89 pages • 2 hours read
Clemantine Wamariya, Elizabeth WeilThe Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 19-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 19 Summary
Wamariya has “never been a gentle protectress” (237); rather, her care of Claire’s children was “militarized,” for she had to “shield them from harm and death” (237).
Wamariya comes home one day to find her nephew Freddy and his friends watching TV, and she scolds him for not washing the dishes. She makes his friends leave, acknowledging they “hated” her. She also acknowledges that, being “broken,” she was taking her anger out on these kids. She decides to help Freddy and Mariette leave home and guides them as they plan their futures in college.
After she graduates from college, she decides not to move back in with the Thomases, for she has to “move on, grow up” (238). Unwilling to move back in with Claire or with her parents, she moves to California with her boyfriend Ryan.
Though she “play[s] the part” of herself, “no role” feels comfortable to her (239). When she speaks in front of audiences, she tries “to be relevant and not too frightening” (240). She dresses in five-inch heels because she “need[s] to be stared at, to be adored and loved” (241). Sometimes people are disappointed that she is “not defeated” because they want to help her, to be “more powerful” than she is (241). She continues to be “a prisoner of their assumptions” (241).
When she has been in California for a year, she is invited to sit on a panel for a nonprofit during Refugee Week. People were briefly concerned about refugees because Aleppo was under siege and a photograph of a drowned child on the beach went viral on social media. Wamariya chides social media stars for exploiting the crisis to gain fame. However, even Wamariya finds it difficult to “hold all the single experiences of suffering in the world in [her] mind at the same time” (242).
Wamariya recalls how one of her co-panelists laughed at the fact that refugees asked the Red Cross for a way to store photographs. Wamariya can understand their request because she has only two pictures of herself in Rwanda. A billionaire attending the event asks how it “feel[s] to be one of us” (243). She suggests he ask her about her experiences instead. When he evades the question, she invites him to tea to talk about it, and he asks her to email him. He does not respond to her email.
Chapter 20 Summary
Wamariya finds her body to be “a burden,” something “that had been vandalized, stolen” (245). She tries not to fear or depend on men and to “reclaim [her] power” (246). These feelings make it hard for her to accept that her boyfriend Ryan is sincere when he tells her he loves her. In their five years together, Ryan is “patient” and “kind” with her (247). When Wamariya attends a concert in the desert, she is reminded of her experiences surviving as a refugee. She must remind herself that she has a family and is safe.
On a visit to Rwanda, she ponders how the country is “filled with too many people who believe they deserve only pain” (248). The architecture is bare, as if the people feel they do not “deserve beauty” (249). One day when she is lying on a blanket in a friend’s garden, she “finally exhale[s],” for she feels that she “stood out and […] fit in” (249).
Once a month the country participates in a government-run program to clean up the community; Wamariya finds it “a gorgeous device of repair” (250). On a day when they are clearing an overgrown field, Wamariya is unnerved by the machetes; she is unable to “bear the ghosts” (250). She goes with her friend Vicki to look at her old neighborhood, and they eat warm chapati, which is “so delicious, a sunrise, a warm bath in my mother’s backyard garden” (251).
When she returns from Rwanda, she finds that Ryan has moved out. They had discussed getting married a few months earlier, but she believes marriage is about “possession” (252). Though she is afraid when he leaves, she reminds herself that she is home.
Chapter 21 Summary
Wamariya plans a trip to Europe with her mother so she can “restage [their] reunion” (253). She goes to London in advance to buy food, flowers, and new clothes for her mother. She wants her mother “to feel special” and to “know her worth” (254).
Wamariya plans every detail of their excursions, and they visit Westminster Abbey and the Infirmarer’s Garden. At their house she wants to tell her mother about her experiences as a refugee but feels unable. She is “trying so hard” but still feels “profoundly alone” (257). At the Tuileries Garden she asks her mother if she misses her own garden, thinking it an easy question, but her mother looks upset and does not respond.
At the Louvre, her mother enjoys the biblical paintings. Wamariya “wishes she could see how people had wielded” religion “to brainwash others, to destroy cultures, to eliminate entire languages, to cause so much degradation and pain” (258). When they pass The Wedding Feast at Cana, Wamariya asks her mother what she sees. Her mother says it “looks like heaven” (259). Wamariya points out the black child under the table by the dog, telling her she “want[s] him at the table, sitting next to Jesus” (259).
Wamariya hoped she and her mother would “become different people, people untouched by loss” (259); however, she and her mother are “parallel to each other,” unable to “connect” (260). She thinks about how Claire, despite not having a lot of money, has big dinners for friends and family. Claire responds, “I have food, and I know I will have food tomorrow” (261). Claire goes to Rwanda every January and cooks for orphans. She dresses in expensive clothing, as if to say, “I am here. I am worthy and valuable. You did not destroy me” (262).
