Contemporary Authors

• The girl who smiled beads : a story of war and what comes after - 2018 Crown Publishing, New York, NY

• Amazon -

  Clemantine Wamariya is a storyteller and human rights advocate. Born in Kigali, Rwanda, displaced by conflict, Clemantine migrated throughout seven African countries as a child. At age twelve, she was granted refugee status in the United States and went on to receive a BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University. She lives in San Francisco.

• Chicago Tribune - http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-10-05/entertainment/ct-ent-1009-chicago-ideas-clemantine-wamariya-20121005_1_chicago-ideas-week-rwandan-town-genocide

  A young survivor of genocide takes her message around the world
  October 05, 2012|Howard Reich | Arts critic

  1916

  Rwandan genocide survivor Clemantine Wamariya. (Thomas Ondrey/The Plain Dealer)
  At 24, Clemantine Wamariya knows more about trauma and survival than most of us ever will. If we're lucky.
  When Wamariya was 6, she and her sister were forced to flee the ethnic killings in Rwanda, spending the next several years in a series of African refugee camps where they fought starvation, mayhem and disease.

  Wamariya, who began rebuilding her life in Chicago in 2000, has since become a much-admired speaker on genocide, a subject
  WERBUNG

  she'll address during Chicago Ideas Week. She hastens to point out, however, that she seeks no sympathy.

  "I'm not a victim," says Wamariya. "I'm a survivor of hunger, of hate, of different injustices that humans are facing today."
  More than that, Wamariya has become an advocate for human rights, a subject she came to understand in a most visceral way.
  Before Hutu militias began slaughtering the Tutsi minority in the spring of 1994 – the massacres ultimately killing 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus – Wamariya led what she considers an idyllic childhood in the Rwandan town of Kigali. She played with her friends in a tree, the youngsters pretending it was a train, a bus, a plane – anything that struck their imaginations.
  But everything changed abruptly.
  "I always call it 'the noise,'" says Wamariya. "The whole killing – I didn't understand it. I didn't understand death. I thought you get old and go to heaven."
  Wamariya and her older sister, Claire, fled and were separated from their parents, the rest of their family, literally everyone they knew. During the ensuing years, they experienced a life they could not have imagined. No one could have.
  "After Rwanda, in our first refugee camp, it was basic human survival," says Wamaria, who with her sister subsisted in camps in seven African countries. "I saw my older sister Claire changing in front of me. She became aggressive in her way of living – she had to find food for us in the middle of this chaos, in the middle of people who were sick. …
  "We were completely alone. It was more like the land of the lost. …
  "There is not a word to describe it: I did not know where my mother and father are. I did not know where we are. We walked for days. It was a sense of confusion."
  When the sisters arrived in Chicago, through the aid of the International Organization for Migration, there was a new language to be learned, new ways of living to be mastered. Like many survivors of genocide, Wamariya breathed not a word to her new friends about what had happened to her. She didn't fully comprehend it, she says, so how could anyone else understand?
  But in seventh and eighth grades – when she began studying the American Civil War, European history and other bloody chapters of the human experience – she realized she was not alone in her past sufferings. Later, by reading Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's landmark book "Night," visiting the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., and otherwise taking the toll of human history, Wamariya concluded that she had to speak out about what happened, as difficult as that would be.

  "It was like all the demons were awakened and shaken out of me," she says. "I could not be silent anymore."
  Far from it. Her composition on what Wiesel's "Night" meant to her won an Oprah Winfrey National High School Essay
  WERBUNG

  Contest in 2006 and earned her an appearance on the show (which included a surprise reunion with her parents), as well as two follow-ups. Wamariya has been speaking widely ever since, and last year Pres. Barack Obama appointed her to the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, which governs the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She is the council's youngest member, serving alongside Wiesel and others.

  Wamariya's studies at Yale, where she's a comparative literature major in the class of 2013, further underscores how far she has come in the aftermath of her experiences.
  "Even among Yale's extraordinary undergraduates, Clemantine's life story is one of unusual hardship, unusual courage and unusual determination," the university's dean of admissions Jeff Brenzel told the Yale Daily Pressin 2010.
  Yet what happened to Wamariya her and her family always hovers in her consciousness.
  "It never goes away," she says. "It has taken me so many years to finally be in my bed and fall asleep for six hours. …
  "I hate light. … I feel like at night, it's safer. If anything happens, there's a way to hide at night. Another thing I hate about light is it reminds me about being in a refugee camp and being outside.
  "For me, it's basically those are the kinds of traumas that every day you have to deal with. Do you trust people who might love you to not turn against you? …
  "My trauma is not as bad as people who saw their family being killed in front of them, their family being tortured in front of them. …
  "I'm still coping with my trauma," adds Wamariya, "but coping by trying to find different ways to heal it rather than hide it."
  Such as speaking out, for everyone to hear.
  Clemantine Wamariya will appear at 11:40 a.m. Friday during Chicago Ideas Week's "Edison Talks." The event will be streamed live at chicagoideas.com.
  hreich@tribune.com
  Twitter @howardreich

