The Girl Who Smiled Beads

Author: Clemantine Wamariya
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0451495349
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war and rape. I would not—could not—live in that tale.” Clemantine Wamariya was six years old when her mother and father began to speak in whispers, when neighbors 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 migrating 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; there, in Chicago, their lives diverged. Though their bond remained unbreakable, Claire, who had for so long protected and provided for Clemantine, was a single mother struggling to make ends meet, while Clemantine was taken in by a family who raised her as their own. She seemed to live the American dream: attending private school, taking up cheerleading, and, 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 beyond the label of “victim” and recognize the power of the imagination to transcend even the most profound injuries and aftershocks. Devastating yet beautiful, and bracingly original, it is a powerful testament to her commitment to constructing a life on her own terms.

Qualification

Author: David Heatley
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1524747629
Category : Comics & Graphic Novels
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
From the author of My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, a new graphic memoir brimming with black humor, which explores the ultimate irony: the author's addiction to 12-Step programs. “Say what you mean, but don’t say it mean.” —12-Step aphorism David Heatley had an unquestionably troubled and eccentric childhood: father a sexually repressed alcoholic, mother an overworked compulsive overeater. Then David's parents enter the world of 12-step programs and find a sense of support and community. It seems to help. David, meanwhile, grows up struggling with his own troublesome sexual urges and seeking some way to make sense of it all. Eventually he starts attending meetings too. Alcoholics Anonymous. Overeaters Anonymous. Debtors Anonymous. Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous. More and more meetings. Meetings for issues he doesn't have. With stark, sharply drawn art and unflinching honesty, David Heatley explores the strange and touching relationships he develops, and the truths about himself and his family he is forced to confront, while "working" an ever-increasing number of programs. The result is a complicated, unsettling, and hilarious journey—of far more than 12 steps.

Beautiful Country

Author: Qian Julie Wang
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0593313003
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
A NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The moving story of an undocumented child living in poverty in the richest country in the world—an incandescent debut from an astonishing new talent • A TODAY SHOW #READWITHJENNA PICK In Chinese, the word for America, Mei Guo, translates directly to “beautiful country.” Yet when seven-year-old Qian arrives in New York City in 1994 full of curiosity, she is overwhelmed by crushing fear and scarcity. In China, Qian’s parents were professors; in America, her family is “illegal” and it will require all the determination and small joys they can muster to survive. In Chinatown, Qian’s parents labor in sweatshops. Instead of laughing at her jokes, they fight constantly, taking out the stress of their new life on one another. Shunned by her classmates and teachers for her limited English, Qian takes refuge in the library and masters the language through books, coming to think of The Berenstain Bears as her first American friends. And where there is delight to be found, Qian relishes it: her first bite of gloriously greasy pizza, weekly “shopping days,” when Qian finds small treasures in the trash lining Brooklyn’s streets, and a magical Christmas visit to Rockefeller Center—confirmation that the New York City she saw in movies does exist after all. But then Qian’s headstrong Ma Ma collapses, revealing an illness that she has kept secret for months for fear of the cost and scrutiny of a doctor’s visit. As Ba Ba retreats further inward, Qian has little to hold onto beyond his constant refrain: Whatever happens, say that you were born here, that you’ve always lived here. Inhabiting her childhood perspective with exquisite lyric clarity and unforgettable charm and strength, Qian Julie Wang has penned an essential American story about a family fracturing under the weight of invisibility, and a girl coming of age in the shadows, who never stops seeking the light.

Girl in the Dark

Author: Anna Lyndsey
Publisher: Anchor
ISBN: 0385539614
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 239

Book Description
Haunting, lyrical, unforgettable, Girl in the Dark is a brave new memoir of a life without light. Anna Lyndsey was young and ambitious and worked hard; she had just bought an apartment; she was falling in love. Then what started as a mild intolerance to certain kinds of artificial light developed into a severe sensitivity to all light. Now, at the worst times, Anna is forced to spend months on end in a blacked-out room, where she loses herself in audiobooks and elaborate word games in an attempt to ward off despair. During periods of relative remission, she can venture out cautiously at dawn and dusk into a world that, from the perspective of her cloistered existence, is filled with remarkable beauty. And through it all there is Pete, her love and her rock, without whom her loneliness seems boundless. One day Anna had an ordinary life, and then the unthinkable happened. But even impossible lives, she learns, endure. Girl in the Dark is a tale of an unimaginable fate that becomes a transcendent love story. It brings us to an extraordinary place from which we emerge to see the light and the world anew.

