After The Holocaust, the world said never again. Never again would we let our brothers and sisters be slaughtered because they are different from us.
Unfortunately, never again has become again and again.
During the Rwanadan genocide in the spring and summer of 1994, approximately 500,000 to 1,000,000 Rwandan citizens were murdered. The lucky survivors (if you want to call them lucky) were forced to become refugees.
Clemantine Wamariya is one of those survivors. She recounts the harrowing experience of being a refugee from mass slaughter in her new memoir, The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After. Co-written with Elizabeth Weil, Ms. Wamariya was a young girl when the killing began. She escaped Rwanda with her elder sister, leaving the rest of her family behind. The narrative jumps between two timelines: her life in America living with an Anglo-American family after receiving a visa to enter the United States and her life as a refugee, living as best she could.
While this book is a little difficult to read, both because of the subject matter and the timeline jump in the narrative, it is an important read. It’s important because we are still killing each other over minute labels instead of finding a way to coexist and respect our differences.
Writergurlny 