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.

first of the two texts is Clemantine Wamariya's The Girl Who Smiled Beads: A Story of War and What Comes After (2018), co-authored with Elizabeth Weil, which recounts the author's experiences of fleeing the Rwandan genocide.The second is Abdi Nor Iftin's Call Me American: A Memoir (2018), co-written with Max Alexander, which depicts life in Somalia during the 1990s as well as the author's relocation to Kenya and then to the USA.Resilience is presented as elusive and as an inherent part of traumas of war, loss and violence.The particular social, political and historical contexts of the two texts examined are central to the experiences recounted.A positive approach to life and to various adversities has been deemed a core feature of resilience, particularly in terms of positive adaptation from clinical, social and therapy-related perspectives (Herrman et al. 259;Harms 11;Ungar).Louise Harms explains in Understanding Trauma and Resilience that resilience requires being '"tested" through adverse circumstances' (11), whereas Michael Ungar equates 'positive outcomes' with resilience, arguing that currently, there is more interest in the interplay between the person in focus and their surroundings than with 'individual characteristics' (111).Helen Herrman et al. connect positive adaptation with 'the ability to maintain or regain mental health' despite difficult circumstances (259).
This paper goes beyond the idea of positive adaptation and argues that the two texts examined indicate a different kind of resilience, one that is not necessarily entrenched in a positive mindset or approach, but that is presented as an inherent part of survival in extreme circumstances, a survival that is often dependent on the help and support of other people.The relational aspect of resilience is thus central, contributing to what Ungar proposes about contemporary approaches being less about personal traits than the connections between an individual, in this case, the self presented in the two co-authored narratives, and the conditions surrounding them.Relationality also emerges in terms of the memoirs themselves, as autobiographical writing inevitably upholds a myth of 'self-determination' (Eakin,How Our Lives 43).The act of narrating the self may inform resilience in terms of the 'multiple registers of selfhood' mentioned by Paul John Eakin (How Our Lives 101).As indicated by Eakin, the self that emerges on the pages of an autobiographical text is merely one version of it (101).Anthony Chennells, too, speaks of 'multiple selves' in autobiographical writing: 'As we live through the shifting certainties of our lives, each one of us experiences multiple selves that correspond with the various stages we are living through' (134).Arguably, these multiple selves are represented in various relational contexts in self writing as well.Adding a trauma dimension further complicates the selves presented.The collaborative effort that brought the two memoirs into being is also part of the relational aspect of narrated resilience.
The Girl Who Smiled Beads recounts experiences from the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and depicts the travels Wamariya undertook as a very young girl together with her older sister from one refugee camp to another in search of a future, having become separated from the rest of their family.Eventually the girls managed to get to the USA where they settled as refugees.The memoir switches continually between life on the run in various African countries and trying to settle in the USA and make sense of what happened.It revolves around the trauma of the genocide and the difficulties of living with the memories of what happened, reconciling with both past and present permeated by trauma.Abdi Nor Iftin's Call Me American is somewhat similar in that it, too, recounts fleeing massive civil conflict, although the circumstances are quite different.The text centres on the author's life growing up in Somalia during the turbulent 1990s, his subsequent departure to Nairobi, Kenya, and eventually his relocation to the USA through luck: winning the green card lottery.Adversity and luck thus combine in this memoir, which gives an overview of the politics and events of the 1990s in Somalia while remaining focused on the author's own life and upbringing.Both memoirs offer a perspective on resilience that is not presented as solely dependent on the acts of the authors themselves but also on the acts of others.Trauma remains a central feature of both texts, and the memoirs make explicit the role of narrative for ordering and accessing trauma.The efforts to make trauma accessible are also represented as relational, as exemplified through the acts of the family Wamariya comes to live with in the United States, and the journalists that give Iftin an opportunity to tell his story to radio listeners.

Narrating Personal and Collective Traumas
The two memoirs examined in this paper have been co-written with a second author.This is a significant feature of the texts, resembling for example the much-examined and praised What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng (2006) by Dave Eggers, which tells the story of Deng who fled Sudan during the second Sudanese Civil War and moved to the USA through a resettlement programme.The book recounts Deng's travels through Sudan and his stays in various refugee camps before eventually ending up in the USA.A similar story arc is presented in Wamariya's and Iftin's narratives.Catherine Gilbert has studied Francophone autobiographical narratives by women who survived the Rwandan genocide and states the following: 'In order to overcome the difficulties inherent in expressing the traumatic experience, many women survivors in particular have recourse to a co-author or collaborator to help convey their stories in writing' (115).Such a starting point complicates the relationship between the narrator and the narrated I.