• Immigrant Connect - http://immigrantconnect.medill.northwestern.edu/blog/2009/06/09/sisters-live-different-lives-after-rwanda/

  On different paths, sisters raise awareness after Rwanda
  Posted on 06/09/2009 by Ali Pechman • 0 Comments

  Clematine and Claire after an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show.
  Clemantine Wamariya had fallen asleep on her sister’s couch, one of her favorite places to sleep, when she heard a knock at the door of the government housing. It was about 3 A.M.
  To Wamariya, America means falling asleep without worrying if she will be woken up to pack and leave. She spent years in refugee camps in Africa with her older sister, Claire Mukundente, after the Rwandan genocide in 1994. They came to Chicago together in 2000; Clemantine was 12 and Claire, then 21, had her two children in tow and was expecting a third.
  Mukundente answered the door, unfazed. It was an African woman from Burundi whom Mukundente works with at the Uptown Neighborhood Health Center, holding a letter in her hand she needed translated.
  Mukundente often takes these night calls to translate for these refugees, some of 8,500 refugees in America as of 2007 who had been in Tanzanian refugee camps since 1972.
  “I can’t tell people not to come because they have nowhere to go and I’m the only one who can help,” Mukundente said, who, with a delicate and soothing voice, speaks four African languages as well as English and some French.
  Sometimes the refugees come to her in the middle of the night with what they believe to be urgent messages that Mukundente must tell them are only junk mail.
  During the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda, Wamariya and her sister clung to each other in a banana tree above their home, believing at the time that their family was being murdered just below. In Chicago, both sisters work avidly to allay the effects of genocide. Mukundente works four days a week at the health center and takes weekend calls, while Wamariya speaks around the country about her story, including at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
  She has been featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show three times to share her story. The first time she appeared on the show, as a winner of Oprah’s National High School Essay Contest about the book “Night,” she and her sister were reunited with her parents and siblings for the first time in 12 years. They are now reunited in Chicago with their mother and father who survived and came to America over a year ago, along with three new siblings.
  The sisters share their ideals, beliefs and history, but America has given them two different lives.
  Mukundente lives in Uptown with her three children, close to where she works, and her family lives around the corner from her. Wamariya lives in Winnetka with her foster family where she attended New Trier High School, and just completed senior year at Hotchkiss Boarding School. She will attend Yale this fall. When Wamariya visits her sister to see her at work or crash on the couch, she knows she is coming from farther than just the suburbs.
  “Life changes by Howard,” Wamariya has noticed.
  Wamariya’s friends from Chicago are American, and as she notes, mostly affluent suburban-raised students now attending private colleges. Her friends from boarding school are from all over the world and, she noticed, even more priveledged than her friends from home. Wamariya did modern dance all through high school; she drives a bright blue Volkswagon bug.
  But when she sees her sister, she finds her eating the same food from Rwanda, friends mainly with other refugees from their country and other parts of Africa.
  Mukundente said about her community, “I feel like I’m in a family.”
  Wamariya knows she adjusted more to America than her sister.
  “I went to one of the best high schools in Chicago, boarding school, Yale.” She is tentative to use the words “American Dream.”
  Wamariya once accompanied her sister to the health center and offered to help translate. She found herself asked by a doctor to tell a mother that she had an incurable blood disease that had passed along to her children. Wamariya began and burst out crying.
  When Mukundente started working at the Uptown Neighborhood Health Center three years ago, she cried a lot too. But she found ways to work through it and to share her life’s work with her sister.
  Mukundente rented out space at Lawrence and Sheridan, found a priest, and started a church for the Burundian refugees. After services, they come to her house and eat, sing, dance and “just be,” Wamariya said, who attends often with her sister.
  Wamariya tried to attend college close to home so that she could spend time with her sister and get to know her parents again, but the opportunities Yale gave her were impossible to turn down, she said. But even though she knows her life is moving farther away from her family, these are choices she never anticipated she’d have the luxury to make.
  “It doesn’t happen where the whole family survives Rwanda and are all together in America,” she said. “Sometimes I’m scared to sit down and feel all the good things that happened to us because it’s so impossible.”
  Filed Under: Back Home, Fearing the Law, The Migration

