Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil (2024) The Girl Who Smiled Beads. A Story of War and What Comes After.

It’s been a few weeks since I read The Girl Who Smiled Beads. We know the story, but don’t know the story in a way many readers will be familiar with. I could read it again. There’s much of Clemantine Wamariya’s biography (I won’t call it autobiography, although it is, because I presume Elizabeth Weil is the ghost-writer) that is increasingly relevant. Wamariya was born in Rwanda to kind and loving parents. Prosperous even. Her dad owned a garage. Traditionally, we use a before-and-after structure to hang a plotline.

President Juvénal Habyarimana was assassinated in 1994. For a little girl of five or six with a pesky younger brother and a big sister, Claire, three years older than her, whom she looked up to, what happened outside their home didn’t matter. Then it did.

 Hate radio RTLM—an analogy would be it’s like our modern alt-right internet bot army—called on its supporter to kill all the ‘cockroaches’. Approximately 800,000 Tutsis were killed over 100 days. Most of them hacked to death by machetes. Women were routinely raped. Children dismembered. Hutus, friends and neighbours, who did not show sufficient savagery, were also killed. Added to the genocide numbers.

This is what happens when hate propaganda wins the war of ideas. As it has done with the re-election of the moron’s moron Trump. Listen to his chatter about refugees—like Clemantine Wamariya, it makes no difference to him that she has legal tenure, her colour of skin does not fit. In a them-and-us universe, people that are not sufficiently white skinned are sufficiently different. They can be accused of eating cats and dogs. In other words, reclassified as cockroaches.

The ongoing genocide in Palestine uses similar words to create a world in which humans can behave inhumanely with immunity.

The Prologue to Wamariya’s biography begins with the known face of America in Oprah. Claire made a surprise appearance on the show with her sister, Claire. Clemantine was eighteen and at junior high. But it had been a long time since she’d been a child. She might belong to the church youth group. Her school production of Les Miserables, well, she’d lived it not on stage, but in real life. Her life, and that of Claire, was a living miracle. Oprah staged it so there was that ah-ha moment when she finds out her mum and dad—and the children they had after the Holocaust—are there to meet them in the studio. Everyone smiled and the traditional happy-clappy ending was so phony it was sick enough to be sincere.

I could say more. Much more. Wamariya knows what it is like to open a fridge and look at the contents and know she’ll not have to queue up for five hours for enough millet, which is largely inedible but might keep them alive for another day in their refugee camp. That  half a vitamin tablet  is regarded as a success story because its doing something for starving children in camps where so many children wither in the sun and die.

Wamariya and her sister, who has three children now, has a target on her back. Without papers. In that in between world where charity begins at home and ends with mass murder. And America, land of the free, is too full of people that aren’t sufficiently white. Read on and weep for what we’ve lost. Let the Trump games begin.

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