The relational aspect of writing trauma is central, indicating that resilience may emerge in such encounters between the person whose story is being told and the co-author.It bears keeping in mind that 'resilience' is a concept mainly imposed from the outside, not something to which the authors explicitly refer themselves.Resilience is a lens through which the narratives are analyzed, bringing together trauma and a relational approach.Katja Kurz argues that collaborating with a co-author may help life writers 'to amplify their voices and to make their experiences legible through a specific cultural and aesthetic frame within the context of life writing that readers would be able to recognize' (37).Form is therefore relevant here, providing a shape to the narrative that makes it readable and identifiable as, in this case, a memoir.Arguably, these endeavours are further complicated when profound trauma is at the heart of the life and events recounted.The memoir makes life and adversity narratable and legible.Gilbert's comment further indicates that trauma may resist narrative to a lesser degree when sorted through and processed in collaboration with another writer.
Eakin argues in his book Writing Life Writing: Narrative, History, Autobiography that coauthored autobiographical texts are products of 'a second person speaking … who has fashioned and interpreted the first person's story' (56).Eakin engages with the 'eye' and the 'I,' which become even more entangled in life writing produced in collaboration with a second author.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.Iftin explains his relationship with his co-author Max Alexander in the acknowledgements section of the memoir, stating that Alexander brought 'passion and guidance' to the text.He calls Alexander 'a good and supportive friend' but does not disclose information about the process of the writing of the book (310).Wamariya also thanks her co-author in the acknowledgements, for her 'openness and listening abilities' (268).Weil, too, thanks Wamariya for the cooperation.The section indicates that the book is built around interviews or conversations, as Wamariya mentions that Weil is a good listener.
The presence of trauma in autobiographical narrative further muddles the relationship between the eye and the I, as also stated by Eakin, who asserts that 'eyewitness narrative promises access to the past, to a biographical or historical truth that will help them make sense of their lives.How to arrive at such knowledge?'(Writing Life Writing 62) The question is of relevance for this paper.This kind of relational resilience writing provides some form of an answer to Eakin's question.The attempt to make sense of life is manifested through the efforts to narrate trauma in the two memoirs.Cathy Caruth, who has been a leading scholar within trauma studies for several decades, explains in the introduction to the seminal work Trauma: Explorations in Memory that a traumatic event 'is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experienced it.To be traumatized is precisely to be possessed by an image or event' (4-5).Wamariya's memoir exemplifies such possession through its attempts to revisit the trauma of the Rwandan genocide and the struggle to survive in various refugee camps, and even more explicitly in terms of her new life in the United States, where traumatic memories resurface.She recounts her struggles to stop living in perpetual survival mode.
Other perspectives on trauma studies have attempted to go beyond earlier theorizations of trauma.Dominick LaCapra criticizes Caruth's approach, stating that history and trauma should not be associated so readily (Representing the Holocaust 14).Instead, he suggests a perspective that allows for trauma and the repetition thereof to 'be worked through and different relations or modes of articulation enabled' (Representing the Holocaust 14).In a later study, LaCapra argues the following: 'But to construe trauma as evoking essential incomprehensibility is to obscure dimensions of traumatic events and experiences that are amenable to at least limited understanding, which may help to avert the incidence of trauma or to mitigate and counteract its effects' ('Trauma,History,Memory,Identity' 378).Autobiographical memory plays a significant role in such mitigation and counteraction.Stef Craps further raises the point of a Western viewpoint in many early theorizations of trauma, asserting that experiences from other contexts have largely been ignored (Postcolonial Witnessing 2).These views are reinforced by Sonya Andermahr, who argues that trauma research 'privileges the suffering of white Europeans, and neglects the specificity of non-Western and minority cultural traumas' (500).This paper offers an analysis of two texts that have emerged within an Anglo-American context, but that detail experiences beyond Western perspectives.They can thus function as bridges between a traditional view of trauma as disruptive and repetitive and a more recent perspective that deems it possible to understand trauma, at least to some degree.Eventually new ways to address and capture trauma that is historically, geographically and socially specific can potentially be found.Further examination of the cultural production of writers such as Iftin and Wamariya, who reside in the so-called global North but with origins in the global South, would be required to explore in more detail the balancing between these two positionings.Many celebrated fictional works have centred on this relationship, for example Americanah (2013) by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Ghana Must Go (2013) by Taiye Selasi.An autobiographical approach could provide novel insights.
