Clemantine Wamariya Quotes

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.