The Girl Who Smiled Beads

by Clemantine Wamariya

  When my nanny Mukamana told me the story, she just set up the character and the premise and let me fill in the pieces. “And what do you think happened next?” she said. I loved this question. It was such a gift. Whatever my answer, whatever plot I chose, Mukamana told me I was correct. In this way, the girl who smiled beads became the answer to all puzzles, a way to give shape to a world that my parents would not explain and later Claire would not explain, a means to bend and mold reality that I could grasp and accept. I thought I was the girl. I thought the beads were fire, though sometimes I thought the beads were water or time. In my version of the story, the girl walks the earth and she is always safe, there but not there, one step ahead. And she is truly special, undeniably strong and brave—a dream, a superstar, a goddess of sorts. I needed to believe those things were possible and that they might be true about me too. In the narrative the world proffered, I was nothing. The world told me I was nothing. The plot provided by the universe was filled with starvation, war, and rape. I would not—could not—live in that tale.

  Instead, I would be the girl who smiled beads, my version of the girl who smiled beads, one who had power and agency over her life, one who did not get caught. I already had the boxes of buttons and beads, all my katundu, my stuff. When I told the girl’s story, when I imagined and determined the future, I told it this way: Not that long ago, in a land full of hills, not that far away, there was a beautiful girl, a special, glowing, magical girl who smiled beads. She traveled and she left them in her wake, like fairy dust, and by the time anyone tried to catch her, she was gone.

  * * *

  My roommate at Yale arrived on Old Campus before I did, with her blue IKEA couch and potted houseplants, and she took the bottom mattress on the bunk bed, leaving me the top. Everything she owned was soft, matching, and in order. I’d shipped my jumble of boxes, my katundu, to New Haven straight from Hotchkiss. I wished our room was bigger, but I was relieved that it was clean. The week before, I’d attended a pre-orientation camp with two hundred other incoming freshmen, out in the middle of Connecticut somewhere, in the woods. We played bonding games and square-danced in a barn and it was fun enough, I supposed. But the hamburgers weren’t cooked through, the cabins smelled like urine, and the mattresses were hard and green. I kept imagining what Claire would think if she saw it. You guys are all smart enough to get into Yale and dumb enough to stay in a place like this?

  Still, I got a Yale sweatshirt, I wore J.Crew. Sunday through Wednesday I sat in Sterling Library, in the sunken leather chairs, reading until 4:00 a.m., and for the next three nights I went out, attending house parties and dancing in the sticky, grabby scene at a bar called Toad’s Place. But it was distraction, not connection; losing, not finding myself. I knew the preppy conservatism of Kenilworth and Hotchkiss could never represent me. But I was not like Claire either, still enjoying her Nigerian soap operas, still wearing kitenges and cooking ugali. Claire’s house was filled with Africans—Nigerians, Congolese, Rwandans, most notably my parents, nieces, nephew, and siblings. I wanted nothing to do with it.

  * * *

  I decided not to go home the summer after my first year at Yale. I signed up for a Yale trip to Kenya to study Swahili. I convinced myself it would be lovely. I would wander out into the wider world, start connecting the dots of my life, not stay trapped inside these new pretty, cloistered walls.

  I had a boyfriend, Zach, who wanted to go to Kenya too. Zach was perfect—handsome, confident, sparkling, a junior from Atlanta, half Nigerian, half Dutch. He was in my Swahili class and he learned Kinyarwanda to speak to me—me, the girl who asked questions as a young child that nobody would ever answer. It felt like the most romantic thing in the world.

  Together in Kenya, I told myself, we’d be in a beautiful place. We’d eat great food. I’d be accepted, understood, praised, even embraced. The Kenyans would approach me, saying, “Oh, wow, you know our languages—how amazing is that?”

  Before we left, the Yale language department issued a dress code. Women, the university said, needed to respect local customs and not wear shorts, short skirts, or spaghetti straps. We needed to pack scarves to wrap our heads and bodies.

  I did not feel obligated to obey. I was different, or so I believed, a special native daughter returning to my continent, not as a socially worthless refugee but as a United States citizen, a Yale student no less. I had an American passport. I had a certifiably valuable identity.

  My worth was now an intrinsic part of my being. My power could not be stolen from me.

  * * *

  That spring, Sach and I hung out at the Afro-American Cultural Center. The place was filled with fabulous black people. Black Europeans. Black Jamaicans. Black Haitians. Black Americans. Black Africans. I had not been around so many black people since I left Zambia.

  I’d built so little connection to black beauty. I’d studied slavery and the abolition of slavery. I’d studied Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King Jr. Yes, I knew and loved Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, and Maya Angelou. I had memorized every word of “Still I Rise,” and each stanza was a mantra.

  Did you want to see me broken?

  Bowed head and lowered eyes?

  ……………….

  You may kill me with your hatefulness,

  But still, like air, I’ll rise.

