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
Years after the Oprah show, which taped when Clemantine was 23, Oprah invites her and Claire to South Africa to an event at her new Academy for Girls. In the lobby of the fancy school, Clemantine notices a display of beaded dolls with red bead eyes. The dolls are familiar to Clemantine, and she asks Claire if she had a doll with bead eyes. Exasperated, Claire says that Clemantine is thinking of Mukamana’s story, which Clemantine always asked Claire to repeat: “once there was a girl who smiled beads.”
Clemantine forgets Mukamana’s story about the girl who smiled beads for a long time. If she hadn’t gone back to South Africa and seen the beaded dolls, she never would’ve remembered the fable she used to love. Returning to this story now, much later in her life, will give her the opportunity to make sense of the experiences she has had as a refugee.
Themes
The Rwandan fable opens with a barren mother who’s desperate for a baby. One day, the woman prays for a child, and it starts to thunder. The thunder tells the woman to stop crying. The woman tells the thunder she’ll stop crying if the thunder will give her a baby. Months later, the woman gives birth to the most beautiful girl in the world. When the girl smiles, a trail of beads flows from her mouth. The mother is proud and jealous and locks the girl in the house so she won’t be stolen. One day, the girl escapes. Her mother asks everyone, but no one has seen her, they’ve only seen her trail of beads. The thunder, looking for his daughter, finds the girl who smiles beads and takes her back to live in the sky.
The girl in Mukamana’s story doesn’t want to be kept at home. She wants to be free and refuses to be possessed. When people try to find this girl, all they can find are the beads that trail from her mouth—beautiful fragments but not the girl herself. This character bears resemblance to Clemantine’s own life. Clemantine was homeless against her own will, and she hates the fragmented nature of her identity that came about as a result of her displacement. But the girl who smiled beads helps her see that her wandering and her fragmented identity are beautiful rather than tragic.
Themes
When Mukamana told Clemantine this story, she gave her the character and let Clemantine fill in the plot. In this way, the girl who smiled beads became the answer to whatever problem Clemantine provided. Clemantine imagines that the girl who smiled beads is always safe and special but always gone. In a world where she is never home, Clemantine decides she is the girl who smiled beads. She wanders and leaves her beads—time, objects, memories—behind in her wake.
Clemantine’s roommate at Yale arrives with furniture and potted plants and takes the top bunk. Clemantine arrives with mismatched things. A week before, she attended an orientation camping trip that was fun, but the cabins were dingy. Clemantine buys a Yale sweatshirt. She studies during the week and goes to parties on the weekends. She is distracting herself; she wants none of the African culture Claire fills her apartment with.
Clemantine leans into life at Yale as a way of erasing her memories of the past. Instead of celebrating her culture, she decides to dress and act like her fellow students. She feels that her roommate’s dorm decorations are cohesive, whereas hers are jumbled—she still hasn’t put her “katundu” in order.
Themes
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The summer after her freshman year, Clemantine decides to go to Kenya to study Swahili. Her boyfriend, Zach, who’s a Black American from Atlanta, is going too. That year, he learned Kinyarwanda just to speak to Clemantine. Clemantine imagines that they will have a lovely time in Kenya where she will be accepted by her people. Yale tells the girls to dress modestly to respect Kenyan traditions. Clemantine doesn’t want to obey; she feels she is special, a native daughter returning to her homeland.
Clemantine imagines that her school trip to Africa will be like the perfect homecoming she’s been dreaming of since she left Rwanda at six years old. In this way, Clemantine still clings to the myth that she can return to who she was and the home she had before the genocide. She seeks this homecoming as an opportunity to feel unique— something she’s desired ever since being a refugee made her invisible.
Themes
The spring before going to Kenya, Clemantine and Zach spend time at the Afro-American Cultural Center. Clemantine meets amazing Black people from all over the world. She feels out of touch with Black beauty. She likes the art of Black Americans who escaped slavery, but she doesn’t share their story. The Black men Clemantine has known throughout her life have been crushed and devastated by the Rwandan Genocide.
Clemantine realizes that she doesn’t know where in the Black community she fits. She doesn’t share the story that Black Americans have, but she also doesn’t feel comfortable around those who do share her story: most of the survivors of the genocide that she’s met are ashamed and crushed rather than proud.
Themes
Clemantine wants to be able to speak about her past with coherence. She starts lecturing her classmates about the ugliness of African culture: how women are subservient to men, and children are beaten. Her classmates say this is a white person’s view of Africa. Clemantine denies this and says that people killing each other is real.
Clemantine finds the pride in African culture false, and her skepticism in this regard is similar to her hesitancy to embrace religion; she wants to confront the ugly truth of things instead of glossing over it with illogical or false explanations.
Themes
When Clemantine’s class lands in Mombasa, Kenya, she hates it immediately. The students stay next door to Fort Jesus, a shack where Africans were kept before being brought to America on slave ships. Mombasa feels menacing; everyone thinks Clemantine is either the Yale students’ employee or a sex worker they’ve hired. Her rage over this only makes the locals think she’s sexy. Everywhere, old white men walk around with young Kenyan girls.
In Mombasa, Clemantine finds that the locals have such a low opinion of themselves that they can’t view her—a fellow African—as the intelligent, successful student that she is. There is, then, a sense of internalized racism at play, which ultimately complicates Clemantine’s return to her home continent, making it that much harder for her to feel a rewarding feeling of homecoming.
Themes
Clemantine rebels, wearing tank tops and short skirts and walking out alone at night. She is afraid the person she created in America will be lost. She is afraid of being raped, sold, killed, or left behind. She realizes now that she was broadcasting her fears so that they came true. She is groped and catcalled wherever she goes in Mombasa. Clemantine wants to feel inviolable, but she only feels lost and degraded. She leaves Mombasa early.
In Mombasa, Clemantine makes her worst fears come true. She wants to push the boundaries as far as she can and still feel like she hasn’t been violated. She wants to prove that no matter what happens, she is inherently resilient. In this way, she makes another attempt to erase the language of ruin she grew up with, hoping to prove that she can be beautiful and strong even after her harrowing past.
Themes
Clemantine spends the rest of the summer in Chicago at the Thomases’ house. She tries to forget her fears about her body. One day, she goes to pick up a prescription with messy clothes, and the pharmacist denies her insurance. But when Clemantine changes to look like a “respectable” suburban person, the pharmacist accepts it.
Clemantine realizes that one’s appearance affects the way they are treated by others. Once she realizes this, she becomes aware of the prejudices connected to her appearance as a Black woman.
Themes
