5

Reading Testimony

Congolese Civil War and the Trauma of Rape in Dramatic Performances and Fiction

Véronique Bragard

DOI: 10.4324/9781003110231-5

Testimonial Drama: Art Inventing New Institutions

As Belgium keeps denying the brutality of its colonial past and several associations are insisting on decolonizing the public spaces by removing the statues of King Leopold II, who ruled during the colonial period of the turn of the twentieth century, links between past and present are becoming increasingly obvious. The way international corporations are presently plundering the Congo and Congolese people are exploited in artisanal mines (where conditions are “often dangerous, exhausting, even close to slavery,” Braeckman 17, my translation) echo the exploitative colonial regime of the Belgian King. After Western powers interfered with independence, killing the country’s first Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, the corrupt Mobutu dictatorship took over. With the end of the Cold War, Western interference was no longer necessary, and the Congo was abandoned by the international political community. The 1990s and what is known as Africa’s First World War were characterized by fights between armed groups (including Hutu militiamen) to overthrow Mobutu’s government, which led to the loss of more than five million lives. Images in the media have often shown people fighting against each other but have failed to expose what Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel has called “the violence coming from above.” As Ndaywel argues, “Institutional violence is never taken into account” (Ndaywel in Braeckman 68–69, my translation). Faced with the passivity of the international community in regards to the Congolese situation, the Swiss dramatist Milo Rau staged a three-day trial in 2015 that brought together victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and specialists of the Congo wars. The hearings were filmed and turned into a documentary called Das Kongo Tribunal, which challenged all participants in the conflict to create “a humanly harrowing, profound analytic tableau … to counteract the decades of impunity in the region” (The Congo Tribunal). The jury included experts such as Belgian journalist Colette Braeckman, human activist Saran Kaba Jones, Snowden lawyer Wolfgang Kalec, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and politician Marc-Antoine Vumili, among others. The trial started in Bukavu, where massacres had taken place, and ended in Berlin, as a way to investigate to what extent the EU, especially through German and Swiss corporations, were involved in the crimes committed in the Congo after the Rwanda genocide in 1994. Rau, in a 2019 interview, explains the social and political impact of his play/documentary:

This art project has had a unique effect: ministers were dismissed and the tribunal has become a model for civil jurisdiction in the region. There have already been subsequent tribunals. We no longer carry them out ourselves, but we finance them through crowdfunding and private sponsors and lend a hand legally and organizationally. The Kongo Tribunal archive page has a link for anyone who wants to help finance other tribunals. (Von Bothmer)

However, as Sara Geenen et al. have pointed out, Rau’s project

ends up in murky ethical waters: it [the documentary] remains deliberately ambiguous about what is fiction and what is reality, its producers lack rigor in examining the cases under investigation, and they selectively take responsibility (wrongly claiming a positive impact and avoiding questions about possible negative impacts) for the impact of the intervention.

In other words, Geenen et al. claim that Rau’s creative piece, through combining fiction and testimonies, also has detrimental and overestimated positive effects. Indeed, because the project fails to use rigorous methods, it never really helps the viewer to fully understand the situation in the Congo, reducing the conflict to an economic struggle for minerals. However, it might be argued that Rau was only attempting to highlight some of the power interests that are devastating the region, including those involving numerous companies whose illegal plundering has remained unsanctioned because European and Congolese authorities do not want to address the problem. Importantly, Rau’s work also gave voice to the many witnesses who were waiting to be heard.

In a context where the International Criminal Court lacks credibility because it fails to include first-world nations such as the USA and Israel, and as political parties all over the world are averting their attention from ethical issues, what Milo Rau’s work epitomizes is how art and civil organizations are now those who have taken over listening to victims. Rwanda 94, a five-hour long play (Collard et al.) based on the testimony of a survivor (Yolande Mukagasana) of the Rwandan genocide, is an eminent example of this “theatre-witnessing,” or new documentary theatre, that gives prominence to the witness’s often invisible position. At a memory studies conference in Copenhagen in 2018, Theogene Niwenshuti, a Rwanda survivor, organized an exercise in empathy, inviting his audience to try to connect with his traumatic genocide survival experience via poetry, mime, and dance. Central to these testimonial performances of violence is the role that art can play when politics fail. Since the 1990s, dramatic performances have increasingly included witnesses on stage (see, for example, Mahy and Van den Eeyden’s Un homme debout about living conditions in prisons) as well as the testimonies of victims as the starting point for their creative productions. According to Maëline Le Lay’s analysis of testimonial drama, many reasons can explain this phenomenon: including testimonies enables a reality effect that offers an authentic and immediate experience; it gives voice to the many testimonies that are often silenced; it pays homage to the people who inspired the author; it bears witness to the witnesses themselves and to their memories, thereby effecting a “duty to remember” those who suffered or died, and reasserts the subjective part within historical truth; and, last but not least, it allows writers “to affirm one’s self as a committed dramatist” (Le Lay 59–75, my translation).

To bear witness often implies communicating an experience beyond rational understanding and description, especially if this act is the expression of a traumatic wound. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, in Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis and History (1992), analyse creative texts that use testimonies written after the Second World War but whose traumatic consequences are still deeply felt. A testimony may offer liberation from trauma (Felman and Laub 46) but it does not offer a complete account of events, as it is language “in process and in trial” (5); it does not possess a totalized “truth” because undisclosed elements may distort the narrative. Rather, a testimony involves a bodily presence and performance, as well as silence and fragmentation (19). Haunted by the fear of repeating the trauma (152), the witness struggles to express it. The testimony is often characterized by a somewhat clinical, intense, and detailed description of some physical experience. As Felman and Laub argue, the witness seems to have become a sacred figure not only because what s/he saw and heard but because s/he has survived (117). More than a witness who testifies in a trial, a witness who is a character in literature has become the guardian of the torments of the past, from the Holocaust to atrocities committed today. The witness testifies so as to recover his/her dignity, affirming society’s obligation to remember. The witness requires a listener, but the latter may have a specific agenda, and may also struggle against paralysis, fear, or numbness (Felman and Laub 72–73).