At the Basilica of Saint Paul, Wamariya’s mother looks for Saint Brigid, the saint of babies. Crying, she tells the nuns that her daughters were gone and then Saint Brigid answered her prayer. Wamariya “envie[s] the comfort she felt” (263). She misses Mukamana.
Chapter 22 Summary
Wamariya tells the story of how two girls’ idyllic lives were changed when they were sent to their grandmother’s house and then left outside to wander for seven years. The younger girl “looked for new powers” (265) and took comfort in books. Wherever she went, “[p]eople thought they knew her” (265). She is reunited with her family and is “given money, status, jewelry, praise, and the fanciest education in the world” (265). She feels “nourished and whole” (265) one day after dressing up and posing in a garden. She “wanted to tell a true story, a complete story,” but “no ending ever felt right” (265).
Chapters 19-22 Analysis
Wamariya’s trip to Rwanda once again illustrates her journey to reconcile her past with her present. Though she is impressed with the beautiful public library, she is unnerved by the “self-hating” architecture of a new apartment complex, for it is “charmless, and cold” (249), as if to say, “You who live here do not deserve beauty” (249). Like Wamariya herself, Rwanda has begun to rebuild, but the remnants of past horrors remain. Reminders of the past haunt her when she participates in Umuganda, the day of community cleanup: Wamariya is disturbed by the machetes used to cut down the grass, for they remind her of the genocide. The past rears its head even in her interactions with her friends and family. Because in Africa her “job was to shield them from harm and death,” her “way of caretaking [is] militarized,” and she yells at Freddy and his friends when she “should have been lashing out at the world” (237). Similarly, when her boyfriend Ryan tells her he loves her, she believes he is “imposing his will” (246). Though Ryan is “patient” and “kind” with her despite her “rules” (247), that he ultimately leaves her suggests the difficulty of forging relationships after trauma.
As Wamariya spends more time in the public eye, she deals with a similar lack of understanding she noticed in her classmates back in school. She finds that when she is not “cast as a martyr or a saint,” people are upset when she is not “defeated,” for they cannot be “more powerful” than she is (241). People also tend not to understand that Wamariya “could help them too” (241). She recalls when a billionaire she met while on a panel for a nonprofit assumed her to be grateful “to be one of us” (243), not understanding that she may know something that he does not (244). As she was in school, Wamariya is “a prisoner of their assumptions” (241).
These encounters illustrate a continuation of the dehumanization of refugees. Wamariya notices that while people see her as “special,” other refugees are “just one of the many dozens of dark migrant bodies crammed into a flimsy boat” (241). When a co-panelist laughs at the fact that refugees are worried about how they will store their photographs, Wamariya remarks that the panel is there “to rescue”—focusing more on their desire to be “saviors” (243) than the humanity of those they seek to help. Wamariya must find the balance between forging her own identity—she dresses in five-inch heels to satisfy her “need to be stared at, to be adored and loved” (241)—and her need to “package [her] story in a way that mattered” (239). She finds herself “play[ing] the part” of herself, but “no role felt exactly right” (239).
Though the conclusion of Wamariya’s memoir is open-ended, it offers a vision of hope. Throughout her memoir, Wamariya has described how she was “constantly yearning for mothers” (253): she found comfort in the love of Mama Nepele, and for a time she wished Linda, in South Africa, was her own mother. Concluding her memoir with her attempt close the “giant chasm” (260) between her and her mother brings the story full circle. That Wamariya struggles to connect with her mother despite the fact that her trip goes exactly as planned shows the lasting damage done by time and by trauma. Wamariya laments that they move “parallel to each other” (260) and that “it was too much to ask” for them to “become different people, people untouched by loss” (259). She and her mother are of different worlds: Her mother does not understand the presence of the white housekeeper, and to Wamariya’s chagrin, she is untroubled by the lack of people of color at Jesus’s table in The Wedding Feast at Cana.
Wamariya recognizes that each person must “live their lives on their terms” (261). While her mother relies on God, Claire turns to community activism, feeding her friends and family and flying to Rwanda to cook for orphans—all while wearing an expensive dress that says, “You did not destroy me” (262). Claire, like her mother, “had a story that worked for her” (263). Throughout her memoir, Wamariya has identified with the girl who smiled beads, who makes her own path and escapes capture by others. Though the girl has enabled her to “believe in [her] own agency,” she still searches for “a narrative that [feels] coherent and complete” (263). Just as she used to answer Mukamana’s question of “What happened next?” Wamariya realizes that she must make her own “plot.” After expressing her longing for Mukamana—she notes how she wanted Mukamana to “make [her] world feel not just magnificent but logical and whole” (263)—Wamariya opens her notebook, indicating that she accepts that she is her own storyteller.
