ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the memoir The Girl Who Smiled Beads (2018) by Clemantine Wamariya in the context of translation as a paradigm. Wamariya’s text is an account of a child survivor of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Her memoir is a translation into an English narrative of her traumatic experience, and her life after the war. Relying on Paul Ricœur’s concept of translation that encompasses the linguistic and the ontological paradigm, I discuss Wamariya’s personal account as a quintessential act of bearing witness to the atrocities themselves, and to the life that continues in their aftermath. As such, the text is read as both a trauma narrative and a literary testimony. The memoir is an outcome of a work of mourning, where language(s) facilitate(s) recollection and constitute a presence relied on in face of grave loss. Whereas the task of the memoirist is seen as corresponding to and overlapping with the task of the translator, the contemporary memoir is proffered as a literary genre that facilitates the translation of wounds from the self to the other in a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural global framework.