In terms of creative writing, a reader’s witnessing might involve empathetic emotional responses or expressions—verbal and non-verbal—that acknowledge the weight and importance of the stories told. In “Empathy and Trauma Culture: Imaging Catastrophe” (2011),E. Ann Kaplan explores the power of images to produce a culture of trauma. She looks at the listener’s/reader’s position and distinguishes between vicarious trauma,empty empathy,and witnessing. The vicarious trauma response characterizes examples where the viewer is emotionally over-aroused and shocked,a reaction that often occurs in response to contemporary media images. By contrast,the succession of images or fragmentation that decontextualizes the image can create what she calls “empty empathy,”which is a form of sentimentality that “prevents the empathy from lasting and turning toward the collectivity” (265). Witnessing,as Kaplan conceives it,combines both forms of empathy (vicarious and empty empathy) but also involves “listening carefully to victims or actually doing something about injustice” (270). It entails a form of distancing to create “a response that may change the viewer in a positive pro-social manner and that … involves ethics” (256). Kaplan’s work,along with Carolyn Pedwell’s analysis of more confrontational and alternative empathies,helps to analyse the creative works under consideration in this chapter,all of which address the issue of rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: African American Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer prize-winning play Ruined (2009), American playwright Eve Ensler’s “A Teenage Girl’s Guide to Surviving Sex Slavery” (a chapter from her book of dramatic monologues, I Am an Emotional Creature, 2010), and Belgian-Congolese dancer, writer, and choreographer Jenny Onya’s dance-theatre testimonial performance Elikya Na Ngai (written in 2015, and performed in 2016–17).

In the last few decades,the testimonies of Congolese witnesses of war have been haunting western dramatists. Like spectral voices of the colonial past,these fictional voices expose the suffering that the western capitalist system is relegating to the margins. Belgian writer David Van Reybrouck,in his famous play Missie (2007),uses testimonies in two ways: he creates a missionary monologue out of dozens of testimonies that he collected,and makes use of the testimony of a nun,whose words he kept intact to avoid any authorial intrusion. This example shows how a testimony found in creative work can be either entirely reshaped or left as such by the writer,via what Le Lay calls a “suture” or “collure” (68),which refers to the invisible space that connects the textual fragments the author has put together.

The three works examined in this chapter are all based on real-life women’s testimonies. These are testimonies that audiences—myself included—do not have access to,but which we recognize in the texts’ monologues,the enactments of flashbacks,the violence and the bodily memories that actors attempt to convey on stage. The oral testimonies have visibly been framed,aestheticized,and rephrased so as to be performed. This chapter will show that,through the use of framing techniques,the writers multiply standpoints in their works in an attempt to avoid empty empathy and create what Kaplan calls “witnessing.” Particular attention will be paid to how the presence of these testimonies engages the spectator/reader with questions of responsibility in the Congo wars,as the voices of Congolese men and representatives of western companies meddle in the texts. More specifically,this study will examine how the plays expose the trauma of rape in the context of the Congolese civil war that caused the death of more than six million people. Female characters, as they remember and relate their own suffering, bear witness to other women’s sexual abuse. The three creative texts are aimed mostly at American and European audiences, and several characters address the audience, testifying as if before a court, as if heard by authorities that could play a role in putting an end to these atrocities.

Framing Congolese Women’s Testimonies: Lynn Nottage’s Ruined

Lynn Nottage’s Ruined is set in a brothel in the heart of the armed conflict in Eastern Congo. The women who sell their bodies (to miners and soldiers) there have suffered rape, exclusion from their families, and sexual slavery. However, in certain limited ways, they have reappropriated their bodies, as they prostitute themselves to both warring groups. Sophie, who arrives at the brothel at the beginning of the play, is “ruined,” that is, her genitals have been mutilated by male violence (via a bayonet), something that is conveyed by the fact that “she walks with pain and effort” (Nottage 12, italics in original). She is welcomed by the brothel owner, Mama Nadi, who is a caring mother figure as well as a harsh businesswoman. The brothel acts at once as a refuge and as a prison for the women, including Mama Nadi, who, we learn at the end of the play, has also been “ruined.” Sophie reminds Mama Nadi of her wounds, and this is why she agrees to keep her. Moreover, she does it for Christian, the travelling salesman character in the play, “cuz you’ve been good to me” (16). Sophie, who cannot sell her “ruined” vagina, sings for the customers instead. The songs also are a means through which she can testify to her hidden suffering and relieve the pain. Mama Nadi later tries to help Sophie through giving her the opportunity to have an operation, something the younger woman has not been able to afford.

