Clemantine Wamariya

This memoir follows Clemantine Wamariya and her sister, Claire, along a six year journey through refugee camps in Africa after fleeing Rwanda. Clemantine was 6 and Claire 15 when they first fled. They spent time in seven countries, mostly without any documentation and in horrible conditions. Claire is a hustler and in each place finds a way to work the system to improve their lot mostly by doing some kind of black market bargaining. Unfortunately Claire is pursued by a CARE worker and marries him. He and her subsequent pregnancy and child make things even rougher. Clemantine becomes a surrogate mother while Claire hustles receiving little assistance from Rob. Interspersed between her memories of this time we read about her life in the US after arriving here when she is 12 and her thoughts and feelings on living with her past. Today Clemantine is a public speaker and activist on refugees. I have a feeling that this book barely touches the surface of her experiences. Very thought provoking.… (more)

#ReadAroundTheWorld. #Rwanda

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.… (more)

Powerful true story about survival, ethnic genocide, and trying to excavate one’s life story from the ruins of inhumanity and others’ expectations.

PS. I first read this book in 2018 and reread it in 2023 because I am going through my bookshelves as I get ready to downsize my home. I remembered liking it very much, but I couldn't remember the details, and my previous review is rather sparse. In this memoir, Clemantine Wamariya chronicles her flight at the age of 6 from the Rwandan genocide in 1994, becoming a refugee with no safe place to land, traveling through a series of refugee camps in several different African countries for six years until she was adopted into a family in the US when she was 12. In addition to exposing the horrors she and her sister experienced, there were moments of grace and Wamariya's own self- reckoning with her victimhood and learning to feel safe. A powerful and important refugee story, in my opinion.… (more)