The Girl Who Smiled Beads

by

Clemantine Wamariya

The Girl Who Smiled Beads: Chapter 6 Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Clemantine’s teacher at the Christian Heritage Academy puts the word genocide on a vocabulary list. Clemantine hates this word because it is insufficient; it is impersonal and sterile when it should be personal and gruesome. It doesn’t describe the pain of each person included in the whole tragedy. She feels that it doesn’t help the victims, but only helps the politicians who sit in their offices and discuss it impersonally. She hates that the word genocide lumps the Rwandan Genocide in with the Holocaust or other horrific instances of ethnic cleansing. Each atrocity is a “different, specific, personal tragedy” that a single word cannot describe.
Clemantine is particularly upset that the word genocide doesn’t capture the unique tragedy of every genocide and of every individual victim. As a refugee and survivor of genocide, one of Clemantine’s greatest losses was the loss of her individuality and her unique identity. She was treated as one of millions, and, if she had died, her death wouldn’t have been recognized. Therefore, it stings Clemantine that the word genocide glosses over the individual’s experience.
Themes
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Displacement and Identity  Theme Icon
Quotes
When she is 16, Clemantine starts reading Elie Wiesel’s book Night. Even though Elie Wiesel was a white Jewish man, Clemantine identifies with his disembodied feeling and with his love and resentment towards family. To this day, Clemantine doesn’t know Rwanda’s political history; she only knows that the Rwandan president was shot down in his plane when she was six. Then, all she knows is that bad people stole from her family. From then on, no one wanted to answer Clemantine’s questions; it was better to be like Claire—stoic—than to talk about it. Clemantine wants to piece together the narrative from her fragments of knowledge. However, she cannot comprehend the idea of one group of people killing another; it is fundamentally wrong.
When Clemantine experienced the Rwandan Genocide as a little girl, it was an incomprehensible threat of violence and evil in her eyes. However, even when she learns the full history of the Rwandan Genocide, the evil that she experienced still makes no sense to her. She can’t piece together why one group of people would kill another group. Since this incomprehensible and fundamentally wrong thing did take place, though, it’s impossible for Clemantine to have faith in the world as a sane and good place.
Themes
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Quotes
Now, living in the United States, Clemantine learns about her own history. The Rwandan Genocide began on April 8, 1994, and lasted 100 days. A group called the Hutus killed their neighbors—a group called the Tutsis. Hutu Power, a radical fascist group, spread the opinion via radio that the Tutsi’s were subhuman cockroaches. Hutu Power required every Hutu to participate in killing and raping the Tutsi’s or else they themselves would be killed and raped. They claimed that killing the Tutsi’s was necessary and legitimate. In a book by Philip Gourevitch, Clemantine reads how Hutu Power armed everyone with machetes to make the Tutsi deaths as painful and grotesque as possible.
The facts about the Rwandan Genocide are terrifying and reinforce Clemantine’s inability to have faith in the world as a good, logical place. It can be very difficult to maintain a positive view of humanity while also acknowledging that some people are so violent and heartless.
Themes
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Clemantine discovers that this cruel science of eugenics was brought to Rwanda by Belgian colonizers. When the Belgians arrived, they measured Rwandans’ skulls and noses and divided them into three groups: the Hutus, the Tutsi’s, and the Twas. The Belgians then created social policies that antagonized the groups against each other. They told the Tutsis they were European and intelligent while they told the Hutus they were stupid and childish. The Belgians left Rwanda in 1962, but their eugenics had poisoned the country. The Rwandan president was shot. Then, the UN peacekeepers left Rwanda, as the countries who won World War II and swore to never let another Holocaust happen abandoned the country.
Rwanda’s history shows that colonizers had an initial impact on the country—an impact that ultimately laid the groundwork for the horrible genocide. Clemantine also points out that the rest of the world abandoned Rwanda when the genocide broke out.
Themes
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Today, the killers in Rwanda are being put on trial in small village courts. Rwanda’s goal is to convict but also to heal, unreasonably expecting their people to coexist with others who killed and raped their families. When American newspapers publish the facts and announce that 800,000 people were killed, everyone looks at Clemantine in alarm. Clemantine feels tired and dizzy.
Rwanda’s attempt to heal is as illogical as the evil that initially destroyed it. In Clemantine’s view, it is as irrational to expect a person to forgive a person who killed and raped their family as it is to kill and rape one’s neighbors in the first place. After what she’s lived through, the world is irrational to Clemantine.
Themes
