The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After
Clemantine Wamariya
Top 10 Best Quotes
“I've seen enough to know that you can be a human with a mountain of resources and you can be a human with nothing, and you can be a monster either way.”
“Nobody is who you think they are at first glance. We need to see beyond the projections we cast onto each other. Each of us is so much grander, more nuanced, and more extraordinary than anybody thinks, including ourselves.”
“The only road to equality—a sense of common humanity; peace—is sharing, my mother’s orange. When we share, you are not using your privilege to get me to line up behind you. When we share, you are not insisting on being my savior. Claire and I always looked for the sharers, the people who just said, “I have sugar, I have water. Let’s share”
“I could no longer discern what was real and what was fake. Everything, including the present, seemed to be both too much and nothing at all.”
“Survival, true survival of the body and soul, requires creativity, freedom of thought, collaboration. You might have time and I might have land. You might have ideas and I might have strength. You might have a tomato and I might have a knife. We need each other. We need to say: I honor the things that you respect and I value the things you cherish. I am not better than you. You are not better than me.”
“I want to make people understand that boxing ourselves into tiny cubbies based on class, race, ethnicity, religion—anything, really—comes from a poverty of mind, a poverty of imagination. The world is dull and cruel when we isolate ourselves.”
“Two people in pain are magnets, repelling each other. We cannot or will not reach across the space to connect.”
“The word genocide is clinical, overly general, bloodless, and dehumanizing.”
“When you're traumatized, your sense of self, your individuality, is beaten up. Your skin color, your background, your pain, your hope, your gender, your faith, it's all defiled. Those essential pieces of yourself are stolen. You, as a person, are emptied and flattened, and that violence, that theft, keeps you from embodying a life that feels like your own. To continue to exist, as a whole person, you need to re-create, for yourself, an identity untouched by everything that's been used against you. You need to imagine and build a self out of elements that are not tainted. You need to remake yourself on your own terms.”
“The colonists, the aid workers, the NGOs -- they're all in a single progression: paternalistic foreigners, assuming they are better and brighter, offering shiny, destabilizing, dependence producing gifts. How can one accept anything from so-called rescuers when their predecessors helped your people destroy one another?”
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Book Keywords:
purity, dissociation, reality, identity, mental-trauma, africa, overwhelmed, refugees, social-justice, ngos, trauma
