The Girl Who Smiled Beads

Clemantine’s teacher at the Christian Heritage Academy puts the word genocide on a vocabulary list. Clemantine hates this word because it is insufficient; it is impersonal and sterile when it should be personal and gruesome. It doesn’t describe the pain of each person included in the whole tragedy. She feels that it doesn’t help the victims, but only helps the politicians who sit in their offices and discuss it impersonally. She hates that the word genocide lumps the Rwandan Genocide in with the Holocaust or other horrific instances of ethnic cleansing. Each atrocity is a “different, specific, personal tragedy” that a single word cannot describe.

When she is 16, Clemantine starts reading Elie Wiesel’s book Night. Even though Elie Wiesel was a white Jewish man, Clemantine identifies with his disembodied feeling and with his love and resentment towards family. To this day, Clemantine doesn’t know Rwanda’s political history; she only knows that the Rwandan president was shot down in his plane when she was six. Then, all she knows is that bad people stole from her family. From then on, no one wanted to answer Clemantine’s questions; it was better to be like Claire—stoic—than to talk about it. Clemantine wants to piece together the narrative from her fragments of knowledge. However, she cannot comprehend the idea of one group of people killing another; it is fundamentally wrong.

Now, living in the United States, Clemantine learns about her own history. The Rwandan Genocide began on April 8, 1994, and lasted 100 days. A group called the Hutus killed their neighbors—a group called the Tutsis. Hutu Power, a radical fascist group, spread the opinion via radio that the Tutsi’s were subhuman cockroaches. Hutu Power required every Hutu to participate in killing and raping the Tutsi’s or else they themselves would be killed and raped. They claimed that killing the Tutsi’s was necessary and legitimate. In a book by Philip Gourevitch, Clemantine reads how Hutu Power armed everyone with machetes to make the Tutsi deaths as painful and grotesque as possible.

Clemantine discovers that this cruel science of eugenics was brought to Rwanda by Belgian colonizers. When the Belgians arrived, they measured Rwandans’ skulls and noses and divided them into three groups: the Hutus, the Tutsi’s, and the Twas. The Belgians then created social policies that antagonized the groups against each other. They told the Tutsis they were European and intelligent while they told the Hutus they were stupid and childish. The Belgians left Rwanda in 1962, but their eugenics had poisoned the country. The Rwandan president was shot. Then, the UN peacekeepers left Rwanda, as the countries who won World War II and swore to never let another Holocaust happen abandoned the country.

Today, the killers in Rwanda are being put on trial in small village courts. Rwanda’s goal is to convict but also to heal, unreasonably expecting their people to coexist with others who killed and raped their families. When American newspapers publish the facts and announce that 800,000 people were killed, everyone looks at Clemantine in alarm. Clemantine feels tired and dizzy.

In Night, Clemantine reads how Elie Wiesel lost his own name and all sense of himself. She is fascinated by Wiesel’s questioning of God. Everyone in Clemantine’s life—even Claire—praises God. But Wiesel asks how God can possibly exist. His only answer is that God is cruel and chose for his people to be killed. Wiesel describes that love is a burden in a cruel world and that he felt relief when his father died from dysentery beside him.

Clemantine finishes Night in two days and then reads it a second and third time. Reading Night gives her a language for describing the atrocities that happened to her. She remembers people disparaging each other, calling each other cockroaches, crying voices asking for their loved ones. Her mother had just said it was intambra—the conflict, but there is never only one word.

Clemantine’s eighth grade class is going to Washington, D.C. to learn about the Civil and Vietnam Wars, so Clemantine needs official identification. She has gone to the DMV twice to get an Illinois State ID, but she has been denied both times. Mr. Thomas, who is a lawyer, decides to take Clemantine to the secretary of state office. They stand at the counter, and Mr. Thomas tells Clemantine’s story: how she fled being killed in the Rwandan Genocide and lived in refugee camps for six years before coming to Chicago. The clerk sends for her supervisor, and Mr. Thomas tells the story all over again. The clerk tells Clemantine she has an interesting story, and issues her an ID.

Clemantine stands on the Antietam battlefield. She learns that 23,000 people died there in one day. However, there are no crying children or signs of blood. The next day, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Clemantine observes that there are no memorials dedicated to the Vietnamese civilians. She feels jealous of those who are named. She sobs while her classmates take pictures. 

At the Holocaust Museum, Clemantine reads about Jacob Unger, a man who was gassed in an extermination camp. Later that semester, a Holocaust survivor visits Clemantine’s class and shows the number tattooed on her arm. Clemantine wants a language, a way of ordering her shattered history. Claire, for instance, orders her life by believing that God has a plan. But no one Clemantine knows of—except Elie Wiesel—acknowledges the awful fact that people destroy each other.

When the movie Hotel Rwanda comes out, everyone asks Clemantine questions. Clemantine finds their questions violating; no one has a right to her pain. Clemantine is asked to speak at youth groups and Catholic charities. She agrees to speak to a high school class and pretends she’s unimportant. She points to the map, showing where she was born, and narrates her life like an adventure. The class reacts without pity and thinks Clemantine is cool. Everyone finds Clemantine’s story exotic, but she feels like she’s disappearing. She dreams of retreating to a fictional time of innocence.