The ​Girl Who Smiled Beads 1 csillagozás

A Story of War and What Comes After
Clemantine Wamariya – Elizabeth Weil: The Girl Who Smiled Beads

Clemantine ​Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbours began to disappear, and when she heard the loud, ugly sounds her brother said were thunder. In 1994, she and her fifteen-year-old sister, Claire, fled the Rwandan massacre and spent the next six years wandering through seven African countries, searching for safety―perpetually hungry, imprisoned and abused, enduring and escaping refugee camps, finding unexpected kindness, witnessing inhuman cruelty. They did not know whether their parents were dead or alive.

When Clemantine was twelve, she and her sister were granted refugee status in the United States, where she embarked on another journey, ultimately graduating from Yale. Yet the years of being treated as less than human, of going hungry and seeing death, could not be erased. She felt at the same time six years old and one hundred years old.

In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, Clemantine provokes us to look… (tovább)

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Hutchinson, London, 2018
276 oldal · keménytáblás · ISBN: 9781786331465

Kívánságlistára tette 2


Népszerű idézetek

plastpumpa>!

I wanted to leave my body. I hated that I had to eat. I hated my stomach, I hated my needs. The bargain my body offered did not feel worth it. I did not want the trouble anymore.

168. oldal

plastpumpa>!

The word genocide cannot tell you, cannot make you feel, the way I felt in Rwanda. The way I felt in Burundi. The way I wished to be invisible because I knew someone wanted me dead at a point in my life when I did not yet understand what death was.

93. oldal

plastpumpa>!

None of my shoes from Rwanda fit. I'd lost so many teeth and I hated the new ones that had replaced them.

84. oldal

plastpumpa>!

I promised if we got out, I would be the best child ever, the best sister. I would be so good and kind and generous – I just didn't want to die in the water. There's no trail you can leave in the water.

92. oldal

plastpumpa>!

My mother’s favorite images, like her favorite stories, were from the Bible. She had a picture of white Jesus on her phone case—ivory skin, blue irises, smooth hair. I wished my mother would see beyond this simple, innocent face. I wished she could see how people had wielded that face to brainwash others, to destroy cultures, to eliminate entire languages, to cause so much degradation and pain. Earlier that day we’d walked by the most gorgeous Senegalese and Nigerian men selling little Eiffel Tower pens and key chains by a metro station. In their eyes you could see they’d suffered as much as my mother’s Jesus. Why not pray to them?

258. oldal

plastpumpa>!

I didn't know how to name the noises. They were human and not human. I never learned the right words in Kinyarwanda. I hope they don't exist.

25. oldal

plastpumpa>!

I thought I was one hundred years old. I thought I was the thunder's child. I had always wanted to be Claire's age or my mother's. I knew I was six. Age made no sense anymore.

27. oldal

plastpumpa>!

It's strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out. No other place takes you in. You are unwanted, by everyone. You are a refugee.

29. oldal

plastpumpa>!

You had to try to hang on to your name, though nobody cared about your name. You had to try to stay a person. You had to try not to become invisible. If you let go and fell back into the chaos you were gone, just a number in a unit, which also was a number. If you died, no one knew. If you got lost, no one knew. If you gave up and disintegrated inside, no one knew.

43. oldal


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Ishmael Beah: A Long Way Gone
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: Half of a Yellow Sun
Rick Atkinson: An Army at Dawn
María Dueñas: The Time in Between
Ken Follett: The Key to Rebecca
Paullina Simons: The Bronze Horseman
Joseph Heller: Catch-22
George Orwell: Homage to Catalonia
Tan Twan Eng: The Garden of Evening Mists
Amy Harmon: From Sand and Ash