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
In the United States, Clemantine survives by shutting out her family and working hard at school. When she needs support, she reads Toni Morrison. She feels the same existential isolation that Morrison’s characters feel. Like them, she feels that only her loneliness belongs only to her.
Because everything she owned was always taken from her, Clemantine’s only possessions are her unique experiences. She cherishes her loneliness and pain as possessions even though these are possessions no one wants to have.
Themes
One day, when Clemantine is shopping with Mrs. Thomas, Claire calls to say Pudi has meningitis. Right away, Clemantine wires her babysitting money to Rwanda to pay for Pudi’s medicine. The next day, she goes to Claire’s empty apartment (Claire has just left Rob) and they wait to get a call from their mother. Finally, their mother calls and says that Pudi is dead. He was 22 when he died, but Clemantine didn’t know him as an adult. There was so much she wanted to tell him, and yet nothing to say. She’d been too terrified to talk to him on the phone. She weeps on Claire’s mattress.
Clemantine feels as though there was so much she wanted to tell Pudi, even if she doesn’t know exactly what she would have said. She has this contradictory feeling with every member of her estranged family. In some ways, her family knows her better than anyone; they know who she was and what she wanted to be. However, none of them know what she has become. Because Clemantine’s life and identity were disrupted and severed, her relationship with her family is both a deep bond and a mere acquaintance.
Themes
Three months after the Oprah show, Claire flies back to Rwanda. She finds her parents living in a shack outside Kigali. Her father is suffering from high blood pressure and diabetes. In Kigali, Claire is treated like a star because of the Oprah show. A genocide museum has been built that contains a mass grave of 250,000 people. In one exhibit, a video plays in which several traumatized Rwandans talk about the necessity of forgiveness.
Claire is intent on bringing the whole family from Rwanda so they can all be together in the United States. Clemantine stays out of this decision. She doesn’t want to see her family because of how close and yet painfully estranged they are from one another. She no longer dreams of reviving the past.
Themes
Years later, Clemantine and Claire sit in a park in San Francisco and argue about forgiveness. Claire believes that people must forgive. Clemantine asks how all the people who suffered and were robbed of their humanity can be expected to forgive. Clemantine says that people need to know that killing their neighbors and families is unforgivable. Claire says that forgiveness is worth it because it brings peace: Rwanda is only peaceful now because people have forgiven their killers. Clemantine understands that forgiveness is practical, and that it is the piece missing from her healing. But she feels that a line was crossed and that everyone must be held responsible for what happened. Claire changes the subject.
Clemantine’s conception of the world has been so altered by her experiences that she can no longer view forgiveness and peace as the right actions to take. In her view, the violence that tore Rwanda apart was so fundamentally wrong that any sense of forgiveness feels completely false to her. In this way, Clemantine has lost her faith in the world.
Themes
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When Claire visits her parents in Rwanda, she obtains visas for her mother and sister. However, she doesn’t have enough money yet to buy them plane tickets. Claire has had a hard time getting on her feet in the United States; Rob takes her paychecks and spends them on other women. He also beats her and constantly tears her down. Claire goes back to Rwanda a second time, but she still doesn’t have money for her mother’s ticket. She calls Clemantine and asks her to borrow the money from her boyfriend Troy’s father, who once offered to help bring Clemantine’s parents to the United States.
Even though Claire has made it out of Africa and her life as a refugee, she is still caught in a constant struggle for survival. Much of what she dealt with as a refugee she still deals with in the United States: Rob is still abusive, and no matter how hard she works, she can never get ahead. This shows that a person’s life isn’t magically better once they are no longer a refugee. The struggles they have as refugees are surprisingly similar to many of the struggles they will face for the rest of their lives.
Themes
Clemantine doesn’t want to ask Troy’s father for money. Even at 19, she doesn’t want charity. She resents the outsiders who try to revive Africa, believing themselves to be great saviors. She doesn’t think this postcolonial generosity makes up for the sins these people originally committed. She wants people to really examine their biases so that their minds don’t slowly get possessed by ideas that eventually lead to systemic killing, like what happened with the Holocaust. However, Claire convinces Clemantine to ask Troy’s father. Troy’s father arranges a flight for Clemantine’s mother. When her mother asks Claire where she got the money, Claire says from God.
Clemantine despises charity because she feels like it is an easy way for people to feel like they are helping. People can give charity without really listening to the experience of the person they are helping and without examining their own biases. Clemantine believes that everyone is responsible for the tragedies that occur in the world. She believes that to truly help a person who’s suffered, one must have full knowledge of this person’s suffering and the part they may have played in inflicting it so as to prevent history repeating itself.
Themes
After Clemantine’s mother moves in with Claire in Chicago, Clemantine avoids the apartment. Her mother tries to help Claire with the chores and the kids, but she is disoriented and doesn’t speak any English. She hovers over Claire, treating her like a child and criticizing her actions. Often, Claire leaves the apartment for fresh air. A few months later, Claire returns to Rwanda for her father and other siblings. Her parents are excited to immigrate to the United States, but they have a hard time settling in. They never talk about the past. Claire and Clemantine feel permanently alienated from them. Clemantine’s father is often in the hospital for his diabetes. Claire has eight people living in her apartment and struggles to feed everyone.
Claire’s mother micromanages Claire like she is still a child, suggesting that Clemantine’s family members have views of one another that are frozen in time before they were all separated. Furthermore, no one talks about what happened even though they all experienced the same kinds of pain. This silence may come partly from Rwanda’s old tradition of modesty, but also from the fact that they all suffered in isolation. No matter how alike their suffering, they all feel like lonely strangers.
Themes
Once, Clemantine starts to ask her mother about what happened after she and Claire left. Her mother’s hands tremble, and Clemantine realizes she shouldn’t have asked. One night, Clemantine and her mother study together at Claire’s kitchen table, Clemantine studying for the SAT’s and her mother studying English. They haven’t been this close in years, but they don’t speak. Her mother looks different from what Clemantine remembered; only her high cheekbones and her white rosary necklace are the same. Clemantine runs to the bathroom and cries.
When Clemantine studies opposite her mother in silence, she sees a woman who barely resembles the mother she had in Rwanda. Because she left her at such a young age, Clemantine’s image of her mother is frozen in time years ago. This suggests that separation and displacement estrange people from one another in ways that are hard to remedy.
Themes