• Vogue - https://www.vogue.com/article/the-girl-who-smiled-beads-clemantine-wamiriya-interview

  Clemantine Wamariya, Who Survived Genocide in Rwanda, on Her New Memoir, The Girl Who Smiled Beads—and Living for Black Joy
  March 16, 2018 1:36 PM
  by Eve MacSweeney
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  Photo: Julia Zave
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  In her memoir, The Girl Who Smiled Beads, (read the excerpt from Vogue’s April issue here) Clemantine Wamariya, with coauthor Elizabeth Weil, describes a childhood brutally disrupted by the Rwandan genocide in 1994. At age 6, she fled on foot with her sister Claire, nine years her senior, into Burundi. The pair moved through southern Africa, staying in refugee camps or scratching out a living, before being granted asylum in the United States in 2000.
  Painted in vivid scenes and flashbacks, the book offers a visceral insight into the stultifying life inside a refugee camp, in which, Wamariya writes, “Staying alive was so much work…. You had to try to stay a person.” In her new home of Chicago, Wamariya’s experience upends preconceptions about the mind and spirit of a refugee, and how she interacts with her new surroundings. Above all, Wamariya is anything but passive. She confronts every challenge head-on, and redefines every exchange from her own questioning perspective.

  Photo: Andrew White
  FacebookPinterest
  She meets Oprah, Elie Wiesel, and President Obama. She goes to Yale University. She joins boards and delegations, and becomes an advocate. She likes to dress up, laugh, and enjoy life. She resists every possible form of pigeonholing. Having fought so hard to stay alive, Wamariya reminds us what life is. Here, she talks to Vogue.
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  How did your move to Chicago at age 12 come about?
  One day, when we were living in Zambia, our seventh country in six years, Claire came home and told me that she’d learned about a U.N. program set up to grant genocide survivors asylum in the United States. We were living in a slum in Zambia. We were so poor. But Claire, who was 21 at the time, was just unbelievably resourceful. She’d saved our lives repeatedly, and for moments like this she always kept one respectable outfit, so that no matter how little money she had, she could meet anyone, anywhere, and not be pitied or judged. She put on her good jeans and crisp white shirt and aced the first interview at the embassy. The following year we were on a plane to Chicago.
  What is a typical day like for you now, as an advocate?
  My day-to-day varies. I do some public speaking. I talk to school groups. A few weeks ago I was at the first Black Joy Parade in Oakland, California—hundreds of people from the Bay Area dancing, singing, walking, and creating joy. At one point I was watching a painter, and a little girl came and sat next to me. She gave me a name, Joyful, because she said I looked like a Joyful. I almost started to cry. She saw me. And that’s the incredible opportunity I have before me: not just to teach but to learn, and to try to get people to slow down and apprehend one other as humans.
  What do you feel most proud of having communicated to the world?

  That all of us have equal humanity. It’s such a simple idea, but so hard for people to hold in their minds. Every single person on the planet has equal humanity. In my own life I’ve gone from being seen as utterly worthless to [having] great privilege, and nothing about who I am inside has changed. Every person you see seeking refuge, every person you see walking away from their whole life because their country has descended into chaos and war…I am every one of those people. You are every one of those people too.
  What do you hope readers will learn from your story?
  I truly hope readers learn to believe in their imaginations and their ability to shape their own lives. That’s what The Girl Who Smiled Beads means to me. The title comes from a fable my nanny told me when I was really young. At every plot point she paused and said, “What do you think happened next?” and whatever I said, whatever future I imagined, came true. Even today, that fable allows me to hold on to the belief that I have the power to create my own reality and future.
  What will readers be most surprised about?
  I know it sounds lofty, but I hope to surprise readers about their own assumptions, particularly the dynamics of who helps whom. That relationship is very complicated, and often undermining. Sharing is wonderful, but giving—I give, you take—often maintains the power status quo. As a teenager, not long into my new life in the United States, I really surprised a lot of people when they said, with the very best of intentions, “How can I help?” and I responded, “How can I help you?”
  From Elie Wiesel to W.G. Sebald, books have meant a lot to you growing up. What are you reading now?
  I am way, way deep into Audre Lorde at the moment. She has an essay called, “Scratching the Surface.” I have the audio recording on my phone and I’ve listened to it seven times. It’s so dense and compelling. I feel like she’s literally redefining my world: “Racism: the belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all the others and thereby the right to dominance. Homophobia: the fear of feelings of love for members of one’s sex and therefore the hatred of those feelings in others.” I do a lot of rewinding, as half the time I’m saying to myself, “This is brilliant, but what were you saying? What does this mean?”
  What is your favorite thing to do when you’re not working?
  Yoga. And sleep. Anything to rest my mind and body.

