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 boat arrives in Tanzania. Clemantine and the exhausted refugees sleep on the beach. In the morning, immigration police round them up and take them to a nearby school. Clemantine puts Mariette in a suitcase to keep her warm. The next day, they ride in a white truck to a refugee camp in Kigoma. There were no tents or bathrooms, and police guard the fence. One day, Claire gets a message from Rob to be at the gate at 10 p.m. He will pay off a guard to drive them away. That night, a man comes, and Claire climbs the fence. Clemantine is too slow, and they leave her, saying they’ll come back for her the next night. Clemantine’s fear of abandonment has come true. But later that night, a guard comes and brings her to Claire, who’s waiting in a taxi.
While much of Claire and Clemantine’s constant moving around is the fault of external forces beyond their control, Claire also wills much of her family’s restlessness. Clemantine doesn’t like refugee camps, but more than anything, she wants to be able to settle into one place, learn how to survive in it, and find small habits for making it feel like home. Claire, who always dreamed of studying abroad, wants to move on to bigger and better things, so she constantly uproots the small victories Clemantine makes in creating home out of nothing.
Themes
Clemantine and Claire join Rob’s extended family in a compound in Kigoma. There is no food, so everyone drinks tea. One day, Mama Nepele prepares a pot of tea with used leaves and tells Claire to serve it to the men. After she serves the tea, Rob yells at Claire for serving weak tea, asking her what kind of woman she is. Mama Nepele tells Rob to stop humiliating his wife. Since Rob has become a refugee too, he no longer looks Clemantine in the eyes.
This scene is the first clear sign that Rob will become an abusive husband. To a certain extent, Rob used to make a show of being kind to refugees back when he wasn’t a refugee himself. However, becoming a refugee seems to have humiliated him, and he responds to this humiliation by debasing Claire.
Themes
A week later, the immigration police start rounding up more people, and Claire tells Rob they must go. They dress in all their clothing, and Claire sews her money into her waistband. She has heard of a better refugee camp in Malawi that has tents. They take a safari bus that has televisions and bathrooms. Clemantine ignores Claire, angry at her for making them leave again. Clemantine watches the landscape change. She feels beyond lost, like a drifting feather. She tries to remember where she has just come from, but she only remembers people screaming.
Claire thinks that moving on will lead her family to something better. By contrast, the more they move, the more Clemantine feels lost. She wants to remember where she came from, but their constant moving erases her past and jumbles her life’s timeline. She feels like a drifting feather because she doesn’t remember where she came from and doesn’t know where she’s going.
Themes
Clemantine still has her Mickey Mouse backpack. Inside, she carries her favorite sweater and rocks from every place they’ve been—Lake Tanganyika, Tanzania. Neither Rob nor Claire has papers to enter Malawi, so they get off the bus before the border. Claire assumes that no one will harass Clemantine and Mariette because they are only kids. A while later, Claire and Rob return. Claire can hardly move. Her expression is impenetrable, but she finally tells Clemantine what happened: she and Rob were caught by the immigration police who beat them with an iron rod. Claire pleaded with them and showed them her leaking breast to prove she had a baby. The soldiers continued to beat them until Claire paid them.
The incident Claire and Rob have with the soldiers shows the full extent of the danger that Clemantine’s family faces. The soldiers beat Claire with an iron rod, showing her no mercy even when she proves that she has a baby who needs her. This shows that, in the region during this time, refugees were often treated as less than human beings. The only thing that keeps the soldiers from killing Claire and Rob is money, proving Claire’s point that money is the only thing that can improve their lives.
Themes
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Clemantine, Claire, Rob, and Mariette arrive at the Malawi refugee camp, Dzaleka. They sleep with 20 refugees in one of the brick huts. They eat rice and peanut butter. Clemantine spends all day with Mariette, watching the road for her parents and Pudi. A nice woman helps Clemantine navigate the showers, where depraved men prey on girls. Every morning Rob dresses in a nice outfit and tries to get a job in camp management. Eventually, he gives up. He lies on the floor all day yelling at anyone who bothers him.
