Narrative, Memory, and Fragmentation Theme Analysis

As a refugee of the Rwandan Genocide, Clemantine Wamariya—the author of The Girl Who Smiled Beads—longs for a coherent narrative of her own life. When she’s forced to suddenly leave her home in Rwanda and spend the next six years as a refugee, her life ceases to follow a linear path. She tries to combat the loss of time, place, and memories by collecting keepsakes: rocks from each place she and her sister Claire pass through, her favorite articles of clothing, and presents for her brother Pudi. Clemantine keeps these objects in a Mickey Mouse backpack—her one possession—until she disastrously leaves it on a crowded bus. For Clemantine, the loss of this backpack is the loss of her life story. Much later, when she has immigrated to the United States, she continues to collect objects, which she calls her katunda, or “stuff.” From these objects—pictures, ticket stubs, gifts—she hopes she can one day piece together an all-encompassing and logical narrative of her life.

As inspiration, Clemantine returns to a story her nanny Mukamana used to tell her about a girl who wanders the earth and smiles a trail of beads. When Mukamana told this story, she allowed Clemantine to choose the plot. In the present, Clemantine feels that she is the girl who smiles beads: her life, although fragmented, is beautiful. However, despite this justification, Clemantine continues to yearn for a plot and an ending to her story, craving some sort of lens that will unify or—to a certain extent—make sense of everything that has happened to her. In this way, the memoir itself is the product of Wamariya’s attempt to recount her fragmented story. Alternating back and forth between her experience in 1990s Rwanda and her experience in the present-day United States, the book tells a jumbled, wide-reaching story of the refugee experience. Though it remains unclear whether or not writing the memoir gives Wamariya the closure she seeks, the very lack of a conclusive ending illustrates just how hard it is to create a coherent narrative out of deeply traumatic experiences.