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Clemantine Wamariya
Claire is Clemantine’s older sister and is 14 when the book opens in Rwanda, before the Rwandan Genocide breaks out. As a teenager, Claire is confident and enterprising, and she dreams of going to college overseas in Canada. Clemantine follows Claire around, wanting to be like her, and Claire finds Clemantine’s constant questions irritating. When they become refugees during the genocide, Clemantine depends on Claire to look after her, but she is also afraid of her. Claire won’t answer any of Clemantine’s questions, and many times Clemantine is afraid that Claire wants to leave her behind. Claire marries Rob, a refugee aid worker, to get her and Clemantine out of poverty, and they move to Zaire to live with his family. Claire and Rob have three kids together: Mariette, Freddy, and Michele. When they become refugees again, Claire barters with other refugees and townspeople to try and make money. Any time they start to settle in somewhere, Claire gets restless and wants to move on. She learns the language wherever she and Clemantine happen to be so she can greet everyone and get them to buy things from her. Rob abuses Claire, but she stays with him until they immigrate to the United States, where his treatment of her doesn’t get any better. In the United States, Claire rents a tiny apartment and works multiple jobs as a hotel maid to support her family and her parents who eventually immigrate from Rwanda. Claire is generous and selfless, flying to Rwanda every New Year’s Eve to cook dinner for orphans of the Rwandan Genocide. Although she and Clemantine share their experience as refugees, they have a complicated relationship even after they’ve reached safety. Claire believes that survivors of the genocide should forgive so they can find peace. Clemantine, on the other hand, believes that it is unreasonable to ask the survivors of the genocide to forgive, and she wants to confront her painful memories. Even though Clemantine feels she owes Claire her life, she continues to feel that Claire ignores her. And indeed, Claire eventually admits that she felt alone even while she and Clemantine were refugees together.
Claire Quotes in The Girl Who Smiled Beads
The The Girl Who Smiled Beads quotes below are all either spoken by Claire or refer to Claire. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 2
Quotes
My life does not feel logical, sequential, or inevitable. There’s no sense of action, reaction; no consequence, repercussion; no plot. It’s just fragments, floating.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3
Quotes
I thought if I stated my name enough times, my identity would fall back into place […] But a name is a cover, a placeholder, not the whole story. A name is a basin with a leak that you need to constantly fill up. If you don’t, it drains and it’s just there, a husk, dry and empty.
I lost myself anyway. Every little thing. I had always loved the fancy soaps at my aunts’ houses. I loved the ones that smelled like geranium and lilac best of all.
Chapter 5
Quotes
That’s life in a refugee camp: You’re not moving toward anything. You’re just in a horrible groove. You learn skills that you wish you did not know: how to make a fire, how to cook maize, how to do laundry in the river and burn the lice on rocks. You wait, […]
But nothing gets better. There is no path for improvement—no effort you can make, nothing you can do, and nothing anybody else can do either, short of the killers in your country laying down their arms and stopping their war so that you can move home.
I now felt I’d made a mistake in Uvira. I’d let my guard down. I’d allowed myself to feel I belonged. But there was no real belonging—not anymore. There was only coming and going and coming and going and dying. There was no point in letting anybody get close.
Chapter 7
Quotes
To be a refugee was to be a victim—it was tautological. And not just a victim due to external forces like politics or war. You were a victim due to some inherent, irrevocable weakness in you. You were a victim because you were less worthy, less good, and less strong than all the non-victims of the world.
Chapter 8
Quotes
It felt surreal and awful. I’d lost track of who I was and who we were to each other. None of us were the same people who’d lived together in that house in Kigali. Those people had died. We had all died.
Chapter 10
Quotes
I understand that forgiveness is utilitarian, that it is likely even the missing piece in my life, the keystone that will allow me to balance and stabilize and keep the bricks of my life from tumbling down. But I can’t do it. To me it feels false.
Chapter 21
Quotes
Every time I need to summon my toughest, most self-actualized persona, I channel [Claire]. […] But […] my most generous feelings [towards Claire] are clouded by my own need to be recognized.
[…]
These days, when I’m with Claire, we have so much love and so much fear, and we want to kill each other.
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Claire Quotes in The Girl Who Smiled Beads
The The Girl Who Smiled Beads quotes below are all either spoken by Claire or refer to Claire. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 2
Quotes
My life does not feel logical, sequential, or inevitable. There’s no sense of action, reaction; no consequence, repercussion; no plot. It’s just fragments, floating.
Related Characters:
Related Symbols:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3
Quotes
I thought if I stated my name enough times, my identity would fall back into place […] But a name is a cover, a placeholder, not the whole story. A name is a basin with a leak that you need to constantly fill up. If you don’t, it drains and it’s just there, a husk, dry and empty.
I lost myself anyway. Every little thing. I had always loved the fancy soaps at my aunts’ houses. I loved the ones that smelled like geranium and lilac best of all.
Chapter 5
Quotes
That’s life in a refugee camp: You’re not moving toward anything. You’re just in a horrible groove. You learn skills that you wish you did not know: how to make a fire, how to cook maize, how to do laundry in the river and burn the lice on rocks. You wait, […]
But nothing gets better. There is no path for improvement—no effort you can make, nothing you can do, and nothing anybody else can do either, short of the killers in your country laying down their arms and stopping their war so that you can move home.
I now felt I’d made a mistake in Uvira. I’d let my guard down. I’d allowed myself to feel I belonged. But there was no real belonging—not anymore. There was only coming and going and coming and going and dying. There was no point in letting anybody get close.
Chapter 7
Quotes
To be a refugee was to be a victim—it was tautological. And not just a victim due to external forces like politics or war. You were a victim due to some inherent, irrevocable weakness in you. You were a victim because you were less worthy, less good, and less strong than all the non-victims of the world.
Chapter 8
Quotes
It felt surreal and awful. I’d lost track of who I was and who we were to each other. None of us were the same people who’d lived together in that house in Kigali. Those people had died. We had all died.
Chapter 10
Quotes
I understand that forgiveness is utilitarian, that it is likely even the missing piece in my life, the keystone that will allow me to balance and stabilize and keep the bricks of my life from tumbling down. But I can’t do it. To me it feels false.
Chapter 21
Quotes
Every time I need to summon my toughest, most self-actualized persona, I channel [Claire]. […] But […] my most generous feelings [towards Claire] are clouded by my own need to be recognized.
[…]
These days, when I’m with Claire, we have so much love and so much fear, and we want to kill each other.
