Place and Trauma in The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil

This chapter examines The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After (2018), written by Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil, from a perspective of trauma and how it transforms, shapes, and emerges from place. The memoir recounts experiences from the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and depicts the travels the author undertook as a very young girl, together with her older sister, from one refugee camp to another in search of a future. Eventually the girls manage to go to the United States where they settle, and the memoir switches continuously between life on the run in Africa and trying to adjust to living in the United States and make sense of what happened. The trauma of fleeing genocide and getting separated from the rest of her family permeates Wamariya’s writing and becomes entrenched in place. Even when safe and secure, the past does not recede, and the traumatic experiences continue to shape life for the author. Place remains central throughout the memoir, and Wamariya remembers her early childhood in terms of the locations in which she and her sister lived.