Clemantine Wamariya Quotes

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.

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.

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.

Anything to help me connect with my strength beyond suffering.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Safety should be a birthright

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

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.

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.