  But Angelou’s pain was not my pain. The slave story, while I related to it, was not my story. White America had not caused my wounds.

  I had known so few elegant, educated, ambitious, cultured black men. The men around Claire’s house were so decimated inside that I wondered if even they knew the true source of their pain. My father had given up. Rob had suffered more than he could absorb and violence leaked from his skin.

  Zach, charming Zach, was a revelation. One night he took me to New York City to see Alvin Ailey’s dance troupe.

  Another night, at the Afro-American house, a woman from Senegal stood up and recited a poem in Wolof, then in English. I was mesmerized—the way she dressed, her eyes, her black lips, her command of her native language, her command of herself. I wanted that wholeness, that coherence. I wanted to be her. But I could not gather myself up, not even here.

  Before long I was instigating debates about the less seemly parts of African culture. I lectured my fellow students at the house about my time living among the women in Malawi, who dropped to the ground when a man entered a space. The women in Zambia taught to roll on the floor after their husbands had sex with them, to express their subservience and gratitude. The Rwandan children beaten before school and their parents calling those beatings kiboko, breakfast.

  People grew angry, defensive, and annoyed. My narrative was counterproductive, they said, a white man’s view of the African mess. Many of those students had parents who’d sent them to boarding school in England to study, or at least had parents financially stable enough to send them to twelve years of school. I did not want to hear their views of Africa the beautiful.

  Zach pulled me aside. “Clemantine, you’re very abrupt and not letting people have room to comment…”

  But I was done, gone. “No, no, no,” I said. “This is real. People kill each other. We do that to each other. And ourselves.”

  * * *

  I felt the ugliness the moment we landed in Mombasa.

  We took a cab to our boarding house, which was hideous, and sure enough, just a twenty-minute walk toward the shore stood Fort Jesus, a temple to monstrosity and human-caused suffering, where slave traders had collected and stored Africans before shipping them away. The building was both Arab and colonial in style, a warren of hallways with small and big doors, each one intricately carved, each one a portal to ruined lives.

  I felt trapped. The whole city felt menacing, insidious. Men scowled and leered at women, especially black women, black women hanging around white women most of all. In restaurants locals assumed that I
was the translator for my Yale group or that I was their whore.

  A worker or a whore—not an American, not a Yalie, not the Oprah Girl, not special, not strong, not brave. “No. I am a student!” I said in Swahili and then Kinyarwanda. “I am a STUDENT!” But after dropping that one piece of my biography, I stopped talking. My frenzied rage pleased the locals. They called me Angry Brown Sugar.

  There was one other black girl on our trip, but she was very light-skinned and she wore blond braids. She could blend in. My skin was dark, almost ebony from the equatorial sun.

  When locals would talk to us and address only the white people at the table, I wanted to scream, Those kids don’t give a shit. They know nothing about your life. And I’m sitting here. I know exactly who you are, I’ve lived your life, and I’m the lowest person in this whole situation?

  Mombasa designated a section of beachfront for white tourists and their escorts. This was the most debased kind of travel—fifty-year-old European men with fifteen-year-old Kenyan girls.

  On the streets, too, and in the clubs, more old men with young girls. Maybe they’d seen a Facebook picture of a friend marrying a rich white man and they thought marriage would be their ticket. Maybe they thought they’d fall in love. Older white women walked the streets with handsome young black lovers. It all looked better than Fort Jesus.

  Men and money, men and candy. The story never stopped. A man who rode a motorcycle would visit our house, when I still lived with my parents in Kigali. Always he brought candy. My mom told me that’s how girls are tricked—men give you things. They lie and they give you things. After that I refused and said to the man, “Oh, I don’t like candy.”

  I hate candy to this day. The second and third time the man visited, he gave me a look of disgust that I would not take his candy. I remember he visited neighbors’ houses too, the houses of two girls I played with. Some girls took the candy in a heartbeat.

  Maybe this was why I didn’t have friends: because I yelled, He’s going to ruin you.

  * * *

  I rebelled and started wearing spaghetti straps. I wore short skirts. I walked alone. It was dangerous and stupid. I was so scared that the person I’d created would be lost, that she was already lost. My fears multiplied. I was scared that the Yale group would fly home and leave me behind. I was scared that I would be sold. I was scared that I would be killed.

  I can see now that I broadcast my fears, dropped them like seeds in fertile soil, and made them come true. As I walked through the city, I got catcalled. I got groped. I got pushed up against a wall. I wanted to prove to myself that I could hold on to who I was through the assault. I wanted to prove I could be like Claire: inviolable. I wanted to prove that I could be rejected, disparaged, and still no one could make me feel small.

  The cats in Mombasa screeched and meowed like they were getting beaten. I heard them in my dreams, and in my dreams I responded to their tormentors in Swahili so I’d have rehearsed the language to defend myself when I woke.

  When not in class I read in my room, hoping to unearth the secret to hate.

  I found an essay in a book called Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, in which every time the men go off to war they lose all their language. When they return home they can’t describe to their families what they saw, so they go back to war to learn the words again.

