The girl who smiled beads : a story of war and what comes after / Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil.
Record details
- ISBN: 9780451495327
- ISBN: 0451495322
- ISBN: 9780525574378
- ISBN: 0525574379
- Physical Description: 274 pages : map ; 22 cm
- Edition: First edition.
- Publisher: New York : Crown, [2018]
- Copyright: ©2018
Content descriptions
Target Audience Note: | HL800L Lexile |
Search for related items by subject
Genre: | Autobiographies. |
Available copies
- 32 of 32 copies available at Evergreen Indiana.
Holds
- 0 current holds with 32 total copies.
Other Formats and Editions
Location | Call Number / Copy Notes | Barcode | Shelving Location | Status | Due Date |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adams PL Sys. - Decatur Branch | B WAMARIY WAM (Text) | 34207002165257 | Adult Non-Fiction Biographies | Available | - |
Barton Rees Pogue Mem. PL - Upland | BIO WAMARIYA (Text) | 76277000044058 | Nonfiction* | Available | - |
Bloomfield Eastern Greene Co PL - Bloomfield Main | 967.57 WAM (Text) | 36803001056006 | NONFIC | Available | - |
Butler PL - Butler | 921 WAMARI (Text) | 73174005035119 | Adult: Nonfiction | Available | - |
Carnegie PL of Steuben Co - Angola | B WAMARIYA C (Text) | 33118000184059 | Adult: Biography | Available | - |
Coatesville-Clay Twp PL - Coatesville | 967.57 (Text) | 78321000027578 | Adult Non-Fiction | Available | - |
Culver-Union Twp PL - Culver | 967.5710431 WAMARIYA (Text) | 34304000894180 | Adult - Nonfiction | Available | - |
Eckhart PL - Main | 967.57 WAM (Text) | 840191002513816 | Adult Nonfiction - Upper Level | Available | - |
Fayette Co PL - Connersville | 967.57104 WAM (Text) | 39230031878224 | Adult Books | Available | - |
Fulton Co PL - Rochester Main Library | 967.571 WAM (Text) | 33187004333197 | Nonfiction | Available | - |
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Copyright © 2018 Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil
The night before we taped the Oprah show, in 2006, I met my sister Claire at her apartment in a public housing unit in Edgewater, where she lived with the three kids sheâd had before age twenty-two, thanks to her ex-husband, an aid worker whoâd pursued her at a refugee camp. A black limo arrived and drove us to downtown Chicago, to the Omni Hotel, where my sister used to work. I now canât think about that moment without also thinking about my own naïveté, but at the time all I felt was elated.
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I was eighteen, a junior at New Trier High School, living Monday through Friday with the Thomas family in Kenilworth, a fancy suburb. I belonged to the church youth group. I ran track. Iâd played Fantine in the school production of Les Misérables. I was whoever anybody wanted me to be.
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Claire, meanwhile, remained steadfast, herself, a seemingly rougher bargain. Unlike me, she was not a child when we got resettled in the United States, so nobody sent her to school or took her in or filled her up with resourcesâpiano lessons, speech therapists, cheerleading camp. Claire just kept hustling. For a while she made a living throwing parties, selling drinks and hiring DJs who mixed American hip-hop, the Congolese superstar Papa Wemba, and French rap. But then she learned it was illegal to sell liquor without a license and she started working full-time as a maid, cleaning two hundred hotel rooms a week.
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All I knew about the show we were taping was that it was a two-part series: the first segment showed Oprah and Elie Wiesel visiting Auschwitz, God help us; the second featured the fifty winners of Oprahâs high school essay contest. Like the other winners, I had written about Wieselâs book Night, his gutting story of surviving the Holocaust, and why it was still relevant today. The book disarmed me. I found it thrilling, and it made me ashamed. Wiesel had words that I did not have to describe the experiences of my early life.
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Iâd dictated my essay to Mrs. Thomas, as she sat in her tasteful Midwestern houseâgracious lawn, mahogany floorsâat a huge old computer that took up the whole desk. âClemantine,â sheâd said, âyou have to enter. I just know youâll win.â Mrs. Thomas had three children of her own, plus me. I called her âmy American motherâ and she called me âmy African daughter.â She packed my lunch every day and drove me to school.