At the centre of the complexities of the analysis in this paper is the juxtaposition of individual and collective trauma.Michael Rothberg raises this matter in his article on decolonizing trauma studies in a special issue on the topic and argues that the various papers in the issue criticize 'psychoanalytic approaches to trauma [that] tend to import individualizing and psychologizing models onto the terrain of collective violence' (230).The relational perspective is central here and can be used to overcome and go beyond individualistic models of trauma, while still recognizing that a memoir as an autobiographical form essentially is a highly individual text.The collaborative efforts that brought the memoirs into being, for their part, also transcend the purely individual perspective.
Iftin admits towards the end of his memoir that he came to realize, after finally having relocated to America, that life was not as easy there as he had expected.He explains that he 'was also suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder' (280), which manifested itself in the form of nightmares and interruptions to his sleep.Iftin admits that he was not old enough to understand the changes taking place in Somalia, but he noticed that his father seemed unhappy and afraid: 'This was a new thing to see in my dad, and while I understood it as part of some larger beginning, all I could think of was that everything I knew was ending' ( 27).According to Iftin, Somalia had been at constant war 'for seventeen years' by 2008, 'but calling this living hell a "war" was too polite.It was really just endless gory terrorism on starving civilians who didn't care which side won' (191).Mary Harper confirms that Somalia 'has one of the worst reputations in the world' (1), outlining the political troubles the country has faced since 1991 when it became entrenched in conflict between 'semi-autonomous regions whose boundaries shift constantly' (3).Iftin's account of growing up in Somalia is thus presented partly as a collective experience of suffering and tragedy.
Similar sentiments are expressed by Wamariya, albeit in more critical terms.She emphasizes the massive human suffering of the tragedy in Rwanda, offering critique of the word 'genocide' as 'clinical, overly general, bloodless, and dehumanizing' (94-95).A single word cannot encompass the full extent of what happened in Rwanda in 1994, just as one memoir cannot fully narrate in any complete way the personal and collective experience of living in the midst of such atrocities.Wamariya is critical of comparing the events in Rwanda with those of the Holocaust or with what happened in Cambodia or Bosnia: 'There's no catchall term that proves you understand.… This -Rwanda, my lifeis a different, specific, personal tragedy, just as each of those horrors was a different, specific, personal tragedy, and inside all those tidily labeled boxes are 6 million, 1.7 million, or 100 000, 100 billion lives destroyed' (95).The genocide as national trauma is indisputable, having taken place in Rwanda between 7 April and 16 July 1994 (Semujanga 395).The events during those months have been defined by André Guichaoua as 'the most extreme genocidal furore ever experienced' (12), indicating that the genocide was to some extent unprecedented.Josias Semujanga states that more than 'one million people are estimated to have been killed in the genocide' (395).The extent and impact of the events in 1994 are thus immense, with Christopher W. Mullins stating that 'the total number of assaults, robberies and incidents of sexual violence are essentially uncountable' (723).Wamariya's claim to the trauma of the genocide as a 'specific, personal tragedy' highlights the danger of generalization and serves as a reminder of, and a memorial to, each individual life that experienced devastation in 1994.
Where Iftin gives his personal experiences of growing up in war and turbulence a collective dimension, speaking of 'starving civilians' trying to survive in 'living hell' (191), Wamariya emphasizes the enormous collective tragedy of the Rwandan as a specifically personal experience: 'Rwanda, my life' (95).A desire to find proper ways to narrate their lives can be detected here, as well as a sense of responsibility towards those who have not had the chance to process the trauma and make the experience of war public.Autobiographical texts are eventually polished products, and in this case brought to the public as co-authored efforts.The two texts therefore exist on multiple levels: primarily as personal, private accounts of immense danger and hardship, but also as efforts to seek recognition for collective traumas.Iftin invites the suffering of other Somalis to be part of his narrative, whereas Wamariya emphasizes the personal dimension of a tragedy that has become part of a historical continuity of extreme war and violence.
