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
Back in Africa, Clemantine sits with Mariette and Freddy in a market in Lusaka, Zambia. People pass them, sneering or looking away. It rained heavily the day before, and the gutters are full of trash, excrement, and dead fish. When Claire, Clemantine, Mariette, and Freddy left Zaire, they tried to return to Rwanda through Burundi, but it was too dangerous, so they backtracked to Zambia. Claire left Clemantine, Mariette, and Freddy at the market while she went to find shelter and food—she doesn’t want to live in another refugee camp.
Clemantine, Claire, Mariette, and Freddy have evidently left Rob’s family in Zaire to try and make it back to Rwanda. Claire believes that refugee camps are the lowest form of life. In a refugee camp, the refugees are treated as less than human beings. She avoids them now at all costs, even though it means leaving a toddler and an infant on the street alone. She fears degradation more than danger.
Themes
Clemantine, Mariette, and Freddy wait for hours beside the market stalls crammed with cheap goods. By noon, the market is crowded with people bargaining and shouting. Children stand on the edges of the market and beg for food. Freddy sleeps through the noise, though Clemantine can’t imagine how. Clemantine daydreams about food. She is scared to be alone with two kids but hides her fear. Mariette, now three years old, is crying. Clemantine can’t comfort her because they have nothing.
This is one of the situations in which Clemantine has to pretend she’s something other than what she feels inside. Although she’s scared, she hides her fear and pretends that she’s older and more confident than she is. This skill carries over when she goes to private school in the United States, pretending that she is more together than she feels.
Themes
A woman comes up to Clemantine and hands her two plastic sacks of water. Clemantine and Mariette drink thirstily. The woman then invites them to wait at her stall. They sit at the woman’s stall in the shade until Claire returns with the address of a pastor’s house. They walk down packed streets until they reach the pastor’s house. They knock, and the pastor’s wife lets them in. Two days later, the pastor buys them bus tickets to Mozambique. They ride on the bus for 12 hours, but when they get to the border, immigration doesn’t let them through. They ride the bus all the way back to Lusaka, where the pastor’s wife reluctantly lets them back in to sleep. She allows them to stay for two weeks but then tells them to move out.
Clemantine and Claire encounter some kindness as refugees, but it also seems that many people are becoming wary of generosity. It seems as though the pastor and his wife have housed many refugees before them and have helped many others try to make it into Mozambique. At this point, the pastor’s wife is desensitized to suffering people because of how many she has seen. She is tired of helping yet another family. This shows the painful fact that, as times of suffering run on, help becomes more and more difficult to find.
Themes
Clemantine and Claire start walking, Mariette and Freddy tied to their backs. Two men catcall Claire in Kinyarwanda, Rwanda’s native language. Claire stops and tells them her name and that she’s from Rwanda. One of them starts crying because his sister’s name was Claire, and she died in the Rwandan Genocide. Claire apologizes for his loss and asks if they can stay at his apartment. One of the other guys breaks down and says he remembers Claire from a church dance.
Clementine and Claire experience a rare form of camaraderie or kinship in this scene, as they connect with fellow Rwandans who—like them—have been forced out of their country under the threat of violence.
Themes
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Clemantine and Claire move in with the man whose sister’s name was Claire. Claire scrambles to make money to help pay for what they eat. She learns more languages and greets everyone confidently, refusing to be broken. She never resorts to selling her body to survive, as so many other women have. Clemantine and Claire’s mother taught them to never trade with sex, telling them that as soon as a woman has been with a man, she can’t get her whole self back.
During the Rwandan Genocide, it was very common for women to turn to sex work in order to survive. Even when a woman didn’t resort to this, she was under constant threat of rape or abuse. Claire experiences abuse at the hands of her own husband, showing that even marriage doesn’t protect a woman from men during this time.
Themes
A few weeks later, Rob shows up. He has no money to help them. Claire doesn’t want their Rwandan hosts to see how badly Rob treats her, so they move into a slum called Chibolya. In Chibolya, children run with no shoes through filthy gutters and open trash dumps. The family rents a very small room in a row of crumbling cinder block houses. The room feels like a one-way passage into death. It faces a courtyard where the landlady’s daughter sits and guards the shower in the communal bathroom, which costs extra to use. They have a tiny electric stove with exposed wires. When Clemantine cooks, she fears getting electrocuted.
Although Chibolya is not a refugee camp—and yet, its conditions are worse than any refugee camp Clemantine and Claire have stayed in since leaving Rwanda. When Clemantine and Claire were in Burundi, they were doled out food and had no opportunities to make their own money. In Chibolya, though, at least their possessions are their own and they pay for the small space they live in. There is, then, a small amount of pride associated with living outside refugee camps, even if the conditions are no better (or perhaps worse) than they might be in a camp.
Themes
Claire befriends a woman with a stall in the market. Claire stands with her and helps bring in business, and the woman gives Claire a cut of the profits. Then, merchants start giving Claire goods to sell, and she keeps the profits. Clemantine gets through the day by caring for the children, cleaning the house, and washing her favorite outfit. When she stands in line for water, she hears the women talk about their cheating husbands. The men feel emasculated by poverty and make themselves feel better by taking advantage of their wives and other women. Clemantine is now 11, and her body is changing. She doesn’t dare stand in the water line after four p.m. for fear of being raped. She doesn’t trust anyone.
Both Claire and Clemantine maintain their pride while living in Chibolya. Claire does so by making money in the markets. Clemantine does so by maintaining dignity and cleanliness in the home. Even though everything around her is so grimy that she could easily see no point in trying to keep clean, Clemantine’s small cleaning rituals make her feel a measure of pride. However, the fact that she’s growing up frightens her; that she’s becoming a woman isn’t exciting but instead puts her in greater danger of rapists.
