Joyful Clemantine Wamariya | |
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Born | 1988 (age 35–36) Kigali, Rwanda |
Nationality | Rwandan, American |
Occupations |
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Awards | Winner of the 2019 ALA/YALSA Alex Award |
Joyful Clemantine Wamariya (born 1988) [1] is a Rwandan-American author, speaker, and human rights advocate. [2]
Born in Rwanda, she was forced to leave her home in Kigali and her parents at the age of six due to the Rwandan Genocide. She sought refuge with her extended family in the south of the country but was forced to flee again when the genocidaires targeted the family there. She and her older sister escaped the country and spent several years seeking refuge through Africa before being granted a refugee asylum to the United States.
She settled with a family in the Chicago area and began formal schooling for the first time at the age of thirteen. She gained international attention in 2006 through an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show which featured a surprise reunion with her parents. After graduating from Yale University, she pursued a career as a storyteller with engagements including a TED talk. In 2018, she published a book recounting her life experiences, titled The Girl Who Smiled Beads . She is a 2019 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Wamariya was born in Rwanda and grew up in nine different countries throughout east and southern Africa. Her father was a businessman in the taxi sector and her mother was a nurse and gardener, growing fruit and flowers at the family's home. She also had a devoted nanny. [3]
The Rwandan Genocide began in April 1994, when Wamariya was six years old. The family began hearing loud noises from the gunfire, which her brother Pudi attributed to thunder, and they noticed that their neighbors were absent. Realising the danger, she and her sister, Claire, were sent to the south of the country to live on her grandmother's farm. But that too was not safe, and the family were targeted for killing. As the genocidaires knocked on the door, she and Claire were told by their grandmother to run away. By traveling at night and hiding during the day, surviving on fruit, they managed to escape from the country and became refugees.
The first safe haven the sisters reached was a refugee camp in Burundi, but they were unable to settle in any one place for long. A combination of violence within the camps and a desire to find a location with a more prosperous outlook meant they spent many years traveling between camps. [4] Over the next six years they moved from Burundi to Zaire, Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, and eventually to South Africa. [2] From there, in 2000, the sisters applied to the International Organization for Migration for assistance, [5] and were granted refugee visas to the United States.
Wamariya and her sisters were resettled by the Chicago branch of the refugee resettlement organization World Relief, which partnered with a family in the Chicago, Illinois suburb of Kenilworth. [6]
Once settled in the US, Wamariya began attending school for the first time at the age of thirteen. [7] She studied from the sixth grade at a Christian Heritage Academy, [8] before moving to the New Trier High School in nearby Winnetka. [7] After graduating from New Trier in 2008, she studied at Yale University, where she obtained a BA degree in Comparative Literature in 2014. [9]
Wamariya first became known on the national and international stage when she appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2006, while still a student at New Trier. Along with her sister Claire, she was booked to appear on the show to discuss her experience during the genocide. But unbeknownst to the sisters, Winfrey had planned a surprise reunion with their parents. Both her father and mother had survived the genocide, and she had communicated with them by phone, but had not seen them in person for twelve years. The show's producers arranged the parents' flights from Africa and their reunion was televised. [3] Wamariya was invited as a guest on the Oprah show on three further occasions during the subsequent years, and her appearances on the show gained her international attention. [10]
Wamariya developed an interest in the art of Storytelling during her school years, as she shared her experiences with fellow students. [11] After her appearances on Oprah, event organizers, especially in the humanitarian aid sector, invited her to speak. [12] Her engagements have included a TED talk, titled War and What Comes After, [13] lunch and dinner speeches, and appearances at fundraising events. [12]
Following her appearance on Oprah, and while a student at Yale, Wamariya carried out her storytelling across the US for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). In recognition of this, and her work with refugee organization at Yale and in New Haven, Connecticut, she was appointed to the board of the USHMM by President Barack Obama. [14] She was re-appointed for a second five-year term in 2016. [15]
After completing her degree at Yale, Wamariya moved to San Francisco, where she met The New York Times journalist Elizabeth Weil, who lived in the same area. She recounted her life experiences to Weil, and the two started drafting a feature-length article. They received a positive reception and decided to expand the work into a full book. They spent two years working on it, [16] and it was released in 2018. The title of the book is The Girl Who Smiled Beads; this refers to a story told to her by her nanny as a child, in which Wamariya controlled the plot and destiny of the characters. In a Q&A with the book's publisher, she cited Elie Wiesel's holocaust memoir Night as an inspiration, having read the book when she was in school. [17] She came to terms with the horrors she endured and read the works of Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, and W.G. Sebald (who taught her that “we live in all times and places at once”). [18]
The Oprah Winfrey Show is an American first-run syndicated talk show that was hosted by Oprah Winfrey. The show ran for twenty-five seasons from September 8, 1986, to May 25, 2011, in which it broadcast 4,561 episodes. The show was taped in Chicago and produced by Winfrey. It remains the highest-rated daytime talk show in American television history.
