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Chapter 18
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Girl Who Smiled Beads, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Trauma and Faith
Narrative, Memory, and Fragmentation
Displacement and Identity
Women, War, and Survival
Charity vs. Sharing
Summary
Analysis
Clemantine flies to the Palm Beach Day Academy to give a humanitarian talk. She wears intimidating high heels. The children look at her with innocent eyes. After her talk, a little girl approaches Clemantine but gets scared and hides behind a teacher’s leg. Clemantine is struck by how safe this girl feels with her teacher. Clemantine herself is not a motherly type. Her way of caring for Claire’s kids is to prepare them for the worst. Once, Clemantine entered Claire’s apartment and found Freddy and his friends watching TV. She screamed at them to study and do the dishes. When Clemantine returns from Palm Beach, she is determined to get Claire’s kids away from her and Claire. She enrolls them in private schools.
In the wake of her traumatic upbringing, Clemantine has learned how to embody power and self-sufficiency. She’s a successful humanitarian and a public speaker in high demand, suggesting that she has focused on becoming successful while also spreading vital information about things like the Rwandan Genocide. In some ways, the power and cultural capital she has cultivated might be a direct response to all the hardship she has faced—after all, she has needed to remain strong throughout her life because of the many difficulties she has encountered. In turn, she has perhaps focused more on embodying power and resilience than establishing a motherly presence (which makes sense, since she doesn’t even have children of her own). And though the book doesn’t necessarily suggest that power and motherliness are mutually exclusive, the implication here is that Clemantine’s traumatic past has inspired her to focus on success and survival over all else.
Themes
The narrative jumps back to Clemantine’s graduation from Yale. Having finished college, she doesn’t know where to go. The Thomases have given her everything, but she feels she has to move on. She also doesn’t want to live with Claire or her parents. She has invitations to travel to fancy places, but she feels that new experiences aren’t filling the void in her. She needs stability, so she and her new boyfriend, Ryan, move to San Francisco. The Berkeley hills remind her of the hills in Rwanda.
Even after years in the United States, Clemantine still doesn’t feel she has a home. Rather than continue to live with her family (whom she feels are ghosts of her past) or with the Thomases (whom she doesn’t fully identify with), she seeks to create a new sense of stability. She’ll never cure her original feeling of displacement but still hopes to find a sense of belonging.
Themes
In public, Clemantine feels like she’s playing a part. She hopes her story will inspire people to be humbler. She wants others to think about how they came to be the way they are. Clemantine feels that she is privileged to have the safety to make a coherent story out of her experiences. Her experience is her messy past, but her story is how she makes her life meaningful. On stage, she dresses to look alarming and unique. Many people offer to help her and then panic when she suggests that she can help them too. Some people ask her if she feels guilty for surviving, and she asks if they feel guilty they weren’t in the Twin Towers on 9/11.
When Clemantine starts public speaking, she employs her philosophy of sharing. She doesn’t want to feel like she—the one with trauma—is the only person who should examine how she came to be who she is. She believes that everyone—even those who’ve led comfortable lives—should consider their pasts and ask themselves how they got where they are now. What’s more, she believes that everyone stands to gain from learning about other people and their experiences.
Themes
A year after she moves to San Francisco, Clemantine sits on a panel of thought leaders for an international nonprofit. The panel claims to want to hear her story so they can solve the refugee crisis. At this time, refugees are dying in the Mediterranean. A picture of a drowned baby on a beach blows up on social media. Clemantine thinks this interest is better than disregard, but the compassion is selfish. She wants to keep in mind all the individual people suffering but knows this is impossible.
Clemantine finds many problems with charity. She thinks it’s voyeuristic for charitable people to pore over a picture of a dead baby, and she knows that people only help because it makes them feel good. She also hates that charity lumps each sufferer’s experience in with others. She knows that each person suffers a particular, personal tragedy.
Themes
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The panel discusses the Red Cross and what it can do to help refugees. One panel member thinks it’s funny that, in a situation of survival, refugees have been asking for ways to store photos. Clemantine understands this; when she was a refugee, she wished for photos to preserve her sense of self and her memories. After the meeting, some billionaire asks Clemantine how it feels to be one of them. Clemantine recoils; is this man asking her what it’s like to be one of the privileged? One of the white, rich people? Clemantine tells him to instead ask for her story, to ask about what he surely doesn’t know. The billionaire gets uncomfortable and says to email him and set up a time to have this talk. Clemantine emails, but the billionaire never responds.
Clemantine understands why refugees want to store photos. Clemantine’s act of collecting rocks and favorite outfits in her Mickey Mouse backpack was an attempt to accomplish what a photo does: it memorializes something. She feels that, because she was a refugee, her life story has holes and her identity is fractured. The only time she didn’t feel like this was when she saw herself in the mirror at Chibolya and walked around in her new dress. Clemantine understands that refugees want photos to confirm their own existences.
Themes
