Going Deep

After a childhood as a motherless Rwandan refugee, Clemantine Wamariya found safety and success in the U.S. But hers is not, she insists, a feel-good story.

One day my mother told me and my older sister Claire to pack a few things to go to my grandmother’s farm in Butare, a few hours south of Kigali, toward the Burundi border. Claire and I loved it there and we revered our grandmother. She lived in an adobe-style house with small windows, a thatched roof, and rows and rows of sunflowers behind it—a house out of a fairy tale.

A man arrived in a van early the next morning. It was still dark. We stopped at other houses; other girls entered. We all squished together in the middle of the seats, away from the windows. We rode up and over the hills, the curved slopes soft, like a body, past the stands of trees, the rice paddies. When I tried to speak, Claire insisted we play the silent game.