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
Clemantine imagines a bird hitting a window while two friends are talking. One thinks the bird is a bomb going off while the other thinks it is just a bird. If the former person doesn’t explain their trauma, the friends are alienated; unspoken fears make them magnets that repel each other. Rwanda and much of the world has this problem. Clemantine thinks that, in many ways, a traumatized person’s identity is broken. To continue to exist, traumatized people need to create a new identity with unbroken pieces. Clemantine needs to comprehend her history; but she also needs to reach across the space between her and others to share joy and pain.
Earlier, Clemantine explained her philosophy of sharing when it comes to resources. Now, her scenario of the bird hitting the window describes her philosophy of sharing when it comes to experiences and life stories. When the two friends who experience the bird hitting the window differently decide not to share their different experiences, they create a sort of impasse, making it impossible for either of them to understand the other’s perspective.
Themes
During her sophomore year at Yale, Clemantine’s photography professor organizes a field trip to the Prudence Crandall School for Negro Girls in Connecticut. This school was for white girls only until the president admitted one Black girl, at which point all the other white girls dropped out. The school then admitted only Black girls until it was attacked, and it closed for good. The professor instructs the students to walk around the school and construct a story from details and feelings. For the first time, Clemantine is told that history—her own and others’—is in the lingering details in front of her. When she wanders the school, she remembers the abandoned school in Burundi where she and Claire slept.
Clemantine wants to examine her past, but she feels like she can’t because it is a scattered trail; her past is missing parts and details, and she has no record of the places she lived or what she did. The experiment her photography tries at the museum gives her an alternative method for finding her history. The method tells her that her history is contained in the sensations and reactions she has to details around her. This method opens up a possibility for Clemantine to unlock her history.
Themes
Clemantine signs up for a class on W.G. Sebald’s work with a comparative literature professor named Carol Jacobs. Jacobs talks about Sebald’s thoughts and about how he presents time, images, and space. Jacobs tells the students to expect to be confused, because Sebald creates a disorienting map of his interior world. The jumble of images and thoughts in his work recreate the amnesia that fell over Germany after World War II.
Reading Sebald validates Clemantine’s interior feeling of confusion and disarray. Sebald uses this feeling in his writing to create an accurate account of a very traumatic world event, and this gives Clemantine the idea that she could use her own complicated feelings to rediscover her traumatic history, too.
Themes
Sebald’s Austerlitz is about a Jewish boy who was sent to Britain at the outset of World War II to escape the Nazis. He grows up and spends his life searching for his dislocated past. Sebald pieces the story together through the character’s non-linear obsessions and memories. Before this class, Clemantine felt that her intense and jumbled reactions and memories were misleading. Reading Sebald convinces her that she lives in all times and places at once; her past is always with her and is liable to rise to the surface at any moment because of various triggers.
For a long time, Clemantine has yearned for a cohesive identity and a logical, linear narrative of her past. Until reading Sebald, though, she thought it would be impossible to find coherence in her fragmented memories. However, she now realizes that the fragmented nature of her identity and past is what will lead her to her true history. She accepts that her story isn’t linear, but rather appears through jumbled associations. She writes her memoir in a way that captures this kind of history.
Themes
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Clemantine makes a practice of walking every day by Annette, a woman who sells flowers in front of Yale. This woman reminds Clemantine of Claire selling goods in Africa to improve their lives. Clemantine has always observed things in order to be a chameleon and adapt to wherever she is. Now, she tries to scrutinize herself. She tried therapy before, but it felt too invasive. Reading Sebald convinces Clemantine that she can examine and solve her problems herself. Sebald says that if a person goes deep enough into their memory, a narrative will appear. All Clemantine has to do is ask questions about herself and she’ll have her history.
While a refugee, Clemantine always looked beyond herself to learn how to survive. She escaped herself and her feelings so as to be more adaptable. She now turns her gaze on herself, examining her own peculiar reactions and habits. This shows that being a refugee often requires people to focus solely on survival and then, when it’s safe to do so, reconnect with themselves and the other aspects of life that they’ve been forced to neglect.
Themes
The following summer, Clemantine interns in the diversity department at Google. One day, the program director surprises the staff with a trip to Disneyland. On the flight to Los Angeles, Clemantine tells a coworker about her Mickey Mouse backpack—the treasure she lost that still makes her cry. Clemantine loves Disneyland; it is proof that a person can assemble a new world and identity with the imagination alone.
Clemantine loves Disneyland because of how imaginative it is. Throughout her time as a refugee, she relied hugely on her imagination to transport her out of a harsh world. She still mourns the loss of her Mickey Mouse backpack—the one tangible vessel of her identity. Having lost that, she knows she must create a new identity from imagination.
Themes