  I bought $200 worth of beads. I made nothing with them. I had a dream about shoving things into a closet. In the dream, I opened the closet door, intending to cram my katundu inside, only to find all the objects already there.

  Near the end of our stay we spent a few days on the island of Lamu. Lamu had resisted colonization. It still had no roads, only footpaths for people and donkeys. There, I finally got the reaction I wanted. “You live in America,” people said, “and you speak Swahili? Come to our house and sit and drink tea.”

  But when we returned to mainland Mombasa all my fears and anger returned. The nightmares that I would be lost. The nightmares that I would be stolen. The nightmares that I would be sold.

  I returned to Chicago early.

  * * *

  Back in Kenilworth, at the Thomases’, I put on my shorts and running shoes and ran along Sheridan Road, relieved to be in a place where I felt safe and did not have to think constantly about my body.

  Then, a few days before flying back to New Haven for the start of school, I went to the drugstore to pick up a prescription. I’d been babysitting, so I was wearing leggings and a T-shirt. My hair was a mess. The pharmacist gave me a hard time.

  “I’m in the system,” I said. “I have insurance.” I was still on the Thomases’ plan.

  The pharmacist was curt. “I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said. “I can’t find it. You’re not in the system.” Next.

  Her tone was absolute, cocky and dismissive. I thought, Fine. You want to judge my body? Fine.

  I returned to the Thomases’, showered, put on makeup, dressed up like a Kenilworth girl, changed my walk to a nice Kenilworth girl walk, my voice to a nice Kenilworth girl voice. I returned to the pharmacy and approached the pharmacist again. She did not recognize me, or admit she recognized me. I got my pills and left.

  17

  Say something happens—say a bird hits this window right here. You and I, we’re strangers in our strange costumes. We’ve come to this moment from different places. I might be terrified of the smash and the carnage, recoil as if the bird were a bomb. You might think I’m overreacting and say, It’s just a bird.

  What’s wrong with me? Or what’s wrong with you? If I don’t share with you my history, if I don’t explain what I’ve brought with me to this moment in time—that to me the bird hitting the window sounded like a shell detonating—then how could you know me? If I’m shaking, trying to bring myself back to objective reality, saying to myself, It’s a bird, right? It’s a bird, right? It’s a bird, right? and I don’t share with you my trauma, I alienate myself. I push you away.

  All the things that we do not say create not just space but a force field between us, a constant, energetic pressure. Two people in pain are magnets, repelling each other. We cannot or will not reach across the space to connect.

  So much of Rwanda—so much of the world—struggles with this. 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.

  I understand, now, that to accomplish this, I need more than the artifacts stuffed into a suitcase. I need to comprehend my history, a deep history. I know the facts about the genocide—the intentional savagery of the killings, the use of rape and the spread of HIV as instruments of war. But that is not enough. That past, that story, cannot fill me. I need a longer, broader, more fully human backstory, a history not all soaked in blood. I need clarity, perspective, joy, beauty, originality, intelligence, a wide-angle view.

  But the truth is, I already know how to take the next step in life, and it is simple. I need to be brave and vulnerable. I need to reach across space, take my mother’s hand, and share my joy and pain.

  This is so hard.

  * * *

  My second fall at Yale I started looking at my hands—they were my mother’s hands. I looked at my feet—my right foot in particular, it was one of my father’s feet. I kept trying to understand myself through academics as well—psychology, history, and political science—and still I found that approach overly abstract and literal, and hard-hearted.

  Then my pho
tography professor asked the class to read a poem about a girl in Connecticut walking to school in the cold. She wanted to take the train, but she was black and blacks weren’t allowed.

  For the next session of that photography class, the professor took us on a field trip to the Prudence Crandall School for Negro Girls in Canterbury, Connecticut. I did not learn this until later, but an abolitionist named Prudence Crandall opened the school in 1831. At first she enrolled only white girls. Then she admitted one black girl, and a bunch of the white girls withdrew. The school closed for a time. It reopened, in 1833, for black girls only. In 1834 a mob of angry, threatened neighbors attacked the building with iron bars and clubs. After that, the Prudence Crandall School for Negro Girls closed for good.

  When we arrived, our professor said, “Sometimes what is not written is the strongest memory we have. It’s in the air, so I want you to find it.”

  She instructed us just to wander the school, take in the space, and put together a story from the details we saw and felt.

  This was the first time I was told to set myself in the way of memory and believe in what I experienced.

  This was the first time that I was told that the story, all the information I needed, was already there. I just needed to slow down and know how to look, how to listen. I needed to trust that the lingering details contained the whole history.

  The Prudence Crandall School for Negro Girls had been meticulously restored, the building stately and closed-lipped, with gables, fluted pilasters, and twin chimneys. We milled around in silence for three hours. I felt the same revulsion that had flooded over me as soon as we landed in Mombasa.