Clemantine Wamariya
Autor de The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After
Obras de Clemantine Wamariya
Etiquetado
Conocimiento común
- Fecha de nacimiento
- 1988
- Género
- female
- Nacionalidad
- Rwanda (birth)
- País (para mapa)
- Rwanda
- Lugar de nacimiento
- Kigali, Rwanda
- Lugares de residencia
- Chicago, Illinois, USA
San Francisco, California, USA - Educación
- Yale University
Miembros
Reseñas
Listas
Premios
También Puede Gustarte
Autores relacionados
Estadísticas
- Obras
- 1
- Miembros
- 611
- Popularidad
- #41,144
- Valoración
- 4.1
- Reseñas
- 42
- ISBNs
- 20
- Idiomas
- 1
This is the memoir of Clemantine Wamariya, who survived the Rwandan Genocide and fled as a child refugee through several African countries and eventually to America with her older sister Claire. It is written by Clemantine herself and also Elizabeth Weil, presumably as a ghost writer.
The conflict began in April 1994, after the assassination of the Rwandan president, and lasted for 100 days, with Hutu extremists slaughtering, in this short time, 800,000 of the minority Tutsi community and other political opponents, and creating refugees of millions more. Rwanda was a Belgian colony from 1916 to 1962 and it is thought this regime sowed some of the seeds of racial disharmony by favouring Tutsi rule and emphasising ethnic differences.
Clemantine was only six when the killing began and had no context or explanation for the events. She and her fifteen year old sister Claire spent the next six years as refugees in seven African countries, on the run, trying to survive, living in squalor in refugee camps and always just half a step away from starvation.
At age twelve Clemantine was accepted as a refugee in America and began a new and unfamiliar life there. While Claire faced the hardship of an abusive marriage, Clemantine struggled to adjust to America, but ultimately gained a university education at Yale.
Although the subject matter of this memoir is horrific and moving, there was something about the way it was written that made it hard to connect with Clemantine. Possibly the rapid shifts in narration between Clemantine as a child being dragged from refugee camp to refugee camp, and Clemantine as an angry teenager and student in America. I think maybe the fact that so much of her education took place in America makes her way of thinking much more American and inward-looking and self-analytical than many other books I have read by African authors. I found myself even wishing I could have read Claire’s story, as she seemed such a dynamic and powerful woman, and as Clemantine herself says, remained much more connected to her African roots even in America. Overall this was a story of survival, that sheds light on the human face of the tragedy of genocide, and of the experience of being a refugee far from home.… (más)