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Sto caricando le informazioni... The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After (edizione 2018)di Clemantine Wamariya (Autore)
Informazioni sull'operaThe Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After di Clemantine Wamariya
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Iscriviti per consentire a LibraryThing di scoprire se ti piacerà questo libro. Attualmente non vi sono conversazioni su questo libro. Powerful true story about survival, ethnic genocide, and trying to excavate one’s life story from the ruins of inhumanity and others’ expectations. PS. I first read this book in 2018 and reread it in 2023 because I am going through my bookshelves as I get ready to downsize my home. I remembered liking it very much, but I couldn't remember the details, and my previous review is rather sparse. In this memoir, Clemantine Wamariya chronicles her flight at the age of 6 from the Rwandan genocide in 1994, becoming a refugee with no safe place to land, traveling through a series of refugee camps in several different African countries for six years until she was adopted into a family in the US when she was 12. In addition to exposing the horrors she and her sister experienced, there were moments of grace and Wamariya's own self- reckoning with her victimhood and learning to feel safe. A powerful and important refugee story, in my opinion. Four stars for the book, but I wish I could give infinite stars in an attempt to heal the suffering in this world. "I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion--anything, really--comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination. The world is full and cruel when we isolate ourselves." (177) "It's truly impossible to hold all the single experiences of suffering in your mind at the same time. ... You cannot hear each of their stories and recognize every individual as strong and special, and continue on with your day." (242) nessuna recensione | aggiungi una recensione
Premi e riconoscimentiMenzioniElenchi di rilievo
"Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. It was 1994, and in 100 days more than 800,000 people would be murdered in Rwanda and millions more displaced. Clemantine and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, ran and spent the next six years wandering through seven African countries searching for safety. They did not know whether their parents were alive. At age twelve, Clemantine and Claire were granted asylum in the United States. Raw, urgent, yet disarmingly beautiful, this book captures the true costs and aftershocks of war: what is forever lost, what can be repaired, the fragility and importance of memory. A riveting story of dislocation, survival."-- Non sono state trovate descrizioni di biblioteche |
Discussioni correntiNessunoCopertine popolari
Google Books — Sto caricando le informazioni... GeneriSistema Decimale Melvil (DDC)967.57104History and Geography Africa Central Africa Democratic Republic of the Congo (Congo-Kinshasa); Rwanda & Burundi Rwanda and Burundi Rwanda 1962-Classificazione LCVotoMedia:
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This is the memoir of Clemantine Wamariya, who survived the Rwandan Genocide and fled as a child refugee through several African countries and eventually to America with her older sister Claire. It is written by Clemantine herself and also Elizabeth Weil, presumably as a ghost writer.
The conflict began in April 1994, after the assassination of the Rwandan president, and lasted for 100 days, with Hutu extremists slaughtering, in this short time, 800,000 of the minority Tutsi community and other political opponents, and creating refugees of millions more. Rwanda was a Belgian colony from 1916 to 1962 and it is thought this regime sowed some of the seeds of racial disharmony by favouring Tutsi rule and emphasising ethnic differences.
Clemantine was only six when the killing began and had no context or explanation for the events. She and her fifteen year old sister Claire spent the next six years as refugees in seven African countries, on the run, trying to survive, living in squalor in refugee camps and always just half a step away from starvation.
At age twelve Clemantine was accepted as a refugee in America and began a new and unfamiliar life there. While Claire faced the hardship of an abusive marriage, Clemantine struggled to adjust to America, but ultimately gained a university education at Yale.
Although the subject matter of this memoir is horrific and moving, there was something about the way it was written that made it hard to connect with Clemantine. Possibly the rapid shifts in narration between Clemantine as a child being dragged from refugee camp to refugee camp, and Clemantine as an angry teenager and student in America. I think maybe the fact that so much of her education took place in America makes her way of thinking much more American and inward-looking and self-analytical than many other books I have read by African authors. I found myself even wishing I could have read Claire’s story, as she seemed such a dynamic and powerful woman, and as Clemantine herself says, remained much more connected to her African roots even in America. Overall this was a story of survival, that sheds light on the human face of the tragedy of genocide, and of the experience of being a refugee far from home. ( )