Themes
Clemantine makes one friend in Chibolya, a girl named Rhoda. Rhoda is the older sister of Joy, the landlady’s daughter who guards the shower. Rhoda and her family are envied because they are well-fed and have multiple rooms. Rhoda is lazy and relaxed. She is certain that life will take care of itself. Even though she lives in Chibolya, her life is perfect: she goes on trips and attends school.
Clemantine envies that Rhoda doesn’t have to worry about how life will go. Most children who haven’t experienced much hardship believe that no matter what, all will be okay. Although Clemantine is Rhoda’s age, she has the opposite feeling.
Themes
For thirty minutes every day, sunlight hits the window in Clemantine’s room and turns it into a mirror. Clemantine looks at herself, fascinated and disgusted. She looks like her mother, but also nothing like her. A 15-year-old boy starts hanging around, bringing candy for Mariette. Also, Rob’s girlfriend comes around. Whenever Claire protests, Rob shouts at her to go back to Rwanda.
Clemantine hasn’t looked in a mirror since before she left Rwanda. In fact, while in the refugee camp in Burundi, she was actually thankful she had no mirror so she couldn’t see how much she changed. Now, looking at herself she confirms her existence as a strange combination of her old self and an unrecognizable self.
Themes
Six months after arriving in Zambia, Claire stops going to the market for fear of getting arrested for having no papers. Rob goes to see his girlfriend and is caught by immigration police and put in jail. Claire considers leaving him, but a friend who also has an abusive husband tells her Rob will shape up when his kids are older. So, Claire visits the jail and lies to the police that Rob is the breadwinner of the family. Rob is released.
Rwandan cultural practices dictate that Claire shouldn’t leave Rob, no matter how abusive he is, because she has given her life to him. In this way, Rwanda’s female standards further put women at the mercy of men’s threats.
Themes
When Rob gets out of jail, his behavior is worse than ever. One night, he comes home angry and beats up Claire. He screams at her to take her kids and leave. Chibolya is dangerous after dark, but Claire gathers her kids and Clemantine and they hide in the bushes in the courtyard. Claire comforts Clemantine as if she’s a child. Clemantine wants to kill Rob. She is also angry at Claire for never consulting anything with her. Clemantine tells Claire that she is strong for earning money and protecting her family. She says that she and Claire need to take care of their beautiful kids. They sneak out of Chibolya and find an old woman who lets them into her house.
Clemantine feels a strange combination of hatred for both Rob and Claire after Rob kicks them out. She is obviously furious with Rob for hurting Claire, but she is also angry with Claire for treating her like a child and always moving them around from place to place. Her complicated feelings of love and resentment towards Claire shows that Clemantine’s most important relationships have suffered from the blurring of her most intense emotions.
Themes
A week later, Clemantine, Claire, and the kids move in with a woman in Lusaka. The woman left Rwanda generations ago. Clemantine sits in the kitchen while the woman cooks, admiring the henna on her hands. The woman braids Clemantine’s hair and takes her shopping for a new dress. Clemantine’s body is filling out. Claire goes to the Belgian consulate and charms the official into using his fax machine to reach her parents. She then sends faxes for other refugees, charging money. She returns to selling clothes in the market when it is safe again.
When Clemantine and Claire move away from Rob and into a woman’s house, their life becomes instantly better. The woman takes Clemantine shopping for a dress that fits her changing body, and Claire is able to save the money she earns at the market. This all suggests that women feel safe in solidarity with each other. In the company of other women, Claire and Clemantine find the most kindness.
Themes
When Claire has saved a little money, she, Clemantine, and the kids move back to Chibolya with Rob. Every day at four, Clementine puts on her new dress and walks out with the kids, feeling clean and tidy. She wants to be noticed. For an hour, she feels like somebody. She feels proud and beautiful. When she gets home, she takes off her dress and goes back to feeling like she is nobody.
Clemantine likes to walk in her new dress because she wants to feel like a unique person. She doesn’t want to blend in with all the other poor children in Chibolya. She loves washing her favorite outfit and cleaning the house because these are ways of respecting and valuing oneself.
Themes
One day, Claire comes home and says a friend told her the UN has a program that helps Rwandan refugees obtain entry to the United States. Claire thinks of America as a place of freedom where a person can start a business and get rich. The next day, she walks to the UN office and fills out the forms. She lists all her family members, including Rob. Even though Rob cheats right in front of Claire, she hopes he’ll change when they get to the United States.
When Claire hears about the opportunity to go to the United States, she decides that this is a better plan than eventually going home to Rwanda. At this point, she assumes her parents are dead. Also, danger lurks everywhere they go in Africa. Claire has always dreamed of going “abroad” and so she sees this as the fulfillment of her childhood fantasy.
Themes
Three months later, Claire is called into the UN for an interview. Claire tells Rob, and he jeers at her for being a refugee and an immigrant. Nonetheless, he dresses with the family the next day, and they all go into the office. They wait in line at the fancy embassy, and then Claire tells a clerk their story. On the way out, the clerk whispers to Claire that she passed.
Claire obtains her family passage to the United States by appealing to the UN officials with her story. This is similar to how Clemantine appealed to Illinois state officials to get her state ID. This shows that, as refugees, all Clemantine and Claire have to appeal for citizenship and rights is their powerful story.
Themes
Clemantine is excited to go to America. Claire says that as soon as they arrive, they will be given whatever they need and will become instantly rich. She buys the family new outfits and puffy jackets. They ride the bus to the airport. Clemantine cries all the way to Chicago. Now, her family will never find her.
Clemantine is both excited and sad to go to the United States. She is excited because she has heard how wonderful the States are, but she is sad because leaving Africa means leaving her past and her hopes of returning to her childhood behind forever.
Themes
