Relational Resilience in The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After and Call Me American: A Memoir

Abstract

Resilient autobiography emphasizes the relational aspect of life writing, drawing on human relationships that have added to the adversity in life recounted, but also builds on human connections that have encouraged and enabled survival. This paper examines resilience in Clemantine Wamariya and Elizabeth Weil’s The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After, which recounts Wamariya’s experiences of fleeing the Rwandan genocide. The other text considered is Abdi Nor Iftin and Max Alexander’s Call Me American: A Memoir, which depicts Iftin’s life in Somalia during the 1990s and relocation to Kenya and then the USA. The two autobiographical texts present resilience not only as survival but as embodied within the memoirs through the selves presented in the narratives. Resilience emerges as endurance in the face of hardship and suffering, and as a counterforce in various relational contexts, to traumatic personal and collective pasts. Both memoirs exemplify the devastating effects of war, displacement and personal loss, where trauma becomes entrenched in efforts made for survival. The attempt to reorder and repossess trauma can also be seen as an act of resilience. The personal narrative is interpreted and put into writing from the perspective of the person whose life is in focus but also through the eyes of an external observer. The life recounted can therefore be seen as both autobiographically and biographically produced.