Clemantine Wamariya

"It’s the journey of digging deep into yourself and the things you discover if you only dare to dig deep into your memories, your relationship, and your thoughts. It’s been such an incredible journey, but thank goodness I was not alone in it. So many people feeding me, listening to me, editing, hosting me—so it’s not been alone."

"Home is a concept. It’s one of a story that we cling to so deeply. When your home has been really, “here is my couch, here is my this, here is my that,” it becomes like mine. For me, home is where people who are loving are. It could be on the street. It could be inside of a tent. It could be in a place where they’re not given a land, then that is a place called a slum. It could be in the high rises of New York or in the middle of chaos in Mexico City. And the physical piece of a home is so important, especially when the weather—sun, cold—is against you…"

"Safety should be a birthright"

"Every single person on the planet has equal humanity. In my own life I’ve gone from being seen as utterly worthless to [having] great privilege, and nothing about who I am inside has changed. Every person you see seeking refuge, every person you see walking away from their whole life because their country has descended into chaos and war…I am every one of those people. You are every one of those people too…"

"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."

"I was the clever child who induced the fairy godmother to bring her parents back to life."

"My mom says tears are good for your skin.” And maybe your soul, too."

"Anything to help me connect with my strength beyond suffering."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"There is so much human pain and suffering in the world. I want to honor all those difficult experiences and acknowledge their aftermath."

"I want to really live in the present, and find love and joy in the world around me."

"Staying alive was so much work…. You had to try to stay a person."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"I needed to see the world in front of me clearly so I could perform my part well. I needed to crack the code. So many times, in my former life, I’d had to become someone else in order to stay out of a refugee camp or out of jail, to stay alive. I had played a mother. I had played a yes ma’am younger sister. I had made myself a nobody, invisible. Now I had to become this strange creature: an American teenager."

"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."

"My body is destroyed and my body is sacred. I will not live in that story of ruin and shame."

"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."

"I now felt I’d made a mistake in Uvira. I’d let my guard down. I’d allowed myself to feel I belonged. But there was no real belonging—not anymore. There was only coming and going and coming and going and dying. There was no point in letting anybody get close."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"It felt surreal and awful. I’d lost track of who I was and who we were to each other. None of us were the same people who’d lived together in that house in Kigali. Those people had died. We had all died."