The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After

One of Wamariya’s primary struggles as a refugee is retaining her identity, remembering who she was “before” (49) and being a person who is not defined solely by being a refugee. This is particularly difficult to do in refugee camps, where people are identified by their unit numbers and where “human dignity is expendable” (44). In the camps, people are reduced to their most basic instincts, driven by hunger, pain, and desperation, and Wamariya becomes “a negative, a receptacle of need” (42). She wonders how she became “a nobody” (42). This dehumanization is clearly evident in her battle with lice, by which she is “blitzed and occupied” (44). Wamariya’s body is “a battleground in the struggle to remain a person” (44-45): She is “worthless except as food” (50). She is surprised and relieved when, at a camp run by Italians, she is given toothpaste and treated like “a normal person with normal human needs” (133).

Her loss of identity is exacerbated by her need to “become some one else” (53), to be whatever people expect of her, to survive. As a child she pretends to be a mother or “a yes-ma’am younger sister” (53); she also becomes “a nobody, invisible” (53).