In interviews, Lynn Nottage clearly states that she based her play on the testimonies of Congolese women, which she collected herself over a period of three years in East Africa (Gener). She explains that she needed to frame and reshape these testimonial voices: “The stories of these refugees are so graphic, so heart-wrenching, that it will be difficult for people to spend two hours hearing them in a two-hour play. It was emotionally difficult for me to hear when I interviewed over 15 women in Kampala” (Gener). Nottage further adds that “the play won’t be testimonials from these women. They told me their stories—they didn’t give me their stories—and those stories are sacred. I know the story I want to tell” (Gener, italics in original). The playwright clearly wanted to avoid the vicarious trauma Kaplan refers to: the audience needs to understand, but the writer needs to steer clear of the violence of representation. Ruined is therefore a play that reframes the testimonies that Nottage gathered. No comparison is possible with the original testimonies since these are not available and remain secret, sacred even. However, the play itself takes the form of a testimony of survivors who feel the need to tell their stories, to involve a listener. The dialogue contains intense, almost clinical descriptions of some physical experiences that the women struggle to voice. The character Salima, at the climax of the play, tells her story in a long monologue that is worth quoting at length:

Do you know what I was doing on that morning? … I was working in our garden picking the last of the sweet tomatoes. I put [my baby] Beatrice down in the shade of a frangipani tree, because my back was giving me some trouble. Forgiven? Where was [my husband] Fortune? He was in town fetching a new iron pot. ‘Go,’ I said. ‘Go, today, man, or you won’t have dinner tonight!’ I had been after him for a new pot for a month. And finally on that day the damn man had to go and get it. A new pot. The sun was about to crest, but I had to put in another hour before it got too hot. It was such a clear and open sky. (68)

In this speech where Salima addresses both Sophie and the audience, the text insists on a physical experience with auditory and sensory elements initially linked with the sweetness of the natural landscape (“sweet tomatoes”). Nottage reinforces this tranquil atmosphere to contextualize events and to give her character some social background, and also to later establish a contrast between the peaceful state the character was living in and the brutal chaos that followed:

‘Yes?’ I said. And the tall soldier slammed the butt of his gun into my cheek. Just like that. It was so quick, I didn’t even know I’d fallen to the ground. Where did they come from? How could I not have heard them? (68)

Salima’s questions, addressed partly to the audience, further explain her situation but also create a link with her listeners. She then remembers specific physical and spatial details, such as her fall and the soldier’s foot:

One of the soldiers held me down with his foot. He was so heavy, thick like an ox and his boot was cracked and weathered like it had been left out in the rain for weeks. His boot was pressing my chest and the cracks in the leather had the look of drying sorghum. His foot was so heavy, and it was all I could see, as the others … ‘took’ me. My baby was crying. (68)

Figures of speech, including comparisons and metaphors, are probably employed to insist on specific physical elements such as the weight of the man (“thick like an ox”) or to soften others in the use of the euphemistic “to take” for “to rape.” Salima describes what she went through in clinical detail, insisting on her focalized perspective, on sounds, physical pressure, and texture. The phrase “took me” insists on the victim’s psychological distancing from the traumatizing events, as she avoids the shame-inducing verb “rape,” and it also conveys a more social dimension, as she was taken away from her self, her dignity, and later her own community: “they took me from my home. They took me through the bush, raiding thieves” (69). In this brutal moment of violence, what she cared for was her baby crying, who was also taken away from her.

Even though Salima’s speech is addressed to Sophie and, to an extent, to the audience, it also reveals both a form of detachment and guilt: she looks at her self in the past and tells Sophie that “I fought them,” and then insists that she did even though Sophie is already in agreement, thus revealing her feeling of guilt. As Sarrazac posits, “witnesses are characterized by a sort of detachment … they cannot be people acting in the Aristotelian sense and people with goals and action as Hegel specifies” (n. pag., my translation). But Salima regrets her passivity during the attack and feels guilty for not having been able to react more appropriately. Her testimonial words include lots of questions, which are probably additions that highlight the educational aspect of a play that sets out to involve the audience, to create emotion and fear in the viewer. Several of these questions Salima asks herself, the others she directs at the audience via Sophie who is listening to her. “Where was everybody? WHERE WAS EVERYBODY” (68) also serves as a question to the entire Congolese and international community: where were you then, and what are you doing to prevent such things now?

As Salima resumes her story, she explains how she became a sex slave tied to a tree, used as “soup to be had before dinner” (69). Some traumatic elements that the author refers to seem to have been replaced by ellipses at the end of Salima’s enumeration: “I make fires, I cook food, I listen to their stupid songs, I carry bullets, I clean wounds, I wash blood from their clothing, and, and, and … I lay there as they tore me to pieces, until I was raw… five months” (69). Salima professes that, when she closes her eyes, she sees terrible things (69), which remain outside of the audience’s sight and reach. She later explains that she was rejected by her family and ostracized by her community due to the shame associated with rape. However, her husband comes back later in the play, which usually does not happen in real-life situations since the rape of one’s wife is supposed to separate families and engender a “form of emasculation” (Salih, Kaur, and Wan Yahya 117). These literary devices—metaphor, questions, ellipsis, contextualization provided by details—clearly establish a framework that oscillates between proximity and distance so as to attempt to move beyond both empty empathy and vicarious trauma. The testimony is framed and no longer characterized by what Kaplan describes as the “fleeting nature of … empathic emotions” (256); rather, we feel the testimonial presence that involves ethics along with empathy as the witness tends to step aside to concentrate on the events and the actions of soldiers. These literary devices allow the author to avoid heroisizing and pathos, yet create some connectedness and ultimately engender “a certain distancing effect that is necessary for an ethical impact” (Kaplan 274).

Some critics have been quite disparaging about Nottage’s play. Candice Pipes argues that Nottage romanticizes the stories of the female characters and “ultimately exploits the real victims’ stories for the effect of making mostly white, upper-middle class American audiences feel good.” Pipes, who analyses the staged performance of the play, claims that the choreography, costumes, dancing, and songs prevent the spectators from connecting with the pain. The audience cannot bear witness to the trauma. However, I would argue, the fact that Salima later kills herself via self-abortion on stage further conveys her suffering in the diegetic parts of the plot. She delivers her words and her own body partly to the audience: “You will not fight your battles on my body anymore (Salima collapses to the floor. Fortune cradles her in his arms. She dies. Blackout)” (94). This can be read as a statement of resistance on Salima’s part, yet it is coupled with despair. Salima ceases to be a survivor and dies.