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In my essay I said that maybe if Rwandans had read Night, they wouldnât have decided to kill one another.
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On the way to downtown Chicago, Claire and I had the inevitable conversationâis this happening? This is so weirdâwhich was as close as my sister and I got to discussing what
had happened to our lives. If we absolutely had to name our past in each otherâs presence, weâd call it âthe war.â But we tried not to do that, and that day we were both so consumed by all the remembering and willful forgetting that when we arrived at the Omni and the bellhop asked, âDo you have any bags?â we realized weâd left all our clothes at home.
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Claire took the L back to her apartment, where a friend was watching her childrenâMariette, who was almost ten; Freddy, who was eight; and Michele, who was five. I stayed in the hotel room, lost.
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Harpo Studios gave us each a $150 stipend for dinner. It was more than Claireâs monthly food stamp allowance. When Claire returned we ordered room service. We woke at 4:00 a.m. and spent hours getting dressed.
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That day, for the show, the producers directed us to the huge studio. Oprah sat onstage on a white love seat, next to tired old Elie Wiesel in a white overstuffed chair. He was alive, old but alive, which meant the world to me. He kept looking at the audience, like he had a lot to say but there was no time to say it.
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In this nice studio, in front of all these well-dressed people, Oprahâs team played the video of Oprah and Elie Wiesel walking arm in arm through snow-covered Auschwitz, discussing the Holocaust.
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Then the producers gave us a break. We sat in silence. Some of us were horrified and others were crying.
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After that, Oprah said glowing things about all the winners of the essay contest except me. I told myself this was fine. Fine. I hadnât really gone to school until age thirteen, and when I was seven Iâd celebrated Christmas in a refugee camp in Burundi with a shoebox of pencils that Iâd buried
under our tent so that nobody would steal it. Being in the audience was enough, right? Plus, I kept wanting to say to Oprah: Do you know how many years, and across how many miles, Claire has been talking about meeting you?
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But then Oprah leaned forward and said, âSo, Clemantine, before you left Africa, did you ever find your parents?â
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I had a mike cord tucked under my black TV blazer and a battery pack clipped to my black TV pants, so I should have suspected something like this was coming. âNo,â I said. âWe tried UNICEF . . . , we tried everywhere, walking around, searching and searching and searching.â
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âSo when was the last time you saw them?â she asked.
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âIt was 1994,â I said, âwhen I had no idea what was going on.â
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âWell, I have a letter from your parents,â Oprah said, as though weâd won a game show. âClemantine and Claire, come on up here!â
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Claire held on to me. She was shaking, but she kept on her toughest, most skeptical face, because she knows more about the world than I do, and also because she refused to think, even after all weâd been through, that anybody was better or more important than she was. When we were dirt poor and alone, sheâd be in her seventh hour of scrubbing someoneâs laundry by hand and sheâd see on a TV an image of Angelina Jolie, swaggering and gleaming, radiating moral superiority, and even then Claire would say, âWho is that? God? You, youâre human. Nothing separates me from you.â
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I have never been Claire. I have never been inviolable. 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 Iâll always be lost inside. I worry that Iâll be forever confused. But that day I leapt up onto the set, smiling. One of the most valuable skills Iâd learned while trying to survive as a refugee was reading what other people wanted me to do.
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âThis is from your family, in Rwanda,â Oprah said, handing me an envelope. She looked solemn, confident in her purpose. âFrom your father and your mother and your sisters and your brother.â
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Claire and I did know that our parents were alive. We knew theyâd lost everythingâmy fatherâs business, my motherâs gardenâand that they now lived in a shack on the outskirts of Kigali. We talked to them on the phone, but only rarely becauseâhow do you start? Why didnât you look harder for us? How are you? Iâm fine, thanks, Iâve been working at the Gap and Iâve found itâs much easier to learn to read English if you also listen to audiobooks.
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I opened the envelope and pulled out a sheet of blue paper. Then Oprah put her hand on mine to stop me from unfolding the letter. It was a huge relief. I didnât want to have a breakdown on TV.
