War and What Comes After: Conversation with Clemantine Wamariya

The stories of people seeking refuge, shaped by political violence and geographic displacement, are many, and Clemantine Wamariya has her own singular story to tell. She grew up in a close-knit family in Rwanda, eating pineapple cake and playing in her mother's tropical garden. At just six years, she and her older sister fled Rwanda's 1994 genocide, and began a six-year, seven-country odyssey before they were granted refugee status in the United States. But the past is always present. "The memory makes me want to burn everything, raze the whole galaxy, and my brain won't hold the plot. But 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." Listen to Wamariya for tell an unforgettable story about turning experience into story, survival into living, and memory into action for justice and the prevention of atrocities.

Presented in partnership with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.