Both Rob and Clemantine live under the delusion that their lives will go back to normal. Clemantine thinks that her family will find her any day now. Rob thinks that if he continues to dress in respectable outfits, people will treat him with respect, like they did before he became a refuge. Both Clemantine and Rob slowly realize that their refugee status isn’t temporary.
Themes
Claire is restless and doesn’t want to settle. At a refugee camp, the workers oppress the refugees and believe that they’re victims because of some inherent weakness. Claire combats this sense of powerlessness by making money. She starts selling the family’s few possessions. One day, she notices a woman selling goat meat and decides she could do better, since she speaks four languages. She starts asking where she can get a goat. Meanwhile, Clemantine learns how to care for Mariette.
Clemantine explains that refugees are treated as though they are inherently lesser than non-refugees. Both Clemantine and Claire defend themselves against this debasement but in different ways. Claire seeks freedom through making money, whereas Clemantine seeks dignity and a sense of home through caring for Mariette.
Themes
Claire dresses like a Malawi woman. Most of the refugees are Muslim, so she barters with a man to kill the goat in the mosque. The next morning, she bribes a guard to let her leave the camp. She walks out into the farm fields and finds someone willing to sell her a goat. She walks the goat back to camp, has it butchered, and sells the meat to the refugees. Every week, she buys another goat. This primitive commerce gives her a sense of power.
In Rwanda as a teenager, Claire had a knack for business and saving money. Now, she puts this skill to use in the refugee camp. Rob is crushed by his lifestyle, and Claire takes his place as the provider for the family by strategizing ways to make money. In this way, she rises above this environment, even as the environment itself threatens to disempower and violate women.
Themes
Four months after arriving in Dzaleka, Clemantine goes to see a movie about Jesus. The movie is screened on a bedsheet in the center of camp, and the workers provide chocolate. Clemantine enjoys watching Jesus preach to his flock and multiply food. When she gets home, Claire has packed their possessions. Without asking Clemantine, Claire and Rob have decided to leave. Clemantine hates them. She packs her Mickey Mouse backpack.
When Clemantine goes to see the movie at the refugee camp, she enjoys herself and starts to feel slightly at home. She is therefore furious when she finds out that Claire is uprooting her yet again. She makes sure to pack her Mickey Mouse backpack—the one thing that she always has, even while she’s migrating.
Themes
All night, Clemantine, Claire, Rob, and Mariette walk. Clemantine fumes; she had just learned how to survive in Dzaleka. Claire carries Mariette clumsily on her back and doesn’t speak to Clemantine. She walks aggressively, not caring how Clemantine feels or that she’s terrified of Rob. Clemantine can feel that Claire is afraid of Rob too; he hits her and only cares about himself. At dawn, Rob says they are in Mozambique. Clemantine scans the landscape for some difference that marks the new country, but it looks the same: bleak and empty. She fantasizes about finding her mother in a market and buying her a present. They walk over bullet shells until they reach the main road.
Clemantine feels that Mozambique looks the same as everything else: bleak and empty. She can no longer tell the difference between all the places she’s been, and this contributes to her sense of displacement and loss. Since the landscape terrifies her and Claire gives her no affection, Clemantine resorts to her imagination to keep her company. She imagines buying her mother a present as if to be the affectionate, caring mother that she herself lacks in life.
Themes
Clemantine and her group reach a bus stop. They sit down in the shade and wait. Clemantine’s stomach aches with hunger, but she gives the rest of the porridge to Mariette. Hours later, a military bus arrives, and they board. Clemantine curls into a ball on the floor and falls asleep. Claire wakes her when they get to the town of Tete, where they get off the bus. Suddenly, Clemantine realizes she left her Mickey Mouse backpack on the bus. She asks Rob and Claire to go back for it, but they refuse. She starts back for it herself, but Rob grabs her arm violently and tells her no one cares.
The loss of Clemantine’s Mickey Mouse backpack is devastating because it is the one possession that remained constant in all the upheaval since she left Uvira. In the backpack, Clemantine kept a roadmap of her restless life in the form of rocks from each place she passed through. She was also collecting presents for Pudi. Therefore, when she loses her backpack, she loses her past and her hope of returning to it.
Themes
