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On Veterans Day, formerly Armistice Day, I usually post “In Flanders Fields” as my FB status; in the past I’ve also blogged about it, one way or another. Today, however, seems like the right day to write a hard review. I received an ARE of The Girl Who Smiled Beads from Penguin Random House almost two years ago; I finished it last week (because, again, life). I’ve been hoping that a few extra days of distance would help me organize my thoughts for this post, but–how do you review a memoir like this? How do you pass judgement on someone’s experiences and how she chooses to recount them? What, really, am I to say?
I suppose I start by saying that this is the second memoir of a Rwandan genocide survivor that I’ve experienced. (Read seems such a blah word under the circumstances.) I was in a book club that picked Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust more than a decade ago, and it was painful and powerful and (ultimately) hopeful in a way that affected me deeply. 1994 was middle high school for me, and current events were not so much my thing; Left to Tell was my introduction to an event that my parents almost certainly mentioned but that I was oblivious to. The Girl Who Smiled Beads, however, is told from an entirely different perspective. In many ways, Clemantine’s story is as much a refugee’s story as a survivor’s story; she and her older sister were sent to their grandmother’s for safety, and then–one night–their grandmother told them to run. They escaped Rwanda with a mass of others and spent the next 6 years in refugee camps and cheap apartments, suffering, travelling–and surviving. Their journey to America was convoluted, and so are their experiences there.
So is life, when that is your childhood.
Ultimately, I view the world differently from Clemantine; how could I not? Her memoir, however, is exactly what it says it is–A Story of War and What Comes After. She is scarred in ways that I cannot comprehend, and she understands that scarring, understands that she is a person in emotional turmoil. I cannot pass judgement on the decisions she has made, the conclusions she has drawn, and the life she now lives, because I cannot imagine what such experiences would do to my own inner self, how they would scar my outer world. I can say that I was expecting a more straightforward memoir of her experiences during the crisis; instead, I found an introspective journey that felt almost uncomfortably intimate at times. (I can also say that I hope she finds more and more peace as time goes by.) Clemantine’s book is an experience that will touch you–and not an experience you can easily forget.