The relationship between trauma and life writing has been examined by Leena Kurvet-Käosaar, who observes 'world-historical events' frequently addressed in the trauma memoir in recent decades, including the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Vietnam War, and 9/11, in addition to personal narratives of 'suffering, violence and injustice in common everyday life contexts' that have also been emerging (305).The two texts in focus here can be said to belong to the first category outlined by Kurvet-Käosaar, being accounts of the 'world-historical events' she lists.Somalia's recent political upheavals are not mentioned but can certainly be added to any list of conflicts in modern times that have had a massive impact on the lives of ordinary citizens.The importance of investigating trauma through particular social and historical contexts has been emphasized by Stef Craps ('Beyond Eurocentrism') and Laurie Vickroy, who argue the following: 'Our conceptions of self are determined and interpreted within cultural histories and contexts' (Trauma and Survival 25).Vickroy explains in a later study that 'literary narratives contextualize trauma for readers by embedding them in scenarios of social and historical significance' (Reading Trauma Narratives 1).The purpose of the trauma narrative is thus geared towards awareness-raising efforts as well.This dimension of the narrative can be seen as part of the resilience it reflects and upon which it builds.
Resilience in the context of trauma means finding ways to narrate and eventually reconcile with the past, to the extent that it is possible.Mark Freeman argues that there is indeed a shape to the past, but it is an inchoate one, one that awaits narrative, we might say, to come into being.Narrative therefore binds together what might otherwise escape our attention and understanding, giving meaning to the movement of experience' (280) This is an important statement as it points to the fluid nature of identity and narrative, and in this case of the past as well.Not only does narrative bind together various aspects of our lives but it also creates connections that may not otherwise have been there.This is exemplified in the two memoirs examined and how they both acknowledge the collective dimension of trauma but also point to the potential dangers of any 'catchall term': 'You cannot line up the atrocities like a matching set' (Wamariya and Weil 95).Resilience, too, must be seen in personal and private terms, yet it inevitably gains a broader purpose through the collective dimension of the suffering represented in the memoirs.

Resilient Memoir
Both Wamariya's and Iftin's narratives indicate that resilience is fragmented.Lynn Gumb defines resilience as '"hardiness" an individual develops in childhood whereby life is viewed as meaningful' (465).However, 'severe or chronic childhood abuse can interfere with the development of resilience' (Gumb 465).Neither of the two memoirs offer a narrative of childhood resilience, but mainly focus on survival in extreme circumstances.The Girl Who Smiled Beads opens with a preface in which Wamariya recounts the events in 2006 when she appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show and got to meet her parents for the first time in many years.The family had become separated at the beginning of the genocide when Wamariya and her sister Claire were sent to live with their grandmother (23) and eventually forced to flee (25).The memoir reveals that she was 18 years old at the time of the Oprah event which went viral, having thus spent six years in the USA since her arrival, and not having seen her parents since leaving Rwanda in 1994 (Wamariya and Weil 1-4).The lines indicate that Wamariya was born in 1988, and the first chapter in Call Me American states that Iftin was possibly born in 1985, 'into a culture where birthdays are not celebrated' (3).The two writers thus belong to the same generation.
The act of producing a memoir is a way of making the trauma narratable and emphasizes that traumatic experience can be seen as requiring more than just 'a simple desire to tell and is coupled with a need for recognition, a validation of the story by the listener' (Gilbert 113).This need is emphasized when Wamariya directly refers to her inability to tell the story in detail.She had been invited to participate in the show as the winner of an essay competition on Elie Wiesel's account of surviving Auschwitz and the Holocaust.Wiesel's book is referred to several times throughout the memoir, with the statement that he 'had words that I did not have to describe the experiences of my early life' (2).The comment speaks to the uniqueness of trauma, yet also reveals that trauma may have certain shared features that can connect across generations and cultures.The preface of the memoir includes the following passage: I have never been inviolable.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.( 5) The lines indicate that traumatic experiences may resist narration and that the fragmented story of the self indicates a disruption of selfhood.When safely in America, going to school and attempting to pursue a normal life, Wamariya was given the chance to listen to a Holocaust survivor who visited Chicago, and she explains the lack of words she had for recounting what had happened: 'I envied that [the survivor] had a language for talking about what had been done to her, a way of describing and ordering a world that had tried to reduce her to nothing' (106).The lines reinforce what Harms states about the importance of narrative for our self-understanding (107).Wamariya's experience also speaks to the importance of narrative for self-worth and dignity.The relational aspect of resilience emerges in these lines, enabling a connection between the Holocaust survivor and Wamariya.