The Rwandan genocide, also known as the genocide against the Tutsi, occurred between 7 April and 19 July 1994 during the Rwandan Civil War. During this period of around 100 days, members of the Tutsi minority ethnic group, as well as some moderate Hutu and Twa, were killed by armed Hutu militias. Although the Constitution of Rwanda states that more than 1 million people perished in the genocide, the demographic evidence suggests that the real number killed was likely lower. The most widely accepted scholarly estimates are around 500,000 to 662,000 Tutsi deaths.
Oprah's Book Club was a book discussion club segment of the American talk show The Oprah Winfrey Show, highlighting books chosen by host Oprah Winfrey. Winfrey started the book club in 1996, selecting a new book, usually a novel, for viewers to read and discuss each month. In total, the club recommended 70 books during its 15 years.
This is a bibliography for primary sources, books and articles on the personal and general accounts, and the accountabilities, of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Pauline Nyiramasuhuko is a Rwandan politician who was the Minister for Family Welfare and the Advancement of Women. She was convicted of having incited troops and militia to carry out rape during the Rwandan genocide of 1994. She was tried for genocide and incitement to rape as part of the "Butare Group" at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) in Arusha, Tanzania. In June 2011, she was convicted of seven charges and sentenced to life imprisonment. Nyiramasuhuko is the first woman to be convicted of genocide by the ICTR, and the first woman to be convicted of genocidal rape.
Sometimes in April is a 2005 American made-for-television historical drama film about the 1994 Rwandan Genocide, written and directed by the Haitian filmmaker Raoul Peck. The ensemble cast includes Idris Elba, Oris Erhuero, Carole Karemera, and Debra Winger.
Gayle King is an American television personality, author, and broadcast journalist for CBS News, co-hosting its flagship morning program, CBS Mornings, and before that its predecessor CBS This Morning. She is also an editor-at-large for O, The Oprah Magazine.
Willa Shalit is an American social entrepreneur and strategic advisor. She is widely recognized for her work as an artist, theatre and television producer, photographer and author/editor.
Mary Jo Buttafuoco is an American author and motivational speaker. In 1992, she was shot in the face by Amy Fisher, a teenager with whom her husband had an affair.
Immaculée Ilibagiza is a Rwandan-American Catholic author and motivational speaker. Her first book, Left to Tell: Discovering God Amidst the Rwandan Holocaust (2006), is an autobiographical work detailing how she survived during the Rwandan genocide.
World Relief is an Evangelical Christian humanitarian nongovernmental organization, the humanitarian arm of the National Association of Evangelicals and a leading refugee resettlement agency.
Oprah Gail Winfrey, known mononymously as Oprah, is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and media proprietor. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which ran in national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011. Dubbed the "Queen of All Media", she was the richest African-American of the 20th century and was once the world's only black billionaire. By 2007, she was often ranked as the most influential woman in the world.
Sara Nelson is an American publishing industry figure who is an editor and book reviewer and consultant and columnist, and is the editorial director at Amazon.com. Nelson was previously editor in chief at Publishers Weekly from 2005–2009 during a time of restructuring and industry downsizing. After that, she was book editor at Oprah's O Magazine. Her book So Many Books, So Little Time was published in 2003.
Wendy Lower is an American historian and a widely published author on the Holocaust and World War II. Since 2012, she holds the John K. Roth Chair at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California, and in 2014 was named the director of the Mgrublian Center for Human Rights at Claremont. As of 2016, she serves as the interim director of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC.
Zura Karuhimbi was a Rwandan woman who saved more than 100 people from being killed by Hutu militias during the 1994 Genocide Against the Tutsi in Rwanda. A traditional healer, she hid the refugees in her house and deterred attackers by masquerading as a witch. Her role was recognized in 2006 by the award of the Campaign Against Genocide Medal by Rwandan President Paul Kagame.
Ruth Emma Clara Louise Barnett, is a Holocaust survivor and educator.
In Praise of Blood: The Crimes of the Rwandan Patriotic Front is a 2018 non-fiction book by Canadian journalist Judi Rever and published by Random House of Canada; it has also been translated into Dutch and French. The book describes alleged war crimes by the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), Rwanda's ruling political party, during its ascent to power in the 1990s.
Susan Michelle Thomson is a Canadian human rights lawyer and professor of peace and conflict studies at Colgate University. She worked in Rwanda for years in various capacities and is known for her books focusing on the post-genocide history of the country, which have received good reviews. Although she initially supported the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), Thomson later reevaluated her position.
Elizabeth Weil is an American journalist and nonfiction writer. Weil wrote for the New York Times for nearly 20 years, during which she also wrote freelance for a number of other magazines. She has also written two nonfiction books and co-authored two nonfiction books. Her journalism has received many accolades, including a New York Press Club Award and a GLAAD Award. Her biography The Girl Who Smiled Beads has received such accolades as the Andrew Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Nonfiction. From March 2020 until December 2021, Weil wrote for ProPublica. She is now a features writer for New York Magazine. Weil teaches part-time at UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story About War and What Comes After is a memoir by Clemantine Wamariya, written alongside Elizabeth Weil, published April 24, 2018 by Doubleday Canada. The memoir follows Wamariya's experience as a childhood refugee from Rwanda. The book was a New York Times best seller, was critically acclaimed, and received various accolades.