The seemingly happy final scene of the play, in which Mama Nadi and Christian, the salesman, dance together, can be perceived as another aspect that at first sight discourages activism or reinforces “empty empathy.” Yet, this ending is not as happy or romantic as it appears. Indeed, as Ann M. Fox’s disability-focused reading of Ruined points out, through Sophie being left without surgery, “disability resists closure” (12) and “what has been done remains” (12). In other words, the play’s happy ending contains no resolution or happiness. Moreover, Mr Harari, the diamond merchant who was supposed to help Sophie get surgery, escapes with the diamond he was given as soldiers attack the bar but leave Sophie behind. The dance at the end is all the more ironical as “the land is also implicitly referenced through disability metaphor, ruined by being pillaged for coltan and gold” (Fox 9). The couple dance to the song “Rare bird,” which tells of a bird crying out to be heard.

Nottage’s play thus uses a number of distancing strategies to “open the text out to larger social and political meanings” (Kaplan 23). The many references to the Belgian colonial past in beer, chocolate, and land-grabbing point an accusing finger at the neo-colonial and postcolonial mechanisms that still devastate the Congo’s politics. It is the characters who pay the human price of the West’s demand for coltan and diamonds, and through staging this violence the play clearly attempts (but probably partly fails) to provoke action in its audience by urging them to denounce the rape of the Congo for its mineral resources. The play is indeed aimed at a western public and prompts them to see the link between, on the one hand, the exploitation of African women and of Africa’s resources, which involves the civil wars that devastate the continent and its inhabitants, and, on the other, the conflict minerals found in the audience’s own cell phones. As Rebecca Ashworth and Nalini Mohabir point out in their reading of the play, “Ruined: From Spectacle to Action,” the “intended message for a western audience is confusing” (7), as the ending of Ruined “is both cathartic and emotionally draining, thus dispelling affirmative action” (7). On one level, Nottage makes a laudable attempt at putting her message across: the ending uses dance to express resilience, something that reinforces the author’s wish to have a play “not about victims, but survivors,” as she writes in her “Author’s Note” to the play (n. pag.). Moreover, the testimonies of the women are contextualized and even viewed in a larger context of exploitation: the body of the woman becomes the body of the Congo, the ground violated, exploited, and destroyed ecologically and economically. But how can an uninformed audience understand this background and look at the causes of sexual violence, not only at its very traumatic consequences? At a 2011 performance, a leaflet entitled “coltan: from the Congo to you” was circulated in the audience. Ashworth and Mohabir highlight the need to make the causes of the sexual violence more explicit: “Citizen-consumers have a role to play along personal, national, and international vectors” (11). Although the role of minerals in wars is now more widely known to the general public, when the play was first performed, it was not really the case.

Nottage’s work highlights the difficulty in creating what Kaplan calls witnessing, i.e. in involving ethics along with empathy. The play was initially intended as a re-writing of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage and her Children (1939) where Mama Nadi, unlike Mother Courage who loses her children, tries to save hers in the war. After listening to the testimonies of victims of the war, Nottage created a more ambivalent Mother Courage and actually moved away from Brecht’s distancing strategies, gesturing towards more empathy and relegating the social and political critique to the background. According to some critical readings of the play, such as Mohammad T.’s “Hollow Humanitarianism,” the lack of politics (the two bands of soldiers are played by the same actors reducing them to moral equivalency) leads to sentimentality and humanitarianism, which “refuses to ask the questions of ‘how’ and ‘why,’ and only offers up charity as the solution to conflict” (Mohammad T.). Listening to a testimony, as Felman and Laub observe, contains major hazards and obstacles.

Eve Ensler’s Guide to Survival: Involving “You”

The same feeling of empty empathy characterizes part of Ensler’s “A Teenage Girl’s Guide to Surviving Sex Slavery.” Like Ruined, this text also addresses the trauma of rape in the context of the Congo, where Ensler helped to create the city of joy, a community for female victims of violence, and where she met with Dr Denis Mukwege before he received the Nobel Peace Prize for his medical treatment aimed at “mending” women who have been brutally raped by armed rebels. Ensler herself experienced sexual abuse (see Aitkenhead) and has been working on the ways in which pain can be turned into power, as the subtitle of the film City of Joy: Turning Pain into Power suggests.

The short chapter “A Teenage Girl’s Guide to Surviving Sex Slavery” is part of Ensler’s volume I Am an Emotional Creature and is preceded by some “girl fact” figures that highlight how 40% of child soldiers around the world are women, and many are sexually abused. The “guide” itself opens with the voice of the narrator: “I live in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, but I think this guide applies to any girl anywhere in the world” (97). This statement is somewhat misleading as the preceding page was about child soldiers in specific conflict areas. This opening sentence further echoes the centrality of survival in the title but also in the next sentences: “People ask me all the time how I survived” (97). This question remains problematic in some ways as it points to some heroic dimension and not to the obstacles faced.