Iftin's early life is outlined in detail in the memoir against the backdrop of the civil unrest that ensued when Siad Barre, called a 'ruthless dictator' by Harper (4), was ousted in 1991.Iftin had to leave Mogadishu with his family, only to return after a dangerous and difficult period of living on the run when his father eventually had to travel separately from the rest of the family in order to keep them safe.The family's struggles with poverty and homelessness after returning to Mogadishu are recounted in detail, including sleeping 'on the streets with the dead,' and being 'sick with dysentery and dehydration' (57).Iftin and his brother Hassan started providing for their family, fetching water and seeking food: 'The struggle was to survive another scorching day, and every day the chances were slim.It felt like all the curses of the universe had descended upon us.… All became things you just had to live with, or die from' (67-68).In the case of the struggles of Iftin and his brother to survive, even having to help bury their new-born baby sister who died shortly after birth (69), it is somewhat unconvincing to talk of resilience in terms of 'positive adaptation' (Herrman et al. 259;Harms 11).The 'hardiness ' Gumb refers to (465) is to some extent present in the efforts of Iftin and his brother to provide for the family after their father had been forced to leave them.The experiences recounted indicate that resilience may be elusive in the face of the struggle to survive and that the two are not necessarily synonymous.
A significant turning point is presented in the narrative through Iftin's discovery of a makeshift cinema in Mogadishu, where he came to see American action movies such as Commando, Terminator and Rambo (75-76).When American forces arrived in 1992, things improved for a while for locals, only to change again in 1993 when the Americans left Somalia after the Black Hawk incident when two American helicopters were shot down and the bodies of soldiers dragged through the streets (79).Harper explains that 'what had started as a mercy mission to feed starving Africans became a humiliating disaster for the USA.Within months of the incident, American troops had withdrawn from Somalia' (6).When the soldiers left, Iftin declared to himself that he was no longer Somali but regarded himself as American ( 92).This becomes a life-changing moment for Iftin, as he proceeds to teach himself English (122) and build his dream of going to the United States (123).Thus, the narrative shifts from being a tale of extreme suffering to a story of survival against the odds, permeated by the desire to become an American citizen.The resilience implied is thus one of subtle resistance against cultural norms through learning English in secret, as well as dreaming of going to Kenya and then on to America with his brother Hassan (128), who eventually left for Nairobi (131).
In Wamariya's story of travelling from one refugee camp to another, eventually ending up in the United States, there is less explicit resistance against dehumanizing conditions.The early chapters on the civil war in Rwanda begin with an account of Wamariya's childhood, of 'the indignations of being young and spoiled' ( 14).The safety of childhood is interrupted by the escalating conflict.Wamariya describes terrifying sights and sounds during the flight from her grandmother's house but did not know as a child how to name them: 'Without words my mind had no way to define or understand the awful sounds, nowhere to store them in my brain' (25).The lines reflect the need to put trauma into words, further emphasized when the sisters reached the first refugee camp in Ngozi in Burundi, a place of traumatized, wounded people who had 'turned to stone.If you touched them, they'd crumble to dust.So they remained still and silent, trying not to shatter' (42).Trauma is thus represented by Wamariya as unspeakable, embedded in the effort 'not to shatter,' and its overwhelming effects are emphasized even after some form of safety has been reached.The memoir can be seen as a manifestation of the need to remain still and silent no longer.
Life in the refugee camp is depicted as a struggle to stay alive, sometimes concretely in terms of standing in lines for food and looking for firewood, but also in more abstract terms: 'You had to try to stay a person.… I thought if I stated my name enough times, my identity would fall back into place.I wrote my name in the dirt.I wrote my name in the dust' (Wamariya and Weil 43).Survival thus depends on retaining one's identity, one's name, in a place that made such efforts near impossible: 'That's life in a refugee camp: You're not moving toward anything.You're just in a horrible groove.… There is no path for improvementno effort you can make, nothing you can do, and nothing anybody else can do for you either' (73).The camp offers only the most basic form of survival, creating a limbo from which escape may not be possible.The camp is presented in these lines as resisting relational resilience and connection, leaving its inhabitants to fend for themselves.
