Clemantine Wamariya

Clemantine Wamariya – Life, Career, and Reflections

Clemantine Wamariya (born 1988) is a Rwandan-American author, storyteller, and human rights advocate. Her memoir The Girl Who Smiled Beads recounts her journey from child refugee to advocate, exploring memory, identity, and resilience.

Introduction

Clemantine Wamariya is a compelling voice in contemporary memoir and human rights advocacy. She survived the 1994 Rwandan genocide as a child, spent years in multiple African countries as a refugee, and emerged in the United States as a powerful storyteller and activist. Her work confronts trauma, identity, and the complex politics of witnessing. Her life and writing continue to inspire readers globally to rethink labels and see the shared humanity in every story.

Early Life and Childhood in Rwanda & Beyond

Clemantine Wamariya was born in 1988 in Kigali, Rwanda.

When she was six years old, the Rwandan genocide erupted.

To protect Clemantine and her older sister, Claire, they were first sent to stay at their grandmother’s farm in southern Rwanda.

Over the next six years, Clemantine and Claire traveled across multiple African countries, shifting among refugee camps and hidden shelters. Burundi, Zaire (now Democratic Republic of Congo), Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, and South Africa.

These years were marked by uncertainty, hunger, danger, and relentless movement. The sisters often traveled by night and hid by day, surviving on fruit or whatever they could find.

In 2000, after years in flux, they were granted refugee status in the United States via the International Organization for Migration, and were resettled in Chicago, Illinois.

Because Clemantine had never had formal schooling, she started school in the U.S. at age 13. Christian Heritage Academy and later New Trier High School in Winnetka, Illinois.

Education, Storytelling & Advocacy

University & Intellectual Formation

After finishing high school in 2008, Clemantine Wamariya went on to Yale University, where she studied Comparative Literature, earning her BA degree in 2014.

During her years in the U.S., she began developing the voice of a storyteller — reflecting on memory, trauma, identity, and the disjunctions of displacement.

Public Presence & Reunification on Oprah

Clemantine’s life story first gained widespread attention through her appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006, when she was still in high school.

She appeared on Oprah’s show multiple times thereafter, speaking about her journey, memory, and the challenges of being displaced.

Beyond Oprah, Clemantine has given TED talks (for example, “War and What Comes After”) and spoken at universities, conferences, and in human rights and refugee contexts.

She was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2011 to the Board of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, becoming one of its youngest members; she was reappointed in 2016.

She is also founder or cofounder of creative and social platforms such as 10HOUSES (a private network for equity and entrepreneurship) and THINGY (a platform to capture, organize, and share creative ways of being) that seek to build connection and belonging.

The Memoir The Girl Who Smiled Beads & Literary Voice

In 2018, Clemantine Wamariya (in collaboration with Elizabeth Weil) published her memoir The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After.

The book traces her life from childhood in Rwanda through her years as a refugee moving through Africa, to her resettlement in the U.S. and her attempts to reconcile memory, identity, and belonging.

The title refers to a fable told to her by her nanny, in which Clemantine was allowed to steer the story: at each point the nanny would ask, “What do you think happens next?” and whatever Clemantine imagined would “come true.” This narrative control became a metaphor for her reclaiming agency over her life story.

The memoir was a New York Times bestseller and received critical acclaim for its lyrical and honest treatment of trauma, survival, memory, and the complexities of being a refugee.

It was recognized with the Alex Award in 2019 (awarded to books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults) among other accolades.

In many reviews and academic discussions, the memoir is praised for resisting simplistic narratives of victimhood and for interrogating who gets to tell stories, how memory is shaped, and how identity is formed across dislocation.

Legacy, Influence & Impact

Clemantine Wamariya stands at the intersection of personal narrative and political witness. Her life and work challenge many conventional assumptions about refugees, trauma, and identity. Her legacy lies not only in her memoir but in how she reimagines power, memory, and resistance.

• Reclaiming narrative: Her use of storytelling to regain agency over her life — resisting labels like “victim” or “refugee” as its sole identity — is a central influence.

• Humanizing displacement: She invites readers to see the human complexity behind mass dislocations, beyond statistics and politics.

• Advocacy through art: Wamariya engages with institutions, cultural dialogues, and public policy through her personal story, bridging art and activism.

• Inspiring new storytellers: Especially among diaspora, displaced, and marginalized communities, her example encourages others to tell stories that challenge dominant narratives.

Her work also enriches academic and activist discourse on memory, trauma, reconciliation, and the politics of witnessing.

Personality, Voice & Creative Ethos

Clemantine’s voice is often described as both vulnerable and resolute. She doesn’t shy away from the rawness of pain, but she also cultivates tenderness, nuance, and introspection. She resists linear narratives and embraces fragmentation, echoing how memory itself works.

She has remarked that one of her challenges is holding multiple truths simultaneously: the harm, the kindness, the confusion, the resilience. Her storytelling tends to avoid neat closure, acknowledging that “after” is itself a landscape of ambiguity.

In her public talks and interviews, she emphasizes listening, discomfort, and bearing witness. She often asks her audience to consider their own assumptions — especially about power, privilege, help, and need. She challenges the dynamics between giver and receiver, and asks: who has the power to define whose story?

Selected Quotes & Insights

While her body of pithy “quotes” is smaller than that of some public figures, the following excerpts and reflections are notable:

“I truly hope readers learn to believe in their imaginations and their ability to shape their own lives.”
— from interviews about The Girl Who Smiled Beads

“Every single person on the planet has equal humanity.”
— she uses this as a guiding moral lens in many public talks.

The narrative of the girl who smiled beads — the idea that one could invent the next step in a story and have it hold truth — is central to how she sees creative and psychic survival.

Lessons from Clemantine Wamariya

1. Storytelling is healing and empowerment
   By framing memory, pain, and possibility through narrative, she shows that stories are ways to reclaim agency and reframe one’s relationship with trauma.

2. Labels are limiting
   She resists being defined only as a “refugee” or “survivor,” underscoring that identities are multiple, shifting, and laden with assumptions.

3. Memory is fragmented, not linear
   Her memoir models how to write in fragments, with shifts in time, tone, and perspective — more faithful to lived experience than tidy chronology.

4. Advocacy and art can merge
   Her work demonstrates how personal narrative can fuel public empathy and action, without reducing either to propaganda.

5. Listening is as important as speaking
   She invites readers and audiences into the discomfort of uncertainty, challenging them to question their assumptions and engage more deeply with difference.

Conclusion

Clemantine Wamariya’s life and writing embody survival, complexity, and the radical possibility of storytelling. From Kigali to refugee camps to American classrooms, she has transformed the turbulence of memory into luminous creative engagement. The Girl Who Smiled Beads stands as a deeply original memoir — not just about war or refuge, but about how we continue to live after trauma, and how we make meaning in the cracks. Her evolving journey as author, speaker, and advocate is a continuing invitation: to listen, to question, to weave stories that hold both pain and possibility.