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.

Broken Memory

Author: Elisabeth Combres
Publisher: Groundwood Books Ltd
ISBN: 1554981611
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 149

Book Description
IRA Notable Books for a Global Society selection Hiding behind an armchair, five-year-old Emma does not witness the murder of her mother, but she hears everything. And when the assassins finally leave, the young Tutsi girl somehow manages to stumble away from the scene, motivated only by the memory of her mother's last words: "You must not die, Emma!" Eventually Emma is taken in by an old Hutu woman who risks her own life to hide the child. Emma stays with the old woman and a quiet bond forms between the two, but long after the war ends, the young girl is still haunted by nightmares. When the country establishes courts to allow victims to face their tormenters in their villages, Emma is uneasy and afraid. But through her growing friendship with a young torture victim and the gentle encouragement of an old man charged with helping child survivors, Emma finds the courage to return to the house where her mother was killed and begin the journey to healing.

How Dare the Sun Rise

Author: Sandra Uwiringiyimana
Publisher: Turtleback Books
ISBN: 9780606413879
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
In this powerful memoir, Sandra Uwiringyimana, a girl from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, tells the incredible true story of how she survived a massacre, immigrated to America, and overcame her trauma through art and activism.

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