Despite the desperate situation, a significant proportion of the chapters that deal with life in various refugee camps focuses on the entrepreneurial efforts of Claire to make sure the two sisters, and later Claire's own family, were able to sustain themselves and make life more bearable.This is further emphasized toward the end of the girls' travels, when Claire had married and given birth to two children but was still forced to spend life on the move.In each refugee camp, Claire continued her efforts to make friends, to become acquainted with her surroundings and to do her utmost to ensure basic necessities for her children: 'Claire tried so hard to hold on.Or maybe it wasn't trying exactly; she refused to let go of her sense of self-worth ' (193).The lines refer to Claire's refusal to sell herself to provide for her family, something about which the memoir expresses wonder and admiration.The role of sexual violence is central in the memoir, as it is implied multiple times but rarely directly addressed.Josias Semujanga even asks whether the genocide can be depicted in literature (396).In a Rwandan context, these lines carry great significance, and the idea of an impossible history (Caruth 5) is present in Wamariya and Weil's writing particularly through the unspeakability of sexual violence.
Large parts of Wamariya's account do not delve into detail about what happened but are told partly at a distance, from a young child's perspective who did not have full knowledge of what was going on at the time.This manifests what Caruth argues about trauma not being 'assimilated or experienced fully at the time' (4-5).Trauma is also unnarratable in terms of sexual violence, which is merely alluded to in the memoir: 'I have to find a way to tell you: This happened.Men came, seeking to destroy my body and demolish my future.But I cannot be ruined' (246).The example of Claire and her refusal to sell her body to make a living is contrasted against the constant danger of sexual assault and rape.The former indicates resilience and resistance on the part of Claire, and so does the latter through the refusal to become ruined despite extreme violence and adversity.
In Iftin's narrative, his attempts to escape Somalia intensify towards the end of the memoir, as the situation in his country continues to deteriorate.He recounts suicide bombings becoming increasingly frequent in 2007, and these dangerous developments are contrasted against his meeting a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in Mogadishu by sheer chance (179).Due to his proficiency in English, Iftin is able to communicate with the journalist who takes an interest in him and provides him with means to stay in touch.Eventually, Iftin is offered the chance to share stories of his life and existence with American radio listeners (195), one of which is called 'Surviving Mogadishu ' (196), and which attracted widespread attention.He is paid for his broadcasts and the woman at the radio station offers assistance to help him realize his dream of moving to the USA.The people helping Iftin are called 'Team Abdi' in the memoir (199), eventually making it possible for him to travel to Uganda (207) and on to Nairobi where he reunites with Hassan (213).The narrative emphasizes the relational aspect of survival, and how being in the right place at the right time and meeting the right people changed Iftin's life forever.
The suspense of the travels Iftin undertook to get out of Somalia stand in contrast to Wamariya's eventual departure from Zambia to which she and Claire's family returned after not being allowed into Mozambique (191).Wamariya recounts how Claire, 'not wanting to be saved by anybody but herself,' got in touch with a woman working for the United Nations who told her about the possibility of applying for entry to the USA as refugees (202-03).They were all granted passage, being finally able to leave the life of struggle and survival behind.However, as Wamariya recounts, the new existence living with an American family in Chicago presents its own struggle: 'I could not relax.Claire could not relax.Neither of us had any ability to enjoy this plush new world' (37).She refers to 'cleaning obsessively' (38) and being overwhelmed by the generosity of people who wanted to donate clothes and toys: 'Generosity was suspect and nothing made sense' (39).The experiences recounted reveal to some extent a repetition of trauma, where efforts continue to be made for survival despite having reached safety.While Wamariya's eventual departure for the United States is told in relatively neutral terms and without much detail, presenting the situation as void of drama, Iftin's experiences emerge in a completely different light.His reporting for the American radio station from Nairobi is presented in terms of living a life where 'you didn't wake up every morning wondering if this would be your last day on earth,' but that his existence still meant that 'you were on your own, and survival depended on your strength, wits, and good luck' (220).He explains that the Kenyan authorities and the UNHCR did not help the large numbers of Somalis living in Kenya and that their status did not allow them to work .Alexander Betts confirms the situation of Somali refugees in Kenya, arguing that Kenya 'has hosted hundreds of thousands of Somalis on its territory for more than two decades,' but that despite this massive humanitarian effort, Somalis have had to endure 'extremely restrictive conditions' (136).These conditions refer to refugees' 'rights to freedom of movement and self-employment, and their access to basic necessities of life' (Betts 137).'Police raids' and 'roundups and deportations' are mentioned in the memoir (Iftin and Alexander 226,240).Iftin decides to stay in Kenya despite mounting difficulties and harassment from police, 'hoping for a miracle' (243).The lines resonate with Iftin's luck when getting 'selected for further processing' in the green card lottery (237).
