23 quotes
My mom says tears are good for your skin.” And maybe your soul, too.
I want to really live in the present, and find love and joy in the world around me.
There is so much human pain and suffering in the world. I want to honor all those difficult experiences and acknowledge their aftermath.
One of the most valuable skills I’d learned while trying to survive as a refugee was reading what other people wanted me to do.
I was the clever child who induced the fairy godmother to bring her parents back to life.
Anything to help me connect with my strength beyond suffering.
My life does not feel logical, sequential, or inevitable. There’s no sense of action, reaction; no consequence, repercussion; no plot. It’s just fragments, floating.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After (2018)
I want to be so loud about the experience of killing each other. I want to tap into everyone’s senses, to touch on our human sensibility.
The reunion was one of the deepest, most joyful moments.
My body is destroyed and my body is sacred. I will not live in that story of ruin and shame.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After (2018)
We don’t write about the human emotions of conflicts; we write about the political and economic aftermath. I wanted to write about those feelings.
I lost myself anyway. Every little thing. I had always loved the fancy soaps at my aunts’ houses. I loved the ones that smelled like geranium and lilac best of all.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After (2018)
Staying alive was so much work…. You had to try to stay a person.
But nothing gets better. There is no path for improvement—no effort you can make, nothing you can do, and nothing anybody else can do either, short of the killers in your country laying down their arms and stopping their war so that you can move home.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After (2018)
In Malawi, I used to write my name in dust on trucks, hoping my mother would see my loopy cursive and realize that I was alive.
We’ve created these categories that divide us as humans, and in doing that, we miss each other. I want to bring people together and remind everyone that they have permission to know themselves and others beyond labels.
It’s strange, how you go from being a person who is away from home to a person with no home at all. The place that is supposed to want you has pushed you out. No other place takes you in. You are unwanted, by everyone. You are a refugee.
I work every day now to erase [the] language of ruin, to destroy it and replace it with language of my own. With konona (rape, ruin), you’re told, there is no antidote, no cleansing agent. […] You’re polluted, you’re worthless—that’s it.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After (2018)
I resent and revile [the word genocide]. The word is tidy and efficient. It holds no true emotion. It is impersonal when it needs to be intimate, cool and sterile when it needs to be gruesome. The word is hollow, true but disingenuous, a performance, the worst kind of lie.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After (2018)
Often, still, my own life story feels fragmented, like beads unstrung. Each time I scoop up my memories, the assortment is slightly different. I worry, at times, that I’ll always be lost inside. I worry that I’ll be forever confused.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After (2018)