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
When Clemantine is a sophomore, she is asked to go to Rwanda with a Yale group that fundraised to buy water tanks for a Rwandan youth orphans’ community. On the plane, Clemantine panics while Zach tells her everything will be alright. Clemantine determines to sit with her pain while in Rwanda instead of hiding it.
As Clemantine explained once to Claire, faith and forgiveness are unacceptable to her—they are false. Without using faith to explain away her trauma, she is left with no other choice but to confront the painful truth of her past.
Themes
When Clemantine returns to the United States, she introduces Elie Wiesel at and event at the Holocaust Memorial Museum. President Obama then appoints her to the board of directors. In 2014, she flies to Kigali with the museum board for the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide. She is the emissary chosen to tell the story of the genocide to future generations. When she arrives, she still scans rooms for exits and studies people to figure out how to act. Kigali is clean and no one is begging. Although the presence of its history is oppressive, Rwanda has done its best to conceal signs of its terrible past. However, young men with guns stand guard everywhere. Clemantine eats dinner at the hotel where Hotel Rwanda took place, and where her uncle, now dead, used to take her for ice cream.
Twenty years after the Rwandan Genocide, the signs of its long-term effects remain. Clemantine still harbors her refugee instincts, and Kigali is under martial law. Clemantine is tasked with telling the story of the genocide to future generations—a difficult task because of how gruesome it was and how personally it affected Rwandans. The people who killed and raped half of Rwandan’s citizens are still living in Rwanda, right next door to those they attacked. Clemantine wonders how she can tell a history that is still so raw and personal.
Themes
On her second day in Rwanda, Clemantine goes with the museum board to a luncheon at the Rwandan First Lady’s house. The First Lady is elegant and kind. Rwanda now has a narrative for its country: the Hutus and Tutsis live in peace, the Belgians come and infect everyone with the idea that some people have less humanity than others, the Hutus and Tutsis kill each other, and Rwanda self-destructs.
Rwanda reminds itself that the belief in eugenics that turned half their people against the other half originated not in their own country, but in Belgium. In this way, Rwanda attempts to absolve itself from blame and shame. Rwandan heals by remembering that colonization is the real evil that befell Rwanda.
Themes
On the 20th anniversary of the Rwandan Genocide, Clemantine goes with the museum board to the Gatwaro Stadium where, 20 years earlier, government officials were gathered and shot. People arrive at the stadium from all over. Before this time for grieving was made official in Rwanda, the grieving was constant and devastating. None of these Rwandans know Clemantine. She tries to hide in her scarf. Everyone starts screaming in a reenactment of Rwanda’s history, with white colonizers turning into refugee camp workers on stage and actors pantomiming murder and death. Clemantine thinks the staging is over the top, but she doesn’t know how else Rwanda can gather to remember its tragic history.
In the reenactment of the genocide, the white colonizers turn into the refugee camp workers as if to show that these two groups were the evil people who caused the genocide and exacerbated its affects. Colonizers originally brought the mindset of eugenics to Rwanda, and the refugee workers maintained the idea that certain people were lower than others. In this way, the reenactment shows that extreme degradation was the evil that tore Rwanda apart.
Themes
Get the entire The Girl Who Smiled Beads LitChart as a printable PDF.
Rwanda’s president, Kigame, takes the stage and says that Rwandans need to heal and unite. The genocide was the fault of colonization, not of Rwandans. Rwandans must “tolerate an intolerable truth”—that they were driven by the Belgians to kill each other—and heal, he says. The crying and screaming continues. Clemantine is humiliated. She doesn’t want to tell this story to future generations. She flies home and stays in bed for a week.
In her own attempts to process and heal from the Rwandan Genocide, Clemantine has been unwilling to “tolerate the intolerable truth” and either forgive or have faith. She sees forgiveness and faith as false and illogical attitudes. She would rather confront the intolerable truth—that people kill each other—head on and reveal just how intolerable it is.
Themes
Years later, Clemantine travels to Israel with the Carter Center to learn about the Palestinian refugees in the Aida Refugee Camp. Clemantine visits the barrier fence that separates Israel and Palestine. Passing through security makes her feel dehumanized. The guards interrogate Clemantine about her black army-style boots and force her to take them off. Clemantine wonders what the boots mean to them and their history. The guards shamelessly search her personal items. She cries the whole time. She is thankful she can return to the United States.
The treatment that Clemantine receives at the Israel-Palestine border reminds her painfully of being a refugee in Africa. When she was a refugee, no one cared about her belongings or respected her body. She was always treated with suspicion and as if she were less than human. What was worse, she never had a home to escape to—as she does now—after this dehumanizing treatment.
Themes
