Rwanda memoir confronts accepted narratives of conflict and survival

Clemantine Wamariya knows what people expect from refugee narratives but, in The Girl Who Smiled Beads, she tells her story of near-impossible survival on her own terms

MEMOIR: The Girl Who Smiled Beads, By Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil, Hutchinson, €21

‘I was often cast as a martyr or a saint. I was special, very special. So strong, so brave, a genocide princess, definitely not just one of the many dozens of dark migrant bodies crammed into a flimsy boat, the ones they saw in those horrifying images on the front page of the New York Times . . .”