The Girl Who Smiled Beads

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.