In her text, Ensler uses the specific genre of the survival guide, which frames the violence to avoid insisting on trauma and instead emphasize resistance strategies. This framework was actually inspired by a testimony that Ensler heard. She explains that, “for the sex slave piece [“A Teenage Girl’s Guide to Surviving Sex Slavery”], the young Congolese woman just started telling me her story in ‘rule’ form, literally listing her experience as rule one, rule two …, so that’s how that piece got its structure” (Cox). It is important to know that Ensler herself did not frame the story this way but mostly passed it on to her audience as it was delivered to her. Like Salima’s description of a peaceful situation before chaos, Marta in “A Teenage Girl’s Guide” describes how she was out shopping with friends by Lake Kivu when soldiers started beating them (98–99). The next section, “Rule 2. Never look at him when he is raping you,” makes clear that the girls have been kidnapped and raped. As Marta tells her story in this second section, the voice of the narrator unveils more detachment: the perpetrator is put at a distance and the pronoun “you” is used instead of “I.” The I-subject of the testimonial form is clearly avoided yet present behind this you-he dialogue that addresses and involves the audience.

The style of the monologue becomes elliptic yet filled with emotional distress, hidden behind short sentences. The factual details convey what happened but also what has traumatized the young woman: “He will hold his hand over your mouth. You are a virgin. You are only fifteen. He will remind you that no one is coming” (99). In many ways, this careful distancing from her own self can also be read as a mise en abîme and a warning to the reader: you should understand what is happening and it could happen to you, especially if you are Congolese. In many ways, Ensler’s short text uses similar elliptical techniques and metaphors as Nottage’s work in order to avoid descriptions that might traumatize the reader: “He took me when I was fifteen” (101). The monologue interweaves Marta’s violent story with advice given to an unknown addressee who might experience the same brutal treatment.

As Marta recounts how she was kidnapped by soldiers, thrown into a truck, locked up, and raped by an older man for two years, she mostly asserts how she tried to psychologically distance herself from the brutal treatment she was experiencing. The strategies she uses are non-naming (“never use his name”), non-expression of feeling (never smile) (99), and recollecting sweet memories such as “remember your mother braiding your hair” (99). Marta becomes the old man’s slave and later falls pregnant. She then explains how, although on the verge of suicide, she successfully escapes with the baby. She ends up rejoicing when she hears that the old man has died. The last notes of advice, “do not feel guilty about how happy you feel when you hear he is dead” and “no one can take anything from you if you do not give it to them” (101), convey some feeling of empowerment involving collective experience and responsibility.

Although Ensler alludes to the fact that the rapist (named Claude, a very French-sounding name) is also an exploiter of minerals (he “stole our country’s minerals,” 101)—in other words, that the use of rape in war mirrors the rape of the land—it is not always evident to the reader how sexual violence is caused by political tensions relating to corporate plunder, governmental corruption, and the continuing impact of colonialism via forms of “slow violence.”1 The emphasis, rather, is on the woman’s power to escape and survive as the story ends with the words, “you will say ‘God did something good’ and at that moment milk will pour into your breasts and you will love your baby” (101). Again, the question of how and why the soldiers resort to sexual violence is relegated to the background, and so is the impact of the (neo)colonial history of the country and the disputes over the country’s natural resources. The text privileges the complex and bewildering ongoing experience of healing as it is heard by empathic listeners/readers whose reactions might take some (limited) prosocial direction. Western audiences will most probably tend to identify with the victims and discard their own responsibility. Stef Craps, in his Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds (2012), highlights the political urgency linked to representations of perpetration and perpetrators in postcolonial contexts, where testimony “does not ask the reader … for empathy but to become critically conscious of his or her own role in the ongoing conspiracy of silence” resulting from the colonial enterprise (42). Craps further urges us to analyse these victim/perpetrator accounts with due consideration for the contexts in which they are produced and read. The next drama performance analysed in this chapter highlights precisely such contextual elements.

Elikya Na Ngai: Performing the Body and Plurivocal Witnessing

Based on true stories, Elikya Na Ngai (meaning “my hope” in Lingala) is a hybrid dance-theatre play that was performed in Belgium from 2016 to 2017.2 The play complexifies the same topic of the violent abuse of women who, in the mineral exploitation in the Congo, are stripped of their sexual agency. Written in 2015 by the Belgian-Congolese Jenny Ambukiyenyi Onya, the play tells the story of two sixteen-year-old teenagers: Rachel, a Congolese girl from the province of North Kivu (a region that has become “the rape capital of the world”), who was brutally raped, and Elise, the white daughter of a businesswoman whose company is active in the Congo. Both girls are the same age yet lead very different lives. The play opens with a scene in which Elise watches a television documentary featuring an interview with Rachel. The play uses a lot of flash-forwards and scenes that belong to the dreams and imagination of the characters, such as the trial in the play. From the opening scene, the testimonial form is foregrounded as Rachel imagines a perpetrator, Sergeant Pitshou, testifying before a (fictional) court. Rachel’s testimony to the journalist is intertwined with Sergeant Pitshou’s voice as he confesses how he resorted to sexual violence to get money because he was not paid by the government.

The spectator then listens to several female victims’ testimonial monologues: “je me trouvais dans la forêt, votre honneur” (“I was in the forest, your honour”). The words “votre honneur” remind the audience of a trial situation where witnesses tell their accounts. Framing her play with legal court references, the playwright condemns the impunity and paralysis that characterizes the Congolese judicial system. Rachel was fifteen when soldiers attacked her house and raped her with a stick: “ils ont mis un baton là… en bas (j’ai crié fort)” (“they put a stick there… down there (I screamed loudly)”). The language used and the description, although discreet, is quite explicit and crude. Rachel says that she is haunted by the attack. In scene 5, in which several women confide in each other, one of them, Eulalie, tells the others how, on her way to the market, she was raped and forced to bury other girls alive. She is haunted by the trauma of this violence and also feels guilty that she could not help these women: “J’ai vu ces femmes souffrir… et je n’ai rien fait pour elles” (“I saw these women suffer… and I did nothing for them”). Another character, Gladisse, relates that soldiers entered her shop, cut off her breasts and forced her to eat them. They then continued to rape her on a daily basis. The abject details that depict brutal rape through the use of objects (a crucifix, twigs) make these descriptions difficult to listen to. As the voices and details accumulate and intensify, the viewer is forced to confront the horror of the women’s experiences. These testimonies become a voice of sisterhood whereby the women support each other and urge each other to remain strong. But the play also points to how, in contexts of survival, rivalries can emerge when necessities are scarce.