• Clemantine Wamariya website - https://www.clemantine.org/

  Clemantine is a storyteller and human rights advocate.
  She's committed to inspiring others through the power and art of storytelling. Her personal account of her childhood in Rwanda, displacement throughout war-torn countries, and experiences in various refugee camps have encouraged myriads of people to persevere despite great odds. With no formal education before the age of 13, Clemantine went on to graduate from Yale University with a BA in Comparative Literature.

  Clemantine has been telling her story and speaking for over 10 years. She has been a four-time guest on The Oprah Show, and a speaker at the Forbes Summit and TEDx, as well as at numerous universities and distinguished organizations. In 2011, President Obama appointed her to the board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, making her the youngest board member in the organization’s history. During her first year she was recognized for her dedication to improving the lives of others, especially the underserved, and she was reappointed in 2016. Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls organization recently described Clemantine as “a compelling storyteller and fierce advocate.” Her Medium article “Everything is Yours, Everything is Not Yours,”was called “superb and artful” by The New York Times. Her memoir, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, written in collaboration with Elizabeth Weil, will be released in April 2018 by Crown Publishers. She is currently devoting her time to building community in the Bay Area and around the world.

  Clemantine’s life is a testament to the power of seized opportunities. She is committed to creating platforms that allow individuals from diverse demographic backgrounds to build relationships and exchange ideas. In this way, she challenges us to reexamine the way that we interact with one another in order to work towards our shared goal of improved equity in our communities.

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

Ann Hulbert
The Atlantic. 321.4 (May 2018): p41.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Atlantic Media, Ltd.
http://www.theatlantic.com
Full Text:
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After
CLEMANTINE WAMARIYA AND ELIZABETH WEIL
CROWN
THE PROLOGUE Of this remarkable memoir is likely to send readers to the YouTube clip of the occasion it describes: the 2006 Oprah show on which 18-year-old Clemantine Wamariya and her older sister were reunited with the rest of their long-lost family, 12 years after the pair had fled the Rwandan genocide. Oprah later pronounced it "one of the deepest, most joyful moments I've ever experienced." She rated the footage "beautiful, raw, raw, raw, raw, raw, raw, pure." On the screen, Wamariya's face twists with pain and near-terror.

On the page, Wamariya and the journalist Elizabeth Weil set out to sabotage facile uplift. Forget raw and pure: Wamariya's quest is to create some semblance of moral and emotional coherence out of a life that too often feels like a self-corroding performance. In flight since she was 6, she has counted for survival on a drive "to be who I needed to be and get what there was to get." A brutal journey through six countries initiated her early on as a "mimic and a chameleon"--by turns obedient younger sister, vigilant little mother (to her sister's children), and "a nobody, invisible." Each smiling version of herself was as fierce as she was afraid.
On her arrival in the U.S., in 2000, a new role awaited. At 12, Wamariya was "a curiosity, an emissary from suffering's far edge." Her "refugee skills" kicked in, and in public she became "Oprah's special genocide survivor," then a Yale student, now a "humanitarian speaker." But that "brilliant fairy tale," too, threatens to erase her. The fractured form of her own narrative--deftly toggling between her African and American Odysseys--gives troubled memory its dark due. Healing does not spell an end to hurting.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hulbert, Ann. "The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After." The Atlantic, May 2018, p. 41. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540796963/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4ffac7eb. Accessed 29 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A540796963

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

Courtney Eathorne
Booklist. 114.13 (Mar. 1, 2018): p19.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After. By Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil. Apr. 2018. 288p. Crown, $26 (9780451495327). 967.57104.
Wamariya was only six years old in 1994, when massacres obliterated her home life in Rwanda. With her older sister, Claire, Wamariya escaped and became a perpetual refugee. The sisters spent the next six years moving around Africa, Claire always making sure that they never got too comfortable in their transient circumstances. After living in seven different countries, the girls were granted asylum to the U.S. When they arrived in Chicago, they had no idea whether their parents were alive or slaughtered. Eventually, they adjusted to their American lives; Wamariya excelled in school, and Claire reared her small children. In 2006, the sisters were featured on the Oprah show, wherein their parents were brought onstage as a Winfrey-style surprise. The book, coauthored with journalist Weil, demystifies life during and after the Rwandan Civil War and explores the difficult reality of such an epic familial reunion. In her prose as in her life, Wamariya is brave, intelligent, and generous. Sliding easily between past and present, this memoir is a soulful, searing story about how families survive.--Courtney Eathorne
YA: Young readers will likely love this honest account of life as a teenage refiigee. CE.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Eathorne, Courtney. "The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 19. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250806/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=72cfa1c1. Accessed 29 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A532250806

