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
The night before she starts school in the United States, Clemantine lies awake rehearsing what she’ll say to everyone. Clemantine and Claire have just moved into a one-bedroom apartment in north Chicago. Clemantine shares the daybed in the living room with Mariette, but she feels like it’s all hers. She wakes up at five a.m. and is ready by seven, when Claire walks her down to the school. Her teacher pronounces her name correctly, but she feels like she has no idea what’s happening.
Clemantine intersperses her experience in Ngozi with her experience starting high school in the United States. This juxtaposition of experiences suggests that, fundamentally, there is nothing different about the way Clemantine felt entering high school and navigating life at the refugee camp: she feels a lack of identity in both places.
Themes
On Sundays, Clemantine is tutored in English by a girl from the church. Clemantine colors in the pictures on the vocabulary notecards. People ask Clemantine if she’s happy, but she doesn’t know what that means. She feels like jumping off the roof and floating away. She and Claire spend Thanksgiving and Christmas at the Beckers’, where they are appalled by the excess food. Clemantine is used to becoming someone she’s not in order to survive, so she tries to be grateful and behave like an American teenager. But she feels like a person without parents.
Clemantine is very good at acting like she fits in, but she never actually feels that she fits in. Her chameleon ability is a survival technique that helped her adapt to the countless places she and Claire moved to as refugees. However, whether she is at a refugee camp, migrating on foot through Africa, or attending high school in the United States, she feels the same inner sense of detachment.
Themes
Mrs. Becker decides Clemantine needs to go to a better school. A year after Clemantine arrives in the United States, Mrs. Becker and Mrs. Beasley enroll her in the Christian Heritage Academy and arrange for her to stay with Mrs. Thomas, whom Clemantine eventually calls her American mother. Clemantine packs a small backpack, and Mrs. Thomas and her daughter Caulay pick her up. This is the first time she’s ever moved without Claire.
Clemantine is used to external factors forcing her to move to a new location. She’s accustomed to suddenly packing to move because of some danger. Now, Mrs. Becker and Mrs. Beasley arrange Clemantine’s newest move, and she goes along. Without Claire this time, however, Clemantine might have the chance to start a new life with a blank slate.
Themes
On the way, Mrs. Thomas points out landmarks in Chicago. When they arrive at Mrs. Thomas’s green house, Caulay shows Clemantine to her new bedroom. It has two beds, a desk, books, and its own bathroom. Clemantine can’t believe it’s all hers. She also can’t believe that the Thomases treat their two dogs like people; in Rwanda, she feared dogs because they ate the dead bodies. Clemantine imitates what Caulay does; she wants to be a good boarder so that she’ll be allowed to stay all year. This is a skill she learned as a refugee: if she became whatever people wanted her to be, they would give her more resources.
Clemantine’s new life at the Thomases’ house contrasts starkly with her old life as a refugee. Whereas she used to have no bed at all, she now has two, and lots of possessions. Although this confuses her, she understands that if she plays the part, this world and all its benefits can be hers. However, she still can’t look beyond this strategy to feel any actual sense of comfort or safety. This suggests that the lack of belonging she felt as a refugee is a feeling that painfully remains.
Themes
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Mrs. Beasley has the idea that Clemantine should go by Tina at school because it is easier to pronounce. Mrs. Thomas picks Clemantine up in the same spot every day, seeming to understand her fear of being forgotten. On the weekends, Clemantine goes back to Claire’s. She always jumps out of the car before Mrs. Thomas can hug her. Clemantine’s life at the Thomases is peaceful, but Claire’s life is still chaotic; her marriage is falling apart, and she works two jobs while raising her three kids. Clemantine helps her clean and take care of the kids, and she doesn’t mention the pretty soaps in Mrs. Thomas’s house.
At Claire’s, everything is chaotic, and Clemantine likely feels that she’s still in the midst of a great struggle for survival when she’s there. At the Thomases’ house, Clemantine experiences a new set of domestic comforts. The pretty soaps in Mrs. Thomas’s bathroom are reminiscent of the nice soaps in Clemantine’s aunt’s houses in Rwanda—the ones that Clemantine remembers and feels are an essential part of her identity. Mrs. Thomas’s house seems to provide her with what she yearned for as a refugee: beauty and domesticity.
