The Girl Who Smiled Beads : a Story of War and What Comes After / Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil
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Copyright © 2018 by Clemantine Wamariya All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. crownpublishing.com CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC. Portions of this work first appeared in Matter (medium.com/matter), as “Everything Is Yours, Everything Is Not Yours,” on June 29, 2015. Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, for permission to reprint an excerpt of “Still I Rise” from And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems by Maya Angelou, copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou. Reprinted by permission of Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Wamariya, Clemantine, author. | Weil, Elizabeth, 1969- author Title: The girl who smiled beads : a story of war and what comes after / Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil. Description: First edition. | New York : Crown Publishing, [2018] Identifiers: LCCN 20170458714| ISBN 9780451495327 (hardcover) | ISBN 0451495322 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780451495334 (paperback) | ISBN 0451495330 (paperback) | ISBN 9780451495341 (ebook) | ISBN 0451495349 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Wamariya, Clemantine. | Rwanda--History-- Civil War, 1994--Refugees. | Refugees- -Biography. | LCGFT: Autobiographies. Classification: LCC DT450.437.W36 A3 2018 | DDC 967.57104/31 [B] --dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017045871 Hardcover ISBN 9780451495327 Ebook ISBN 9780451495341 International Edition ISBN 9780525574378 Map by Jeffrey L. Ward Cover design by Michael Morris v5.2_r1 ep Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication A Note from the Authors Epigraph Clemantine and Claire’s Route Prologue Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Chapter 21 Chapter 22 Acknowledgments About the Authors For Claire and for Mukamana, who taught me how to create and live in my own umugani A NOTE FROM THE AUTHORS This is a work of nonfiction. A handful of the people in the book have been given pseudonyms; otherwise, everyone is identified by their real names. We have worked hard to be accurate and, just as crucial to a book like this, emotionally honest. But memory is flawed and idiosyncratic, and many of the events described here happened decades ago to a child under intense stress. Every human life is equally valuable. Each person’s story is vital. This is just one. “What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say?” —Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider PROLOGUE he night before we taped the Oprah show, in 2006, I met my sister CTlaire at her apartment in a public housing unit in Edgewater, where she lived with the three kids she’d had before age twenty-two, thanks to her ex- husband, an aid worker who’d pursued her at a refugee camp. A black limo arrived and drove us to downtown Chicago, to the Omni Hotel, near where my sister used to work. I now can’t think about that moment without also thinking about my own naïveté, but at the time all I felt was elated. 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. I’d played Fantine in the school production of Les Misérables. I was whoever anybody wanted me to be. 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 resources—piano 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 Zairean 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. 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 Oprah’s high school essay contest. Like the other winners, I had written about Wiesel’s 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. I’d dictated my essay to Mrs. Thomas, as she sat in her tasteful Midwestern house—gracious lawn, mahogany floors—at a huge computer that took up the whole desk. “Clemantine,” she’d said, “you have to enter. I just know you’ll win.” Mrs. Thomas had three children of her own, plus me. I called her “my American mother” and she called me “my African daughter.” She packed my lunch every day and drove me to school. In my essay I said that maybe if Rwandans had read Night, they wouldn’t have decided to kill one another. On the way to downtown Chicago, Claire and I had the inevitable conversation—is this happening? this is so weird—which 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 other’s presence, we’d call it “the war.” 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, “Do you have any bags?” we realized we’d left all our clothes at home. Claire took the L back to her apartment, where a friend was watching her children—Mariette, who was almost ten; Freddy, who was eight; and Michele, who was five. I stayed in the hotel room, lost. Harpo Studios gave us each a $150 stipend for dinner. It was more than Claire’s monthly food stamp allowance. When Claire returned we ordered room service. We woke at 4:00 a.m. and spent hours getting dressed. 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. In this nice studio, in front of all these well-dressed people, Oprah’s team played the video of Oprah and Elie Wiesel walking arm in arm through snow-covered Auschwitz, discussing the Holocaust. Then the producers gave us a break. We sat in silence. Some of us were horrified and others were crying. After that, Oprah said glowing things about all the winners of the essay contest except me. I told myself this was fine. Fine. I hadn’t really gone to school until age thirteen, and when I was seven I’d celebrated Christmas in a refugee camp in Burundi with a shoebox of pencils that I’d 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? But then Oprah leaned forward and said, “So, Clemantine, before you left Africa, did you ever find your parents?” 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. “No,” I said. “We tried UNICEF…, we tried everywhere, walking around, searching and searching and searching.” “So when was the last time you saw them?” she asked. “It was 1994,” I said, “when I had no idea what was going on.” “Well, I have a letter from your parents,” Oprah said, as though we’d won a game show. “Clemantine and Claire, come on up here!” 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 we’d been through, that anybody was better or more important than she was. When we were dirt poor and alone, she’d be in her seventh hour of scrubbing someone’s laundry by hand and she’d see on a TV an image of Angelina Jolie, swaggering and gleaming, radiating moral superiority, and even then Claire would say, “Who is that? God? You, you’re human. Nothing separates me from you.” 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 I’ll always be lost inside. I worry that I’ll be forever confused. But that day I leapt up onto the set, smiling. One of the most valuable skills I’d learned while trying to survive as a refugee was reading what other people wanted me to do.