How Dare the Sun Rise

Author: Sandra Uwiringiyimana
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062470167
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
Junior Library Guild Selection * New York Public Library's Best Books for Teens * Goodreads Choice Awards Nonfiction Finalist * Chicago Public Library’s Best of the Best Books for Teens: Nonfiction * 2018 Texas Topaz Nonfiction List * YALSA's 2018 Quick Picks List * Bank Street's 2018 Best Books of the Year “This gut-wrenching, poetic memoir reminds us that no life story can be reduced to the word ‘refugee.’" —New York Times Book Review “A critical piece of literature, contributing to the larger refugee narrative in a way that is complex and nuanced.” —School Library Journal (starred review) This profoundly moving memoir is the remarkable and inspiring true story of Sandra Uwiringiyimana, a girl from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who tells the tale of how she survived a massacre, immigrated to America, and overcame her trauma through art and activism. Sandra was just ten years old when she found herself with a gun pointed at her head. She had watched as rebels gunned down her mother and six-year-old sister in a refugee camp. Remarkably, the rebel didn’t pull the trigger, and Sandra escaped. Thus began a new life for her and her surviving family members. With no home and no money, they struggled to stay alive. Eventually, through a United Nations refugee program, they moved to America, only to face yet another ethnic disconnect. Sandra may have crossed an ocean, but there was now a much wider divide she had to overcome. And it started with middle school in New York. In this memoir, Sandra tells the story of her survival, of finding her place in a new country, of her hope for the future, and how she found a way to give voice to her people.

Summary of Clemantine Wamariya & Elizabeth Weil's The Girl Who Smiled Beads

Author: Everest Media
Publisher: Everest Media LLC
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 39

Book Description
Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I was a precocious snoop. I lived in Kigali, Rwanda, and was a regular child. I was nicknamed Cassette. I repeated everything I saw or heard, including that my sister Claire, who was nine years older than me, wore shorts under her skirt and played soccer instead of doing family errands after school. #2 I wanted to be fed ice cream and pineapple cakes. I wanted to wear a teal-blue school uniform and grow into Claire’s clothes. I didn’t fit in. #3 I was very young when I lost my mother, and I remember being extremely upset by the funeral. I wanted to understand what was happening around me, and I spent a lot of time around old, sick people. I wanted to hear God talking to them. #4 I wanted to be like my mother, who was a storyteller. I wanted to tell stories and dance for others. I felt threatened as an older sibling, and begged my mother every day to return me my baby sister.

Home and Nation in Anglophone Autobiographies of Africa

Author: Lena Englund
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031366360
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

Book Description
This book looks at contemporary autobiographical works by writers with African backgrounds in relation to the idea of ‘place’. It examines eight authors’ works – Helen Cooper’s The House at Sugar Beach, Sisonke Msimang’s Always Another Country, Leila Ahmed’s A Border Passage, Noo Saro-Wiwa’s Looking for Transwonderland, Douglas Rogers’s The Last Resort, Elamin Abdelmahmoud’s Son of Elsewhere, Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads and Aminatta Forna’s autobiographical writing – to argue that place is particularly central to personal narrative in texts whose authors have migrated multiple times. Spanning Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Egypt, Rwanda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, this book interrogates the label ‘African’ writing which has been criticized for ignoring local contexts. It demonstrates how in their works these writers seek to reconnect with a bygone ‘Africa’, often after complex experiences of political upheavals and personal loss. The chapters also provide in-depth analyses of key concepts related to place and autobiography: place and privilege, place and trauma, and the relationship between place and nation.

Passages

Author: Sam Okoth Opondo
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526174340
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Passages: On geo-analysis and the aesthetics of precarity is a multi-genre and transdisciplinary text addressing themes such as colonialism, nuclear zones of abandonment, migration control regimes, transnational domestic work, the biocolonial hostilities of the hospitality industry, legal precarities behind the international criminal justice regime, the shadow-worlds of the African soccerscape, and immunity regimes related to the COVID-19 pandemic. This book invites inquiry into today’s apocalyptic narratives, humanitarian reason, and international criminal justice regimes, as well as the precarity generated by citizen time and 'consulate time'. The aesthetic breaks emerging from the book’s image-text montage draw attention to the ethics of encounter and passage that challenges colonial, domestic, and nation-statist sovereignty regimes of inattention.

Home and Nation in Anglophone Autobiographies of Africa

Author: Lena Englund
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031366360
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 217

More Nights than Days

Author: Yudit Kiss
Publisher: Central European University Press
ISBN: 9633867258
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 379

Book Description
More Nights Than Days is a unique exploration of the experience of children who survived the Holocaust—including Roma and Sinti victims—and the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Bosnia. Children are among the principal victims of armed conflicts and slaughters; nonetheless, they perceive events through the prism of their unique perspective and have a range of coping techniques adults don't possess. This overview of writings of ninety-one child survivors bears evidence from a wide range of human ruthlessness. The author presents little-known texts along with famous memoirs and autobiographical fiction, with abundant quotations. Many of these are not only compelling as historical testimony, but poetic and stirringly expressive. Yudit Kiss has not written a historical study or literary criticism of the children’s books. She explores, instead, what the authors went through and what they felt and understood about their experience. An accessible and captivating reading, this volume presents a close-up, human size dimension of the destruction. The books written by child survivors also describe the resources and means that helped them to remain human even in the deepest well of inhumanity, offering precious lessons about resistance and resilience.M