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In Night, Clemantine reads how Elie Wiesel lost his own name and all sense of himself. She is fascinated by Wiesel’s questioning of God. Everyone in Clemantine’s life—even Claire—praises God. But Wiesel asks how God can possibly exist. His only answer is that God is cruel and chose for his people to be killed. Wiesel describes that love is a burden in a cruel world and that he felt relief when his father died from dysentery beside him.
Clemantine identifies with Elie Wiesel’s loss of faith. Even as a girl, Clemantine was too curious to unquestioningly believe in the vague and contradictory explanations of God that her mother gave her. After the genocide, she doesn’t believe in God because the world contains so much evil and suffering.
Themes
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Clemantine finishes Night in two days and then reads it a second and third time. Reading Night gives her a language for describing the atrocities that happened to her. She remembers people disparaging each other, calling each other cockroaches, crying voices asking for their loved ones. Her mother had just said it was intambra—the conflict, but there is never only one word.
Clemantine wants to write about her experiences, but she feels that her language is too limited. She struggles with words such as “conflict” and “genocide” because they seem too limited to fully capture what she wants to say. Slowly, she tries to piece together her memories as a way of more accurately representing the history these words attempt to describe.
Themes
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Clemantine’s eighth grade class is going to Washington, D.C. to learn about the Civil and Vietnam Wars, so Clemantine needs official identification. She has gone to the DMV twice to get an Illinois State ID, but she has been denied both times. Mr. Thomas, who is a lawyer, decides to take Clemantine to the secretary of state office. They stand at the counter, and Mr. Thomas tells Clemantine’s story: how she fled being killed in the Rwandan Genocide and lived in refugee camps for six years before coming to Chicago. The clerk sends for her supervisor, and Mr. Thomas tells the story all over again. The clerk tells Clemantine she has an interesting story, and issues her an ID.
Clemantine obtains an official ID by appealing to the state with her story. But the challenge of simply obtaining an ID drives home her permanent feeling of displacement. Although she has technically made it out of harm’s way, her feeling of belonging nowhere persists.
Themes
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Clemantine stands on the Antietam battlefield. She learns that 23,000 people died there in one day. However, there are no crying children or signs of blood. The next day, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Clemantine observes that there are no memorials dedicated to the Vietnamese civilians. She feels jealous of those who are named. She sobs while her classmates take pictures. 
When Clemantine visits the DC war memorials, all she can see is how unfair history is to all the victims involved in tragedy. In her country’s tragedy—the Rwandan Genocide—she was one of the many victims who was made invisible and robbed of her individuality. She is jealous of victims who get the respect of memorials in history.
Themes
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At the Holocaust Museum, Clemantine reads about Jacob Unger, a man who was gassed in an extermination camp. Later that semester, a Holocaust survivor visits Clemantine’s class and shows the number tattooed on her arm. Clemantine wants a language, a way of ordering her shattered history. Claire, for instance, orders her life by believing that God has a plan. But no one Clemantine knows of—except Elie Wiesel—acknowledges the awful fact that people destroy each other.
Clemantine is caught between the feelings of wanting to talk about her past and also being unable to grasp the horrible, illogical truth of what happened. She finds it impossible to turn to God to soothe her confusion and pain but also is unwilling to move forward, forgetting her life and things that happened to her that made her who she is.
Themes
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When the movie Hotel Rwanda comes out, everyone asks Clemantine questions. Clemantine finds their questions violating; no one has a right to her pain. Clemantine is asked to speak at youth groups and Catholic charities. She agrees to speak to a high school class and pretends she’s unimportant. She points to the map, showing where she was born, and narrates her life like an adventure. The class reacts without pity and thinks Clemantine is cool. Everyone finds Clemantine’s story exotic, but she feels like she’s disappearing. She dreams of retreating to a fictional time of innocence.
When Clemantine first starts speaking publicly about her experiences, she can’t speak candidly. Similar to the way she puts on an act in order to adapt to her surroundings, she now puts on the act of a cool teenager so she can tell her story. Eventually, she will become a powerful public speaker and will write this memoir, but at this point, she feels that no one has a right to her pain because it is the only possession that’s truly hers. 
Themes
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Displacement and Identity  Theme Icon
Charity vs. Sharing  Theme Icon