Wamariya, Clemantine: THE GIRL WHO SMILED BEADS

Kirkus Reviews. (Mar. 1, 2018):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Wamariya, Clemantine THE GIRL WHO SMILED BEADS Crown (Adult Nonfiction) $26.00 5, 1 ISBN: 978-0-451-49532-7
Record of a childhood in flight from war and terror.
"I hated that I had to eat," writes Wamariya. "I hated my stomach, I hated my needs." Growing children are always hungry, but the author, forced at the age of 6 to flee her native Rwanda during the genocide of 1994, was for years as a refugee never able to satisfy those elemental needs. Intercut with her chronicle of experiences in a series of refugee camps are moments from her new life in America, where she landed at the age of 12, adopted into a welcoming home in a bit of fortune that she did not trust: "I was callous and cynical....I thought I could fool people into thinking that I was not profoundly bruised." She had reason to worry, for on a six-year trail that passed through one African nation after another, she witnessed both generosity and depravity coupled with the constant worry that the older sister with whom she had fled would decide that she was too much of a burden and abandon her. She did not: Her sister's presence through one fraught situation after another is a constant. Wamariya's experiences adjusting to life in a country where, her sister declared, beer flowed from faucets and people owned six cars at a time are affecting, and there are some Cinderella moments in it, from being accepted to Yale to appearing on Oprah Winfrey's show. But more, there are moments of potent self-reckoning; being a victim of trauma means that "you, as a person, are empty and flattened, and that violence, that theft, keeps you from embodying a life that feels like your own." The work of finding home and feeling safe--it's something that every foe of immigration ought to ponder; in that alone Wamariya's narrative is valuable.
Not quite as attention-getting as memoirs by Ismail Beah or Scholastique Mukasonga, but a powerful record of the refugee experience all the same.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Wamariya, Clemantine: THE GIRL WHO SMILED BEADS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959757/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=26cdc662. Accessed 29 June 2018.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A528959757

Hulbert, Ann. "The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After." The Atlantic, May 2018, p. 41. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A540796963/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=4ffac7eb. Accessed 29 June 2018. Eathorne, Courtney. "The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After." Booklist, 1 Mar. 2018, p. 19. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A532250806/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=72cfa1c1. Accessed 29 June 2018. "Wamariya, Clemantine: THE GIRL WHO SMILED BEADS." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Mar. 2018. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A528959757/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=26cdc662. Accessed 29 June 2018.

• The Atlantic
  https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/05/cover-to-cover-the-girl-who-smiled-beads/556898/
  Word count: 367

  The Girl Who Smiled Beads Defies Easy Uplift
  Clemantine Wamariya’s memoir tries to make sense of a life fractured by the Rwandan genocide.
  Ann Hulbert
  May 2018 Issue

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  The prologue of this remarkable memoir is likely to send readers to the YouTube clip of the occasion it describes: the 2006 Oprah show on which 18-year-old Clemantine Wamariya and her older sister were reunited with the rest of their long-lost family, 12 years after the pair had fled the Rwandan genocide. Oprah later pronounced it “one of the deepest, most joyful moments I’ve ever experienced.” She rated the footage “beautiful, raw, raw, raw, raw, raw, raw, pure.” On the screen, Wamariya’s face twists with pain and near-terror.

  Crown
  On the page, Wamariya and the journalist Elizabeth Weil set out to sabotage facile uplift. Forget raw and pure: Wamariya’s quest is to create some semblance of moral and emotional coherence out of a life that too often feels like a self-corroding performance. In flight since she was 6, she has counted for survival on a drive “to be who I needed to be and get what there was to get.” A brutal journey through six countries initiated her early on as a “mimic and a chameleon”—by turns obedient younger sister, vigilant little mother (to her sister’s children), and “a nobody, invisible.” Each smiling version of herself was as fierce as she was afraid.
  This article appears in the May 2018 issue.
  Subscribe now to support 160 years of independent journalism. Starting at only $24.50. View more stories from the issue.
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  On her arrival in the U.S., in 2000, a new role awaited. At 12, Wamariya was “a curiosity, an emissary from suffering’s far edge.” Her “refugee skills” kicked in, and in public she became “Oprah’s special genocide survivor,” then a Yale student, now a “humanitarian speaker.” But that “brilliant fairy tale,” too, threatens to erase her. The fractured form of her own narrative—deftly toggling between her African and American odysseys—gives troubled memory its dark due. Healing does not spell an end to hurting.

Word Count