These links between women as well as some tensions between survivors mostly emerge in the actors’ corporeal expressions: in one scene, several bent women walk with difficulty, expressing their physical and psychological pain. The performance aspect of the play, which includes several types of dances and songs, physically conveys and counter-balances the vicarious trauma these descriptions could engender, providing the audience with a reconnection with an empowered body and collective expression. The horror and the sound intensify as the testimonies are delivered in the play. Although it is impossible to analyse the performances (only short clips are accessible online), one needs to highlight how the violence is rendered via dance, song, and movement, which suggests both chaos and collective resilience. In their review of the play, Laurenne Makubibua and Céleste Kabanyana explain how the dancers express their inner sadness via dismantled movements,contortion, and sliding. The dance performances to Krump andhip-hop,together withblaring music,Lingala and French songs,“create a chaotic atmosphere” (Makubibua and Kabanyana,my translation).

The other voice that spectators hear is the perpetrator’s when he confesses his crime: as Rachel relates the violence of the soldiers’ attacks on her village, Sergeant Pitshou recounts how the latter were no longer paid, so they decided to steal and rape. As the two testimonies evolve in parallel, we understand that Pitshou created chaos and fear in villages. When he reminds his former child soldier, Chembe, that he helped him when he was lost in the streets, Chembe admits in his trial response that Pitshou raped him and forced him to kill people. Yet, Chembe does not feel compassion for the raped women, as suggested by the fact that he remains aggressive in his Krumb dancing gestures. The playwright creates both a young and an adult Chembe to convey two versions of a man who is eventually killed by the militias. His slam monologue reveals how he slowly realized what he had done and begged for redemption. The play subtly attempts to look at the causes and evolution of the chaotic situation and all the victims it engenders, as we are reminded that the military—perpetrators of rape, violence, and murder—are former child soldiers or former “shegués” (“street children” in Lingala). They sometimes lost their families because militias recruited them and were sometimes themselves the victims of rape. The play also gives voice to the perpetrator, Sergeant Pitshou, who in some ways has also been a victim: his confession that “J’ai violé de nombreuses femmes, cinquante femmes” (“I have raped many women, fifty women”) repeatedly resonates in a chaos of voices that also includes the question of a woman, “Savez-vous ce que c’est que manger ses excréments?” (“Do you know what it feels like to eat your own faeces?”). A form of dialogue between victims and perpetrators is here established. This is in line with Onya’s observation that “it was indeed important for the production to give the floor to those who committed these crimes in order to try to explain how they had come to this violence (living conditions, poorly paid by the government, if at all, problems with recruitment)” (email to the author, February 2018, my translation).

As both victim and perpetrator are testifying before an imaginary court, the voice of a western woman, Barbara, interrupts the scene. While simultaneously quarrelling with her daughter who is watching a documentary, she discusses her business deals with her colleagues on the phone: “mais ce qui se passe là-bas ne nous regarde pas” (“but what happens over there is none of our business”). She continues: “et nos concurrents sont déjà sur place… Ils l’ont tous fait… oui en RDC” (“and our competitors are already there… They all did it… yes, in the DRC”). The play problematizes the ethical ambiguity of the perpetrator, who is not only the male military rapist but also an overarching system of economic plundering. One of the most significant aspects of this play is how Rachel’s voice indicts the role of capitalist corporations. Via the western character attempting to do business in the Congo, the play shows how foreign companies, blinded by financial gain, participate in these wars. For instance, they buy palm oil or minerals from the mine owners, and support the militias that take control of the resource sites. They put pressure on certain groups, enslaving the local population for their own benefit. Women are very often the first victims.

In her play, Onya creates a very chaotic atmosphere with contemporary music, flashes, darkness, radio extracts, and dance, thereby moving away from traditional images of folkloric Africa. She brings together several regions, languages, points of view, slam, songs, and audio extracts from documentaries and testimonies. Rachel’s voice echoes in the auditorium as follows: “je veux témoigner que je suis encore en vie”; “c’est ce que je raconterais si j’en avais encore l’occasion” (“I want to testify that I survived”; “This is what I would say if I had the opportunity to do so”). The survival aspect is foregrounded to emphasize the right and the need to have a trial and to be listened to. This experimental, polyphonic play ends with a clear message to the Belgian audience: “à quand le changement? Nous avons tous une responsabilité” (“when will change come? We all have some responsibility”). More than the other plays discussed in this chapter, Elikya Na Ngai challenges us as spectators as to the role we are playing as individuals and consumers of goods involving plundering in the Congo.