Eventually, after much bureaucratic trouble and gathering of all documents needed for the visa process, Iftin is able to obtain a visa for the USA (254).Despite his luck in the lottery, he states that he did not win anything but had earned his way: 'Years of practicing English, a lifetime of dodging bullets and bombs, risking death by refusing to join the Islamists, hiding from crooked cops, and above all never giving up' (255).These lines indicate that resilience, perhaps even the 'hardiness' that Gumb refers to (465), has been at play throughout, and that Iftin's eventual relocation to the USA, despite immense difficulty and hardship, was something he himself made happen through hard work and perseverance.The contrast is significant when compared to Wamariya's experiences, as she makes no claims about having earned her way out of the refugee camps.In both Wamariya's and Iftin's accounts, survival becomes dependent on human connections and a refusal to fully accept the status quo, and to fight back with whatever means necessary.These means are often provided by people around them.In Wamariya's case, much of the resilience is drawn from Claire, and in Iftin's narrative, 'Team Abdi' plays a great role in his eventual departure from Somalia and Kenya.Both memoirs also indicate that resilience requires acceptance, a moving forward to the degree that it is possible, and coming to terms with that which cannot be fully possessed or processed.

Conclusion
The Girl Who Smiled Beads and Call Me American offer depictions of upheaval in personal and collective terms, focusing on the struggles and suffering of Wamariya and Iftin, whose early lives are upended by the Rwandan genocide and Somalia's civil unrest.Survival is central to both narratives, sometimes in extremely dire circumstances such as life in refugee camps or starvation in Mogadishu, and sometimes in less urgent contexts, relating to the authors' lives in the United States.The resilience represented in the memoirs becomes a manifestation of human connections in various situations, and trauma's personal and collective dimensions become entangled with the personal and communal dimensions of resilience and survival.Resilient memoir emphasizes the relational aspect of life writing, drawing on human relationships that have added to the adversity in life recounted, but also building on human connections that have encouraged and enabled survival.
In The Girl Who Smiled Beads, these efforts become complicated by the confusion caused by trauma and the difficulty in finding consistent and permanent boundaries for the personal narrative, within which it can be safely processed and contained.Wamariya's concern about remaining confused and lost in her memories and experiences, unable to string them together properly, exemplifies the need to construct a coherent and cohesive narrative of the self that builds on but also remains separate from the collective experience of the genocide, as well as how the genocide is presented and portrayed outside Rwanda.Call Me American, on the contrary, goes from the personal to the collective, providing space in the memoir for the history of Somalia and the hardship of fellow Somalis living in Mogadishu or in refugee camps in Somalia and Kenya.The memoir takes a more explicit approach to survival, drawing on Iftin's own efforts and endeavours to improve his living conditions.
Resilience emerges in Iftin's suspenseful story in terms of how he managed to escape Somalia and later move to the USA through many twists and turns, with the invaluable help of journalists and others involved.Wamariya gives her sister Claire and her entrepreneurial efforts significant space not only in her personal story but also in terms of survival and resilience.The perseverance of her sister becomes a source of resilience for Wamariya and eventually enables her survival too.Both memoirs exemplify the detrimental, devastating effects of war, displacement, and personal loss.Trauma becomes entrenched in efforts made for survival.The attempt to reorder and repossess trauma can be seen as an act of resilience, as embodied in the two memoirs examined.The story of the self is built in relation to others, while simultaneously emphasizing the importance of the individual experience in contexts of conflicts and atrocities that have impacted large numbers of people.