Narrating the refugee experience: the importance of role, memory, and loss of identity in Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil’s The Girl who Smiled Beads

Abstract

[eng] This undergraduate dissertation analyses the memoir whose protagonist, Clemantine Wamariya, explains her resilient transformation and awareness of the refugee crisis as she escapes from the Rwandan war and its horrors. The purpose of this study is to provide a broader examination of several concepts that are essential for the rights of refugees through a close reading of the memoir. This paper explores the several roles that the author performs without agency of decision, the dynamic influence of other narratives and genocides together with the essential but disregarded concept of identity and belonging. For this, the role of refugees is examined within every context that the protagonist encounters. The fragile and vulnerable aspects of these images are used to prove the agency and willing of the main character who reconsiders the canonical definition of genocide and how it has a detrimental effect on multidirectional memory. None of the victims of other horrors can be regarded with the same definition as the refugees do because their distinctiveness places them all in juxtaposition. Also, not every person endures losing his identity and sense of belonging as it happens with Clemantine whose wide introspection of her experience and personality provides an insight in this issue. Through this memoir, she claims her right to be the active agent of her life, to turn her story into history, and to raise awareness about the international refugee crisis.