In Onya’s play, the audience occupies not only the role of the jury giving the victim a proper trial but mostly, as in Milo Rau’s project, the role of the accused since most spectators can identify with the westerners involved in the business in the Congo. The play thereby engages our capacity for individual and collective political action, what Kaplan calls witnessing. In many ways, Elikya Na Ngai also reconnects with the Brechtian distancing effect or intellectual empathy, which was the starting point of Nottage’s play. The viewer is forced to become critical and analytical as s/he is directly addressed. However, some very shocking elements in the play probably also create unpredictable and deeply emotional responses. Empathy is created at several levels. At a metalevel, the audience watches a young girl watching a documentary. When Elise’s mother, who is not watching and refuses to understand her daughter’s position, turns the TV off, spectators are reminded of how they can turn a blind eye to what they have seen. But Elise feels empathy for these women and the journalist confesses in the documentary that she was supposed to enquire about palm oil but veered off from her original assignment and decided to listen to these women out of concern.

Towards Confrontational Empathy

Fiction moves us and makes us move. Recent studies have shown how empathy can help us understand others as we project ourselves into their shoes via films,art,or discourses. Yet,as we increasingly become weary in front of violent images,“authors call on us to develop more empathetic attitudes and capacities as a means to create a global society built on greater respect, cooperation and equality” (Pedwell). As Pedwell observes, the important question is to ask oneself what comes after empathy. She further exposes how empathy-centred texts have led us away from the political workings of empathy and its prosocial role,as political discourses and media images have used empathy discourses for market-oriented aims or to reproduce hierarchies and objectification.

The first two creative reworkings of Congolese rape testimonies discussed in this chapter seem to oscillate between Kaplan’s first two forms of empathy because,on the one hand,the concept of being ruined (not explicitly explained in Nottage’s play) shocks and sometimes paralyses audiences and because,on the other hand,the genre of the “manual” used in Ensler’s text puts trauma at a distance. In both cases,we can thus speak about forms of empty empathy. Kaplan’s concept of “witnessing” in these works becomes most relevant to emphasize how texts and plays may struggle to invite more complex reactions,between emotion and ethical engagement. Witnessing involves an understanding of the structures of injustice,which appear in some references to resources such as coltan and diamonds or the names of places,countries,and courts. Since the three texts were mostly created for western audiences,the question of identification remains central yet problematic if viewers/readers only identify with the victims of rape. Of course,they can and should do so,since rape also haunts the West,but other characters can be there to suggest how men,companies,or even women can also be perpetrators. Doesn’t Mama Nadi telling, or even forcing, Sophie to prostitute herself count as a form of violence by both the soldier and Mama Nadi? How can one educate the audience and make sure that people do not only identify with the victims but also recognize themselves in those victimizers whose actions directly or indirectly cause the conflicts?

In a similar approach to Kaplan,Megan Boler,in “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze,”points to the risks of what she calls “passive empathy,”which is not sufficient for educational practice,and she advocates a “testimonial reading” that requires the reader’s feeling of responsibility. Re-reading Art Spiegelman’s famous Maus (1986),Boler highlights the fact that the reader “does not have to identify with the oppressors” in this book (260) and is spared the emotions of rage,blame,and guilt (260). Testimonial reading,like witnessing,involves not only recognizing an “other,”but also “analogous social relations in our own environment,in which our economic and social positions are implicated” (267). Building on Boler and Kaplan,Pedwell provides a critique of universalist discourses of empathy in the postcolonial context. She shows how “empathy has long been employed as an affective tool in the pernicious construction of racialised, classed and gendered social ‘difference.’” She warns against the “risks [of] obscuring their [‘privileged subjects’] complicity in the wider relations of power in which marginalisation, oppression and suffering occur.” The alternative and confrontational empathies that Pedwell foregrounds can be found in Onya’s play, where we as spectators observe the indifferent mother figure who refuses to watch the horrors on television. We are here confronted with a character devoid of empathy in order to question our own sense of critical questioning as well as our own complicity.

Finally, representing the violence of rape in the Congo requires viewers to understand the link between the violence against women and the conflict minerals in their cell phones. As Peter Eichstaedt points out in Consuming the Congo, “each time we use a mobile phone, use a videogame console, or open a tin can, we hold the lives and deaths of the eastern Congolese in our hands” (5). Guno Jones, in a debate at the Festival des libertés in Brussels in 2018, affirmed how “consumers are more complicit than suppliers,” echoing Ashworth and Mohabir’s activist idea, mentioned earlier in this chapter, that “citizen-consumers have a role to play along personal, national and international vectors” (11). How are we sustaining the status quo? How can new dramatic approaches engage with these other more complex and invisible forms of violence entailed in consuming, ignoring, or invisibilizing? Onya’s Elikya Na Ngai illustrates how artists’ approaches to the Congo’s plundered resources are becoming more visible. Her complex play, involving multiple genres and perspectives, constitutes a new dramatic form in which viewers are not only invited to understand the fragmented traumatic experiences of raped women, but also to work out how to articulate testimonies that engage with questions of complicity and ethics. These staged testimonies overcome the erasure of the ambiguities and ambivalences surrounding concepts of victims and perpetrators. Any spectator of the play can be led to reflect about his or her capacity to act in a violent way or to avoid it. Onya’s play, far more explicitly and successfully than Nottage’s and Ensler’s works, urges viewers to contextualize genealogies of violence and understand how violence is created, maintained, and how it can possibly be stopped.

Notes

  1. 1 In his ground-breaking book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon highlights how what he calls “slow violence”—the invisible and distant violence caused by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, dams, and war—takes place gradually and often in the margins. As Nixon points out, this violence is, however, denounced in a number of creative works.

