The Girl Who Smiled Beads: Chapter 17 Summary & Analysis

Clemantine imagines a bird hitting a window while two friends are talking. One thinks the bird is a bomb going off while the other thinks it is just a bird. If the former person doesn’t explain their trauma, the friends are alienated; unspoken fears make them magnets that repel each other. Rwanda and much of the world has this problem. Clemantine thinks that, in many ways, a traumatized person’s identity is broken. To continue to exist, traumatized people need to create a new identity with unbroken pieces. Clemantine needs to comprehend her history; but she also needs to reach across the space between her and others to share joy and pain.

During her sophomore year at Yale, Clemantine’s photography professor organizes a field trip to the Prudence Crandall School for Negro Girls in Connecticut. This school was for white girls only until the president admitted one Black girl, at which point all the other white girls dropped out. The school then admitted only Black girls until it was attacked, and it closed for good. The professor instructs the students to walk around the school and construct a story from details and feelings. For the first time, Clemantine is told that history—her own and others’—is in the lingering details in front of her. When she wanders the school, she remembers the abandoned school in Burundi where she and Claire slept.

Clemantine signs up for a class on W.G. Sebald’s work with a comparative literature professor named Carol Jacobs. Jacobs talks about Sebald’s thoughts and about how he presents time, images, and space. Jacobs tells the students to expect to be confused, because Sebald creates a disorienting map of his interior world. The jumble of images and thoughts in his work recreate the amnesia that fell over Germany after World War II.

Sebald’s Austerlitz is about a Jewish boy who was sent to Britain at the outset of World War II to escape the Nazis. He grows up and spends his life searching for his dislocated past. Sebald pieces the story together through the character’s non-linear obsessions and memories. Before this class, Clemantine felt that her intense and jumbled reactions and memories were misleading. Reading Sebald convinces her that she lives in all times and places at once; her past is always with her and is liable to rise to the surface at any moment because of various triggers.

Clemantine makes a practice of walking every day by Annette, a woman who sells flowers in front of Yale. This woman reminds Clemantine of Claire selling goods in Africa to improve their lives. Clemantine has always observed things in order to be a chameleon and adapt to wherever she is. Now, she tries to scrutinize herself. She tried therapy before, but it felt too invasive. Reading Sebald convinces Clemantine that she can examine and solve her problems herself. Sebald says that if a person goes deep enough into their memory, a narrative will appear. All Clemantine has to do is ask questions about herself and she’ll have her history.

The following summer, Clemantine interns in the diversity department at Google. One day, the program director surprises the staff with a trip to Disneyland. On the flight to Los Angeles, Clemantine tells a coworker about her Mickey Mouse backpack—the treasure she lost that still makes her cry. Clemantine loves Disneyland; it is proof that a person can assemble a new world and identity with the imagination alone.