The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

Mukamana once told Wamariya a story about how during a thunderstorm, a woman cries so loudly the thunder is offended. She promises to stop crying if he gives her a child. She gives birth to a girl who has a smile so beautiful “that whenever it crosses her lips, out flows a gorgeous trail of beads” (209). When the mother forgets to lock the door, the girl vanishes. In her search, the mother finds that people have only seen the girl’s trail of beads.

When Mukamana told Wamariya this story, she asked what Wamariya thought happened next, allowing Wamariya to determine the plot. Wamariya identified with the girl and believed in possibilities for herself. She imagined herself disappearing when anyone tried to catch her.

At Yale Wamariya reads late into the night and attends parties with classmates. She finds it is “distraction, not connection” (211). She frustrates fellow black students by “instigating debates about the less seemly parts of African culture” (214), namely the subversion of women. Her classmates, who largely are from affluent families, complain that her comments represent “a white man’s view of the African mess” (214).

Rather than go home that summer, she and her boyfriend Zach go to Kenya with a program through Yale. Wamariya believes she is “a special native daughter” who is no longer “a socially worthless refugee” (212); she now has “a certifiably valuable identity” (212). In Mombasa, Kenya, Wamariya is frustrated when people assume she is her white classmates’ translator. Seeing older white men with young African girls reminds her of a man in Rwanda who used to try to lure her away with candy.

Wamariya defies the dress code and walks around the city by herself. She does so in fear “that the person I’d created would be lost” (216). She begins to have nightmares and goes back to Chicago before the program is over.

One day she attempts to fill a prescription wearing her messy babysitting clothes but is turned away. She returns after dressing up. When she speaks to the pharmacist in “a nice Kenilworth girl voice” (218), her prescription is filled.

To be whole, Wamariya must “build a self out of elements that are not tainted” (220). She realizes that she must “be brave and vulnerable” to “reach across space” (220) and hold her mother’s hand, even though it is difficult.

In 2010, her second year at Yale, Wamariya visits the Prudence Crandall School for Negro Girls with her photography class. When her professor tells them to walk around and “put together a story from the details [they] saw and felt,” Wamariya realizes that “all the information” she needs to feel whole is “already there” (221).

Wamariya’s life changes when she takes a course on the book On the Natural History of Destruction by W. G. Sebald. In writing about the Holocaust, Sebald plays with time and space; the protagonist “tries to piece together his life story from his obsessions, curiosities, and habits of mind” (224). Wamariya regards the book as her “flashlight, [her] looking glass, [her] everything” (223). The book teaches her that “we live in all times and places at once” (224). The past is always present and can be triggered “to rise to the surface at different times” (224). She learns that she can use her memories to learn about who she is today, and that she can “find order and connection in the world” (226).

That summer she goes to Disneyland with Google, with whom she is interning. Still moved by the loss of her Mickey and Minnie Mouse backpack, she is “stunned” by the reminders of her “lost treasure” (227). She is impressed by the “triumph of imagination” and to this testament to the question, “What do you think happened next?” (227).

During spring break in 2012, Wamariya goes to Rwanda with a Yale group that is installing water tanks in a Rwandan community. She is also appointed by President Barack Obama to the board of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, which sends her to Kigali “to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide” (229). When she arrives, she finds herself falling into her refugee habits, like locating exits. She notices that the city is clean and that a modern new library has been built, its “glass walls” and “soaring ceilings” suggesting “intelligence, hope and space” (230). However, there is a strong military presence.

Wamariya attends a Remembrance Day ceremony at Gatwaro Stadium, where 20 years ago 12,000 people were murdered. During a reenactment of the genocide, people around her scream. Wamariya wants to “disappear” (232), believing the genocide impossible to encapsulate. President Kagame speaks about how the Belgians “spread evil” (233) that led to the killings. Wamariya considers how they “needed to acknowledge facts that are incompatible with a stable faith in humanity” (233). As screaming people become unruly, they are removed by guards, and Wamariya is “ashamed,” unwilling “to keep telling this story to future generations” (234). When she returns home, she takes to bed.

She goes to Israel the following year as part of a Carter Center delegation. There, she meets with Palestinian refugees and sees the security fence that divides Israel and Palestine. She is upset by the military presence and by the way people are led through security like cattle. She is traumatized when she is questioned for two hours over her boots. She cries on the flight home, pondering how at least her American passport means she “could get out of there” (235).