  2. 2 That Elikya Na Ngai is based on “true stories” is mentioned in the trailer of the play (“Trailer Elikya Na Ngai”). In an email exchange with Jenny Ambukiyenyi Onya that took place in February 2018, the author confirmed that the texts included in the play were based on testimonies, “even if these were somewhat modified for the purposes of the play (e.g. first names of the victims, locations where the rapes took place, etc.)” (my translation from the French). I was unable to secure the script of the play, so all the quotations included in this chapter come from the leaflet I received when attending the performance, Programme Elikya Na Ngai, le viol des femmes en RDC—Espace Toots: traduction des scènes jouées en lingala.

Works Cited

  1. Aitkenhead,Decca. “Interview: Eve Ensler: We Should Be Hysterical about Sexual Violence.” Guardian 7 Feb. 2014. Web. 27 Dec. 2019.

  2. Ashworth,Rebecca,and Nalini Mohabir. “Ruined: From Spectacle to Action.” Explusultra 2 (2010): 1–14. Web. 3 Aug. 2019.

  3. Boler,Megan. “The Risks of Empathy: Interrogating Multiculturalism’s Gaze.” Cultural Studies 11.2 (1997): 253–73. Print.

  4. Braeckman, Colette. Congo: Kinshasa aller-retour. Brussels: Nevicata, 2016. Print.

  5. Brecht, Bertolt. Mother Courage and Her Children. 1939. Trans. John Willett. London: Penguin, 2007. Print.

  6. City of Joy: Turning Pain into Power. Dir. Madeleine Gavin. Essence Road and Impact Partners, 2016. Film.

  7. Collard,Marie-France,Jacques Delcuvellerie,Yolande Mukagasana,Jean-Marie Piemme,and Mathias Simons. Rwanda 94. Dir. Jacques Delcuvellerie. Théâtre de la Place,Brussels,2000. Performance.

  8. The Congo Tribunal. n.d. Web. 3 Aug. 2019.

  9. Cox,Johanna. “Eve Ensler Talks Teen.” Elle. 11 Feb. 2010. Web. 24 Mar. 2020.

  10. Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma Out of Bounds. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,2013. Print.

  11. Eichstaedt, Peter. Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict Minerals in the World’s Deadliest Place. Chicago: Hill, 2011. Print.

  12. Ensler,Eve. I Am an Emotional Creature. New York: Villard,2010. Print.

  13. Felman,Shoshana,and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,Psychoanalysis and History. London: Routledge, 1992. Print.

  14. Fox,Ann M. “Battles on the Body: Disability, Interpreting Dramatic Literature, and the Case of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined.” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disabilities Studies 5.1 (2011): 1–15. Print.

  15. Geenen, Sara, Kristof Titeca, Josaphat Musamba, and Christoph Vogel. “The Ethics of Political Art.” Africa Is a Country. 14 Sept. 2018. Web. 3 Aug. 2019.

  16. Gener, Randy. “On Lynn Nottage’s Ruined.Critical Stages/Scènes critiques 3 (2010). Web. 1 Dec. 2019.

  17. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Empathy and Trauma Culture: Imagining Catastrophe.” Empathy: Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. Ed. Amy Coplan and Peter Goldie. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. 255–76. Print.

  18. Le Lay, Maëline. “La réécriture des témoignages du Congo chez David Van Reybrouck et Lorent Wanson.” Textyles 49 (2016): 59–75. Web. 3 Aug. 2019.

  19. Mahy, Jean-Marc, and Jean-Michel Van den Eeyden. Un homme debout. 2010. Dir. Jean-Michel Van den Eeyden. Perf. Jean-Marc Mahy and Stéphane Pirard. Cité Miroir, Liège, 2015. Performance.

  20. Makubibua,Laurenne,and Céleste Kabanyana. “Elikya Na Ngai @ Cité Miroir.” Quatre mille. n.d. Web. 1 July 2019.

  21. Mohammad T. “Hollow Humanitarianism: A Review of Lynn Nottage’s Ruined.” Deaf Walls. 5 Apr. 2011. Web. 3 Aug. 2019.

  22. Nixon,Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP,2011. Print.

  23. Nottage,Lynn. Ruined. London: Hern, 2009. Print.

  24. Onya,Jenny Ambukiyenyi. Elikya Na Ngai. Espace Toots,Evere,and Cité Miroir,Liège,2016. Performance.

  25. Pedwell,Carolyn. “Decolonising Empathy: Thinking Affect Transnationally.” Samyukta: A Journal of Women’s Studies 16.1 (2016): 27–49. Web. 5 Jan. 2020.

  26. Pipes,Candice. “Performing War: Making the Ruined Visible.” Albeit 2.1 (2015). Web. 3 Aug. 2019.

  27. Programme Elikya Na Ngai, le viol des femmes en RDC—Espace Toots: traduction des scènes jouées en lingala. 2016. Print.

  28. Salih,Elaff Ganim,Hardev Kaur,and Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya. “Wartime Women Rape: A Means of Moral Attack and Emasculation in Lynn Nottage’s Ruined.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature 5.2 (May 2016): 113–20. Web. 1 Dec. 2019.

  29. Sarrazac,Jean-Pierre. Description on Back Cover. Le geste de témoigner: un dispositif pour le théâtre,special issue of Etudes théâtrales 51–52 (2011). Print.

  30. Spiegelman,Art. Maus. New York: Pantheon,1986. Print.

  31. “Trailer Elikya Na Ngai.” YouTube. 16 Mar. 2016. Web. 24 Mar. 2020.

  32. Van Reybrouck,David. Missie. KVS Theatre,Brussels,2007. Performance.

  33. Von Bothmer,Eleonore. “Interview with Milo Rau: ‘This Trial Would Never Have Been Possible in The Hague.’” Theatre Times. 24 Jan. 2019. Web. 1 Dec. 2019.

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