People Productions

From William Ferrer, board member of People Productions and actor in Ruined:

From Richard Scharine, director of Ruined and co-founder of People Productions:

“You Will Not Fight Your Battles On My Body Anymore.”

The quote above is the last line spoken by a character in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined before she dies.  Salima is a Hema woman, 19 years old and a prostitute in a bar and brothel in the rain forest of the Ituri province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Once, her life was different.  She was a loving wife and mother, picking the last of the sweet tomatoes in the family garden, when a passing squad of rebel soldiers—ostensibly fighting for her freedom—kidnapped her, brutally murdered her baby, and subjected her to five months of sexual and domestic slavery as what the Japanese in World War II called “a comfort woman”.  She was for everyone’s use, “soup to be had before dinner.”

After five months of suffering Salima escaped and returned to her village.  Her family turned its back on her, and her husband drove her away with a switch.  She had “dishonored” him.  He was too proud to bear her shame, but unable to protect her from it.  Her life at Mama Nadi’s is the best she can hope for now.  She is still a ”comfort woman” for soldiers of any stripe, but is protected from the worst of their abuse, has a semblance of a home life, food, shelter, etc.

“You will not fight your battles on my body anymore.”

What does the line mean to Salima and to the play as a whole?  Why does Salima, having chosen to take to take her life rather than face the future, explain her action in such epic terms?  Salima is pregnant from her ordeal—a pregnancy unknown to her husband, who has reconsidered his shame and come in search of her, an action which threatens to destroy the fragile shelter Mama Nadi’s bar offers to her and ten other women.  Still, even assuming the worst, their deaths would be a minuscule addition to the bloodiest conflict on earth since the end of World War II.  During the five years of the Congolese Civil War (which went virtually unnoticed in the United States) an estimated 5.4 million people died.  Why does Lynn Nottage take a comparatively small personal tragedy and use it to reference an obscenity of holocaust proportions?

“Africa’s World War”

The war in the Congo is not a new one; nor, despite a 2003 cease fire, is it anywhere near over.  As a modern conflict it goes back 125 years when it became the personal fiefdom of King Leopold II of Belgium.  Leopold had no interest in the Congo itself, but only in the wealth its ivory and rubber could provide.  The quarter century of his reign cost the lives of between five and seven and a half million natives.  The current conflict is similarly an economic one, and is sometimes known as “the Coltan War” because the country is the primary source of the mineral used in a billion mobile phones worldwide.  Thus, every time you use the cell phone which we ask you to turn off prior to each Ruined performance you make your own small contribution to the Congolese Civil War.

If you are an American it is not your first contribution.  Many of the deaths are attributable to guns purchased from America, although South Africa, Russia, China, and Greece share our guilt.  The Congo received its independence from Belgium in 1960 at the height of the Cold War.  Its first elected Prime Minister was Patrice Lumumba, whom we saw as a Marxist.  With the aid of the CIA he was murdered by General Joseph Mobutu, who took full power in 1965 with our support as a bulwark against Communism.  When the Cold War ended, that support fell away and in 1997 Mobutu fled a bankrupted country, taking with him an estimated $4 billion.

“The Ituri Conflict”

Ruined is set in the Ituri region of the northeastern DRC, and is in part a tribal conflict reflecting the much better known Tutsi/Hutu clashes in neighboring Rwanda.  Belgian colonialism contributed to the problems in Rwanda by favoring the minority Tutsi with positions of political and economic power in the days before independence.  The Hutu majority overthrew the Tutsi-led government in 1962, but the Tutsi began waging civil war in 1990 and the assassination of the prime minister in 1994 triggered the start of a genocide by Hutu militia and civilians that cost 800,000 Tutsi lives in 100 days.

In the Ituri province the Belgian colonists favored the Hema tribes over the Lendu, resulting in disparities in wealth and education.  The disputes between the two groups were largely over control of the land.  It may be useful to think of it as a rancher/ homesteader war, as the Hema raised stock and the Lendu were farmers.  The Hema were accused of abusing the 1973 Land Use law, which allowed people to buy they did not inhabit, and then force the residents to leave two years later when their ownership could no longer be contested.  After 1994 when refugees from Rwanda began pouring over the border, the Hema began to identify themselves with the Tutsi and the Lendu with the Hutu.  Civil war within the Ituri province began in 1999, continued until 2007, and to some extent still exists today.

“The Democratic Republic of the Congo is the rape capital of the world.”

The quote above comes from Margot Wallstrom, the United Nations special representative on sexual violence in conflict.  A study in the American Journal of Public Health concludes that 400,000 females aged 15 to 49 were raped over a 12-month period in 2006-2007.  That’s an average of 48 girls and women raped every hour.  The Journal calls this estimate conservative in that it does not include known rape victims as young as three, as old as 80, or men.

“You will not fight your battles on my body anymore.”

In a metaphorical sense Salima and the women like her are “Mother Africa”, the battleground for an economic and ethnic war that is the summing of 150 years of Western influence.  The crimes against her, as well as against Sophie (who was violated by a bayonet), Mama Nadi, and the others, are not sex crimes but rather a deliberate tactic of war.  Among the many gifts women bring to mankind are the stability of domestic life and the children which are the future.  What happens to the women of Ruined is obvious and unthinkable.  What is happening to the men of the Congo is more subtle and insidious.  Salima is cast out of her village by her husband because he has been “dishonored”.  This is appalling because it is both unfair and true.  Fortune was unable to protect either his wife or his sense of himself.  The effectiveness of rape as a military tactic derives from its ability to destroy the basic unit of society:  the family—the building block of the village which is the manifestation of the state.  The proof of that effectiveness is that such crimes are almost never punished in the Congo.  The state has apparently little interest in the source of its future.  The result is that the hellish actions of the militias are increasingly now being carried out by civilians.  In not standing up against the perpetrators we have become the destroyers of our own civilization.

What can we do?  I don’t know, but it is obvious that given the consequences we cannot close our eyes and do nothing.  In the past we may have affected the Congo with impunity, but now we live in a world with no more respect for our borders than we once had for its.  Our dilemma and our responsibilities are summed up in a statement attributed to the English statesman Edmund Burke 240 years ago.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.”