It is well worth every minute. (Review by
Margaret von Klemperer, Courtesy of the Sunday Times)
Clemantine Wamariya’s story opens in 2006.
She was an 18 year-old high school student in America and was a finalist in an
Oprah Winfrey essay competition. So she set off for the filming of an episode
of Oprah’s show dealing with Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner
Elie Wiesel. For Wamariya is also a survivor – in her case of the Rwandan
genocide – and she had written about Wiesel’s book, Night.
Wamariya attended the shoot with her
sister, Claire, who, nine years older than the six year old Clemantine, had
protected her through six horrific years in the refugee camps of seven African
countries. By 2006 they knew their parents had also survived, but had not seen
them for 12 years. With no warning, Oprah reunited the family on screen, in front
of a world-wide television audience – and of course there wasn’t a dry eye in
the house.
Oprah had done an amazing thing, reuniting
a family after years of devastation, death and loss. And she had raised
awareness of a terrible event. But when I read about it, I could only see it as
the commodification of grief and suffering, calculated to load the disengaged
watchers with warm fuzzy feelings but shattering to those for whom it mattered.
The
Girl Who Smiled Beads - A Story of War and War and What comes After is partly an
articulation of what that evening in a television studio meant. Wamariya says
she was grateful to Oprah, of course, but goes on: “But I also felt kicked in
the stomach, as though my life were some psychologist’s perverse experiment”.
Wamariya tells her story with an almost
unbearable honesty and a palpable anger as she describes the refugee years with
Claire, a supreme survivor who was always on the hustle. In that time Claire
had two children who Wamariya made it her mission to keep alive, clean and
attractive – because clean attractive infants score better in the hand-to-mouth
refugee existence.
Once the sisters were granted refugee
status in the United States, Wamariya was taken in by a genuinely good and
caring family who saw to her education, so successfully that eventually she was
accepted to go to Yale. But her main struggles were never going to be academic:
Wamariya had to deal with people who wanted, often from the best of motives, to
see her as a kind of “genocide princess”, particularly after Oprah. She tried
to live up to that, but boiling away below the surface was distrust of people’s
motives, learned in her years trailing around the Eastern side of Africa.
Then there was the difficulty of forming a
relationship with the family she had been torn from at the age of six. Wamariya
is honest about her problems and the loss of a sense of self that came from her
horrendous childhood. She writes of her
hatred of the word “genocide”, because it is too easy a catch-all. Each person
caught up in it has their own personal story, a private horror that can become
lost in the general. We all know the compassion fatigue that stories of
refugees and their situation can engender. Wamariya lays her experience before
us without asking for pity or even understanding but simply for the amount of
our time it takes to read her book. And it is well worth every minute. - Margaret
von Klemperer
The
Girl Who Smiled Beads” A Story of War and War and What comes After is published by Hutchinson
- ISBN 9781786331472
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