Throughout The Girl Who Smiled Beads, beads symbolize the fragmented personal narrative and sense of self that is unique to the refugee experience. When Clemantine Wamariya is a girl in Rwanda, her nanny Mukamana tells her a story about a magical girl who wandered the earth and smiled a trail of beads. In the story, no one ever sees the girl—her presence is only known by the trail of beads she leaves behind. As Clemantine grows up and becomes a refugee of the Rwandan Genocide, traveling through six African countries and eventually immigrating to the United States, she uses this story to give meaning to her life. She feels that although places, memories and her sense of self lie in fragments, these pieces are beautiful like a trail of beads.
Clemantine wants to string together the narrative of her life as one would string together beads, so she starts collecting odds and ends that represent memories or places she has been. She hopes to one day line these pieces up in a coherent order. Later on, Clemantine literally strings together something beautiful from jumbled pieces by making bracelets from a collection of beads that her American host family gives her. Throughout the memoir, beads represent Clemantine’s fragmented life. However, in calling these fragments of her life beads, Clemantine asserts that her life is nonetheless beautiful. Therefore, beads also represent her desire to appreciate her life for what it is and string her story together into a coherent narrative.
Beads Quotes in The Girl Who Smiled Beads
Often, still, my own life story feels fragmented, like beads unstrung. Each time I scoop up my memories, the assortment is slightly different. I worry, at times, that I’ll always be lost inside. I worry that I’ll be forever confused.
My life does not feel logical, sequential, or inevitable. There’s no sense of action, reaction; no consequence, repercussion; no plot. It’s just fragments, floating.
The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war, and rape. I would not—could not—live in that tale.
Instead, I would be the girl who smiled beads, my version of the girl who smiled beads, one who had power and agency over her life, one who did not get caught.
I had only a character, a rubric. The girl who smiled beads gave me a way to go through the world […] but I was still looking for a narrative that felt coherent and complete. […] I still, still, after everything […] longed for Mukamana. I wanted her to sit on the side of my bed, talk to me, and make my world feel not just magnificent but logical and whole.
Beads Symbol Timeline in The Girl Who Smiled Beads
