Black History Month -Book Review. The Girl Who Smiled Beads — Clemantine…

Two of the audiobooks I consumed this summer were on wars. They once more reinforced how you could go to bed in your land, as someone, then wake up, fleeing with only the clothes on your back as a refugee.

While that of Syria was written by a male refugee in Germany, a female Rwandan living in the USA, who survived the genocide, wrote the second one. And because it is still Black History Month in the UK, I am sharing with you Clemantine Wamariya’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads.

A deeply immersive read, which I found quite heart-wrenching and deeply relatable. I would try to keep the details bare so your interest remains piqued.

In this searing memoir, Clemantine invites us into the fragmented terrain of memory, migration, and meaning-making. A coddled last child of upper-middle-class parents, she was forced to flee her home at six years old, with her elder sister Claire. From their grandmother’s safe house in the interior, where the cousins were sequestered, they crossed the border to Burundi, thus embarking on a six-year odyssey across seven African countries before being granted asylum in the United States. But The Girl Who Smiled Beads is not a linear refugee tale — it’s a kaleidoscope of trauma, survival, and the search for wholeness.