Sustaining Complexity Against the Hero High

I'm back from the Puerto Rico conference, where I was able to see my partner, catch up with old friends, hear some fascinating papers, and even (the night before I left) swim in the ocean.

I'm pleased to see the post about the Christian Prison (again--that just seems like a contradiction in terms to me) got some traffic. Clearly this is a matter deserving more attention. I mean, what's next? Denominational prisons? "I've spent 3 years doing hard time at the First Methodist Penitentiary. It's tough, but at least it's not as strict as Immanuel Baptist Prison. I keep hoping for a transfer to that Unitarian facility I hear about..."

I'm grateful to the commenters for their support and additional information. After I catch my breath (i.e., catch up on grading/class planning), I plan to investigate this issue more closely, and the resources suggested seem like excellent places to start. Thanks!

Before I dive into that matter, though--one of the papers I heard at this theatre conference was from my friend Laura Edmondson (I don't usually name names, but her work is fabulous). Laura researches East African theatre, particularly in the Tanzania/Uganda area. Of late, she's focused on performances, both by Africans and by outsiders, that address the multiple, various, and (in some cases) ongoing wars, battles, and genocides plaguing that region.

I've longed to have her perspective on the proposed Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda (latest news: this formal letter of protest by Exodus International). Laura has a way of investigating East African issues that combines a clear appraisal of the area's history with a critical awareness of how easy it is for Westerners especially to oversimplify those issues.

Her presentation was on a play by US playwright Lynn Nottage called Ruined. Ruined takes place at a brothel in a disputed region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) run by a savvy, powerful woman named Mama Nadi. As the play begins, Mama reluctantly agrees to take in two girls to work in her establishment. One of these, Salima, had been kidnapped and used as a concubine for a group of rebel soldiers. The other, Sophie, has been "ruined": raped with a bayonet so that she suffers from constant pain and (it is implied) a degree of incontinence. As such Sophie, while physically the more attractive, is useless as a prostitute since cannot herself have sex and, as a "ruined" woman, is considered dishonored. Mama nevertheless takes both girls in, employing Sophie mainly as a singer/eye candy.

As the play progresses, Nottage shows how Mama survives in a world defined by ever-shifting relations of trade, foreign intervention, and violence. Like Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage (a play that serves as a rough model for this one), Mama refuses to declare loyalty to anyone but herself and her establishment, stroking the egos (and other things) of any soldier, commander, rebel, miner, or what have you who enters.

Nottage herself spent several years interviewing women who lived (or had lived) in Congo, many of whom were themselves "ruined" by rape. In Congo especially, rape is a weapon of war. A woman may be gang raped by soldiers in full view of her village and family so as to dishonor them along with her. Often rapist-soldiers will use objects like knives, sticks, or guns, damaging their victims and (when not immediately fatal) causing debilitating, humiliating, and painful conditions such as fistulas. This report by the Newshour on PBS gives a good overview. Men, too, are victims of this kind of war-rape. All of these acts of violence, of course, occur in the larger context of the aftermath of "Africa's World War," in which political power struggles, inter-tribal tensions, and the legacy of multiple exploitative colonial experiences erupted into widespread violence, much of which remains active today.

Confronted with this horrible spectacle, the temptation for theatre artists--particularly Western theatre artists--is to make, well, a spectacle out of all that horror. What's the problem with that? Well, for one thing, the Western dramatic tradition (the last couple of centuries, at least) prefers its dramas simple and its conflicts clear. Good guys versus bad guys, white hats versus black hats--this is the stuff of good theatre. Little in the Congo or other East African contexts, however, lends itself to melodramatic casting. To create a play about Congo in which bad people do terrible things to good people would be to flatten out, to do violence to, a complicated history.

Ruined, however, tries (as Nottage says) "to sustain the complexity" of the DRC's situation. No one in the play comes off as completely innocent, yet neither does Nottage set up a villain capable of absorbing all of the blame for the violence and human want. The play isn't interested in clarifying who's really at fault in this scenario. Indeed, little details in the play--references and bits of imagery sprinkled here and there--fill out the world, make it ever-more complicated.

In sustaining the complexity of the play, in denying the audience anything like a good/evil taxonomy of persons or forces, Nottage quells the Western impulse to "save the day," the impulse to act first--do something, anything--without thinking. As I've written about previously, the West's tendency to cast itself as Heroic Intervener encourages it to imagine and act on scripts in which it "succeeds" as hero insofar as it identifies a Bad Guy and destroys it. More often than not, this kind of action leads to the realization that ham-fisted interventionism does little beyond giving the West a "hero high" (that all-important sense of having done something) and may even make the situation worse. It may be, in many cases, that the best thing the West can do in some cases is to delay doing something huge, to question whether it's really equipped to intervene in a situation effectively, and to reconsider if the love of the hero-high isn't blinding it to other realities.

The potential danger, of course, with sustaining complexity like Nottage does is that spectators have the opposite reaction. Rather than donning a "Super-Savior" costume, Western spectators may just throw up their hands in despair and disengage, deciding that the horrible violence is just the way things are. Or--perhaps this is worse--the complex play may impose an artificially simplistic resolution.

Unlike the Brecht play it's modeled after, Ruined stays generally in the bounds of theatrical realism. As theorist Jill Dolan argues, realism as a style often dictates that plots resolve artificially (similar to how sitcoms typically return things to normal by the end of the episode), and Ruined is no exception. The play ends (spoiler!) with Mama revealing to the man who adores her that she, too, is "ruined"; the man (named Christian) accepts her anyway, giving a brutal play about brutal realities a sweet ending that (to Dolan and other critics) mars the careful treatment of the DNC situation.

My friend Laura, however, noted that East African spectators who have read the play or heard it (it does not yet have an African staging, nor has it yet been translated into Swahili or any other African language) like the ending. They resonate with the affirmation that life does go on and that, as the character Christian says, "we, and I speak as a man, can do better."

I do not do justice to my friend's in-depth analysis of the play, having just heard it once. I was so impressed, however, by just how carefully Laura strives to sustain the complexity of her reaction to Ruined while refusing to disengage. It's her example I've kept in mind as I've reacted to the Ugandan debates. Indeed, I think that example can apply even to the Christian Prison debate. What complexities are there? How do my own feelings, my own need to be Activist-Christian Hero, hinder my ability to see the situation in all its complexity? How, finally, can we as Christians and as activists do better?

More tomorrow,

JF