Themes
One day at school, everyone is panicking. The principal dismisses school early. At Mrs. Thomas’s, Clemantine watches the Twin Towers fall on TV. Mrs. Thomas anxiously calls her son who lives in New York. Clemantine feels nothing. She tells Mrs. Thomas scornfully that this happens to people everywhere. Mrs. Thomas is shocked. Then, Clemantine dreams that she’s trapped in a room with terrified people. She wonders why no one is fleeing. She looks at obituaries in the paper, contemptuous that these dead people get mentions.
Clemantine is relatively unmoved by the tragedy of 9/11 because she knows that such tragedies happen to tons of people all over the world. She even feels envious of the people who died in 9/11 and their families, since all these people had obituaries in the paper. This shows that another horrible aspect of the Rwandan Genocide was the invisibility of its victims and their suffering.
Themes
Everyone pities Clemantine and wants to pamper her. Clemantine is contemptuous because she knows they only want to make themselves feel better. There are only two other Black students at her school, and everyone stares at her. One day, Mrs. Kline—a friend of Mrs. Thomas—takes Clemantine shopping at a mall. Mrs. Kline is an expert at shopping and navigates the overwhelming space confidently. As a refugee, Clemantine was always navigating complicated places this way. She still asks calculating questions whenever she enters a new place. Mrs. Kline has Clemantine try on lots of clothes and gives her opinion on everything. Clemantine is used to protecting her body and views it as a vulnerability; Mrs. Kline can see that she needs help loving herself.
Clemantine doesn’t recognize clothes shopping as a kind of survival. For six years, she had to focus solely on the physical needs of her body, such as whether she was hungry or cold or in danger. Her refugee life was not a life in which she could think about how she looked or appreciate her physical attributes. In fact, she was even thankful she had no mirror as a refugee because she didn’t want to see how transfigured her face was by hunger and grime. She now can’t view her body as anything other than a burden.
Themes
Clemantine tries to look down on Mrs. Kline’s vanity, but she actually aspires to her confidence. Claire never talked to Clemantine about her body. Clemantine watched girls in refugee camps get their periods, so she knows how her body works, but not how to love it. In Rwanda, women are seen as valuable only if they are virgins when married. If a woman is konona—raped—then she is “ruined” permanently: the evil that is done to her becomes part of her being. Clemantine works hard to forget this “language of ruin.” Although her body has been “ruined,” it is still sacred.
Clemantine was not literally raped, but the experience of starving and being homeless made Clemantine feel violated and robbed of her bodily autonomy. If she doesn’t want to feel ruined and worthless for the rest of her life, she recognizes that she has to change her language—that is, she has to change the way she views beauty and her body. Her goal is to be able to see that the same thing can be both ruined and beautiful at the same time. Her memoir also seems to have this goal: to find the beauty in a shattered life.
Themes
Mrs. Kline buys Clemantine her eighth grade graduation dress. Clemantine loves that Mrs. Kline sees beyond her to something beautiful. The dress is black satin with blue panels on the side. Clemantine thinks her narrow feet are ugly and weak; she remembers when bugs lived in them. But when she wears the sandals Mrs. Kline picks out for her, she decides they look good.
Clemantine knows her feet only as part of the “battleground” that her body became as a refugee, the battleground on which she fought to stave off everything that tried to overtake her. Now, with a pair of pretty sandals, she can finally see beauty in her body.
Themes
In order to fit in and not be expelled, Clemantine hides the fierce side of herself. One day, however, a popular girl named Susan invites everyone to her pool party except Jane, a quiet girl from Eastern Europe. Later, Clemantine follows Susan into the bathroom and locks the door behind her. She watches Susan put on her lipstick then greets her in an aggressive, protective voice. She tells Susan not to be mean to Jane again or she’ll pay for it. She enjoys watching Susan struggle frantically with the locked door. Then Clemantine unlatches it and walks out.
Clemantine tries to act like an American teenager so that she can have an easy life, but deep down, she identifies with those who are outcasts like herself. Her act breaks when Susan bullies Jane. As a refugee, she was treated like she was lesser and was outcasted from normal life. Now, in the United States, she stands up for people who are treated, even in small ways, like she was treated.
Themes
Clemantine joins the cheerleading squad. She thinks that learning to smile for no reason is a good skill to have in the United States. The physical challenge takes her out of her body and her bad thoughts. The other cheerleaders invite her everywhere, but Clemantine doesn’t want to bond. She feels that all relationships, even if they start out cute and loving, end with the person trying to kill her.
Clemantine goes through the motions of being an American teenager, but none of these acts erase her inner alienation. She’s good at adapting but not good at connecting, suggesting that the trauma of the refugee experience can make it hard for people to open up to others.
Themes
