10 quotes
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
I thought if I stated my name enough times, my identity would fall back into place […] But a name is a cover, a placeholder, not the whole story. A name is a basin with a leak that you need to constantly fill up. If you don’t, it drains and it’s just there, a husk, dry and empty.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After (2018)
To be a refugee was to be a victim—it was tautological. And not just a victim due to external forces like politics or war. You were a victim due to some inherent, irrevocable weakness in you. You were a victim because you were less worthy, less good, and less strong than all the non-victims of the world.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After (2018)
I wanted to piece [the] world back together, but the idea of one group of people killing another group of people—people they lived with, people they knew—that chunk of knowledge could never fit itself in my mind. It was categorically, dimensionally, fundamentally wrong. It was like trying to store a tornado in a chest of drawers. That was not how the universe worked.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After (2018)