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 âYou donât have to read it right now, in front of all these people,â Oprah said. âYou donât have to read it in front of all these people . . .â She paused, master of stagecraft that she is. âBecause . . . because . . . your family . . . IS HERE!â
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I started walking backward. Claireâs jaw unhinged in a caricature of shock. Then a door that had images of barbed wire on itâcreated especially for this particular episode, I assume, to evoke life in an internment campâopened stage right and out came an eight-year-old boy, who was apparently my brother. He was followed by my father, in a dark suit, salmon shirt, and tie; a shiny new five-year-old sister; my mother in a long blue dress; and my sister Claudette, now taller than me. Iâd last seen her when she was two years old and I still believed my mother had picked her up from the fruit market.
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Iâd fantasized about this moment so many times. In Malawi, I used to write my name in dust on trucks, hoping my mother would see my loopy cursive Clemantine and realize that I was alive. In Zaire, Iâd saved coins so I could buy my parents presents. In Tanzania, Iâd collected marbles for my older brother, Pudi, who wasnât there for this reunion. Pudi was dead.
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Claire remained frozen. But I, in my TV clothes and blown-out hair, ran toward my Oprah-produced family, arms outstretched. I hugged my brother. I hugged my father. I hugged my tiny little sister. I hugged my mother, but my knees gave out and she had to pick me up. Then I hugged her. I hugged Claudette, my little sister, little no more. I walked across the stage and hugged Oprah. I hugged lovely, weathered Elie Wiesel.
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The cameras were so far away that I forgot I was participating in a million-viewer spectacle, that my experience, my joy and pain, were being consumed by the masses, though I was aware enough to realize that everybody in the audience was crying.
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A few hours later, though it seemed like minutes, we found ourselves on the sidewalk outside the studio, and my family took a black limo north to my sisterâs apartment. She lived in the front unit in a squat brick low-rise, across the street from the L tracks and a block away from an abandoned wooden house with a gable roof, a once fantastic, now forgotten home that I hoped would someday be ours. I would put everybody in it. We would be a family again.
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Nobody talked in the car. In the apartment, nobody knew what to do, either. My mother, in her long blue dress, kept sitting down and standing up and touching everythingâthe living room walls, the TV remoteâand singing about how God had protected us and now we must serve and love him. My father kept smiling, as though someone he mistrusted were taking pictures of him. Claire remained nearly catatonic: rocking, stone-faced. I thought sheâd finally gone crazy, for real.
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I sat on Claireâs couch, looking at my strange new siblings, the ones whoâd replaced me and Claire. They looked so perfect, their skin unblemished, their eyes alight, like an excellent fictional representation of a family that could have been mine. But they didnât know me and I didnât know them and the gap between us was a billion miles wide.
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I fell asleep crying on Marietteâs bed and woke still wearing my Oprah shoes.
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The next day was Friday. Of course, I didnât go to school. We needed to start making up for so much lost time. Yet I couldnât look at my parentsâthey were ghosts.
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I felt gratitude, yes. Oprah had brought my parents to me. But I also felt kicked in the stomach, as though my life were some psychologistâs perverse experiment: Letâs see how far we can take a person down, and then how far we can raise her up, and then letâs see what happens!
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Saturday, my family, along with the Thomases, drove up the lakeshore to the Chicago Botanic Garden, where we stared at the Illinois lilies and roses. We all wanted these to be beautiful links to the lilies and roses in Kigali, threads knitting this present to that past, but everything was awkward, and it felt as though cameras were still following us around. Sunday we did Navy Pierâthe gaudy Ferris wheel, the sticky cotton candy, all the tourist stuff.
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My father kept smiling his fake, pained smile. Mine probably looked the same: a smile covering a scream. Claire barely said a word. Then, Monday morning, my parents and new siblings left on the flight back to Rwanda that Oprahâs people had booked for them, and Mrs. Thomas picked me
up as usual at Claireâs apartment. I had no idea how to make sense of what had just happened. So I just ran out to her Mercedes and she dropped me off at school.