before landing in America. This raw-to-the-bone memoir grew out of an Association of Magazine Media Ellie Award finalist posted on the blog Medium, and Wamariya is known to Oprah watchers.

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 1, 2018
Record of a childhood in flight from war and terror."I hated that I had to eat," writes Wamariya. "I hated my stomach, I hated my needs." Growing children are always hungry, but the author, forced at the age of 6 to flee her native Rwanda during the genocide of 1994, was for years as a refugee never able to satisfy those elemental needs. Intercut with her chronicle of experiences in a series of refugee camps are moments from her new life in America, where she landed at the age of 12, adopted into a welcoming home in a bit of fortune that she did not trust: "I was callous and cynical....I thought I could fool people into thinking that I was not profoundly bruised." She had reason to worry, for on a six-year trail that passed through one African nation after another, she witnessed both generosity and depravity coupled with the constant worry that the older sister with whom she had fled would decide that she was too much of a burden and abandon her. She did not: Her sister's presence through one fraught situation after another is a constant. Wamariya's experiences adjusting to life in a country where, her sister declared, beer flowed from faucets and people owned six cars at a time are affecting, and there are some Cinderella moments in it, from being accepted to Yale to appearing on Oprah Winfrey's show. But more, there are moments of potent self-reckoning; being a victim of trauma means that "you, as a person, are empty and flattened, and that violence, that theft, keeps you from embodying a life that feels like your own." The work of finding home and feeling safe--it's something that every foe of immigration ought to ponder; in that alone Wamariya's narrative is valuable.Not quite as attention-getting as memoirs by Ismail Beah or Scholastique Mukasonga, but a powerful record of the refugee experience all the same.

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Starred review from March 19, 2018
Wamariya, a human rights advocate, and Weil, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, tell the powerful story of Wamariya’s experience fleeing Rwanda after the genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group began in 1994. While visiting her grandmother at age six, Wamariya and her older sister, Claire, were told to sneak out of the house after they heard a knock on the front door. For the next six years Wamariya and Claire crossed through at least seven countries, separated from their parents and living in refugee camps; when Wamariya was 12, they were granted asylum in the U.S. and landed in a safe home in Chicago. Wamariya was an ambitious student and even became interested in cheerleading. After graduating high school, she attended Yale, where she came to terms with the horrors she endured and read the works of Audre Lorde and W.G. Sebald (who taught her that “we live in all times and places at once”). At last, the sisters were reunited with their parents in 2006. This book is not a conventional story about war and its aftermath; it’s a powerful coming-of-age story in which a girl explores her identity in the wake of a brutal war that destroyed her family and home. Wamariya is an exceptional narrator and her story is unforgettable.