Throughout The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Rwandan Genocide survivor and former refugee Clemantine Wamariya struggles to hold onto her identity. When Clemantine first flees her home in Rwanda and lives in various refugee camps in other African countries, she is preoccupied with remembering the bits of information that define her, like that she covets her sister Claire’s bathrobe and that she often plays in a specific mango tree with her brother Pudi. Most significantly, she repeats her name to herself and other refugees even though no one listens to her. As she grows up, though, she loses parts of her past: her baby teeth fall out, her shoes from Rwanda no longer fit, and she can barely remember what Pudi looks like. She also loses her sense of identity as she learns how to survive as a refugee. As a means of survival, she learns to become whatever people want her to be in a given situation, realizing that this is the best way to make sure people give her what she needs.
This survival technique carries over when she immigrates to the United States six years after fleeing Rwanda. In the United States, she studies how to fit into her suburban host’s family, and she goes through the motions of getting into Yale. By throwing herself into this new American life, though, she feels lost and out of place, as if her identity has been divided into disparate parts. Because her identity at the beginning of her life was so tied to domestic details like her sister’s bathrobe and the mango tree that she and Pudi used to play in, the further she gets from these memories, the further she feels from her original sense of self. The displacement she has undergone as a refugee therefore not only impacts her sense of belonging in the world but also refigures how she conceives of her own identity. In turn, it becomes clear that the forced displacement inherent to the refugee experience does a lot more than simply make people feel estranged from their homes—it can also undermine and complicate their sense of self for the rest of their lives.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Displacement and Identity ThemeTracker
Displacement and Identity Quotes in The Girl Who Smiled Beads
I thought if I stated my name enough times, my identity would fall back into place […] But a name is a cover, a placeholder, not the whole story. A name is a basin with a leak that you need to constantly fill up. If you don’t, it drains and it’s just there, a husk, dry and empty.
I lost myself anyway. Every little thing. I had always loved the fancy soaps at my aunts’ houses. I loved the ones that smelled like geranium and lilac best of all.
I needed to see the world in front of me clearly so I could perform my part well. I needed to crack the code. So many times, in my former life, I’d had to become someone else in order to stay out of a refugee camp or out of jail, to stay alive. I had played a mother. I had played a yes ma’am younger sister. I had made myself a nobody, invisible. Now I had to become this strange creature: an American teenager.
I now felt I’d made a mistake in Uvira. I’d let my guard down. I’d allowed myself to feel I belonged. But there was no real belonging—not anymore. There was only coming and going and coming and going and dying. There was no point in letting anybody get close.
My hustle was getting through the day. How to claim dignity. How to keep the kids clean […] How to “shine” the house, which was really just dousing the floor with petrol to keep out the bugs. How to wash my loud, floral, short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt, which I loved and which I wore with my jean skirt, tied at the waist. How to make the kids cute, and thus make them lovable and seen.
For that one hour, I felt proud. Not just dignified but certain, impermeable, a rock. The sun that turned the window glass into a mirror had confirmed my existence. But I needed to see my body—I needed to own it.
Almost every other minute of my existence, I felt the pain of being nobody’s child, the sting of the assumptions people make when you don’t have a mother and you don’t have a father. People assume you’re adrift, at play. They assume that you are vulnerable. They assume your needs are lesser, that your will is broken, that your body can be bent to theirs.
The sun felt rejuvenating. Some ants worked on a ledge in the shade, dismantling a fallen mango. […] I felt, at last […] like I’d finally exhaled. I was wearing a floral top, black with huge yellow and green flowers, and a bright yellow skirt. I stood out and I fit in, and I felt taken care of in a way that I felt taken care of nowhere else in the world. It had been so long since I felt like that—like a child, like someone else’s ward.
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.
