Mickey Mouse Backpack Symbol Analysis

Clemantine’s Mickey Mouse backpack—and specifically the loss of it—represents her sense of unbelonging as a refugee. Rob’s family in Uvira, Zaire initially gives her the backpack. While living with the family in Zaire, Clemantine felt special and loved for the first time since leaving her parents and her childhood home in Rwanda during the Rwandan Genocide. When Clemantine and Claire leave Uvira and become refugees again, Clemantine holds onto the Mickey Mouse backpack as her most valued possession. She fills it with rocks from every place she and Claire pass through, trying to hold onto landmarks that will cement and memorialize her transitory life. She also collects marbles for her brother Pudi in the backpack, wanting to have something to give him when she gets home.

When Clemantine accidentally leaves her Mickey Mouse backpack on a crowded bus, she is devastated. The loss of the backpack symbolizes the loss of her life story, since it contained everything that captured her fractured life since becoming a refugee. Clemantine starts to lose hope that she’ll ever belong anywhere, or that she’ll ever get back home. The tragic loss of the backpack is repeated when Claire and Clemantine arrive in the United States, and the airline loses their bag. The loss of this bag—which held the few items they had painstakingly collected before leaving Africa—is once again the loss of the past. Throughout the novel, the loss of possessions—particularly the loss of the Mickey Mouse backpack—represents the refugee experience. The loss of the backpack is the loss of childhood, home, continuity, and possession—everything that makes a person feel they belong.