That night, I offered my blanket to the little girl. She fell asleep immediately, and her mother began to confide in me, probably because I was the first person who had shown any compassion toward her since she’d first fled her home. Her husband was a senior manager in a bank. When she, her husband, and her daughter came out of the woods in response to appeals from the authorities, they were arrested at a checkpoint along the so-called humanitarian corridor set up by those same authorities. After they were robbed of all their possessions—money, watches, jewelry, cell phone—a soldier tried to force her into the bushes and rape her. Her husband, outraged, tried to intervene. The soldiers seized him, beat him savagely, and threw him into a large truck parked near the roadblock. Then they raped her, right there on the grass by the side of the road, in front of her daughter. Several times. And then they raped her daughter—a girl of twelve! She thought she would go mad. The arrival of a Red Cross team saved them, and that’s how they wound up at the camp. Now she had only one thought: Was her husband still alive? She had no idea how to find out.
What could I say to someone in her situation? Nothing. Happiness may be collective, but suffering is intensely personal. No one but me could feel the almost physical pain that tore my heart whenever I thought of Fofo. I, in turn, could never feel the grief of this woman the way she felt it. My words could do nothing to assuage what she, in her own body, was suffering. In such cases, it’s better not to say anything. I was silent.
The wonderful thing about children is that it takes so little to make them happy. They never put off their happiness till tomorrow. If it’s there, they stretch out their little hands to seize it. In the camp, children were fluttering all around, laughing the buoyant laughter that takes wing as soon as it leaves their lips, trying t o learn the songs I made up for them—songs about animals, flowers, and stars. They were running here and there, chirping like birds, capering like goats, meowing like cats, roaring like lions.
I had come up with a crazy idea and managed to make it work. Seeing all those children who were languishing from boredom, whose dejected mothers were at their wits’ end and didn’t know what to do with their offspring moping about the camp, where the only distraction came when the rations were doled out, I had made up my mind to do something. One afternoon, I gathered together all the children in the vicinity of my tent—about a dozen girls and boys. I asked them if they wanted to play with me.
We began with a game of ndzango, which the boys loved because it was usually reserved for girls. I didn’t choose it at random. Two opponents facing each other, hopping on one foot, clapping their hands, finally raising one leg high in the air—the game was a good opportunity for the kids to get some exercise. After the ndzango and a few songs, I decided to play schoolteacher.
“Children,” I said, “I’ve got something for you to recite. Repeat after me: ’The Hand’ . . . This is my hand . . .”
“This is my hand,” they chorused enthusiastically.
“Five fingers there be . . .
Five fingers there be . . .
Here are two of them, here are three.
Here are two of them, here are three.
The one at the end is a brave little man,
And the thumb’s the one that says, ‘I can!’
Watch my fingers as they do their work,
Each does its job and never will shirk!”
The hand. The head. One can’t manage without the other. You should never say that one is more important than the other. This was a rhyme that my grandfather, my father, and I had all learned when we were small. And now I, in turn, was passing it on to a new generation. Doing this gave me great intellectual satisfaction—and suddenly my hope in the future revived, for the first time since the beginning of this stupid war. If the girls and boys remembered the rhyme, they would eventually teach it to their own children. And thus the chain of life would continue. All would not be lost. Since the dawn of humankind, knowledge had been transmitted this way: through the children and then the children’s children.
I watched their lips recite, watched their fingers spring up one at a time and finally wiggle in sequence as if performing arpeggios on a keyboard. The kids had forgotten the dreary camp in which they were stagnating. They had become children once more, doing what nobody in the world does better: playing. With their little hands and their boundless imaginations, they built houses and trucks out of bits of bamboo; from empty sardine tins mounted on beer corks, they made cars that they raced in the sand; out of scraps of iron, they fashioned airplanes; using empty tin cans and pieces of plastic, they erected structures I couldn’t even name. No sooner had their brains thought of an object than their nimble fingers would set about making it, their creativity finding abundant raw materials in the piles of trash that lay all over the camp. I was happy.
But if I was happy, their parents were even happier. My improvised classes combined games, songs, recitations, simple arithmetic, and drawings done with charcoal on a large piece of plywood (our makeshift blackboard), and my little school grew from a dozen students to more than twenty in just a few days. The entire time it lasted, parents who had nothing to do would come and gather around under the tarp I’d put up to ward off the sun. Often they would sing along with us, and sometimes, briefly forgetting their plight as refugees, they would even burst into laughter—gay, liberating laughter—at the antics of one of my students.
During one of those playful moments, I happened to look away from the blackboard and spied—Birgit! Birgit the Swede who wasn’t blond, though I’d once thought that all Swedish people were blond. At first I assumed I was hallucinating because I’d eaten nothing but red beans for days, with not a bit of meat or fish. Unable to move, I called out to the apparition:
“Birgit?”
“Lao!” came the reply.
It was her!
We ran to each other, and she gave me a long, strong hug. I gazed at her face, while she did the same to me.
In the line of work that she’d chosen, Birgit had no doubt seen and experienced the worst kinds of human suffering. She had certainly witnessed the most extreme cruelties that human beings can inflict on one another, and so she must—I thought—have hardened herself against any emotion or sentimentalism that would impair her ability to do her job. But I was wrong. When she saw my T-shirt, the same one I’d been wearing the day the French army had evacuated her, except that now it was filthy and tattered; when she saw my shoes, which were nothing but a couple of plastic soles tied to my feet with two laces; when she saw my sunken cheeks and my tangled hair, wild and matted like the hair of a grieving widow—her eyes grew wet with tears. As for me, I was sobbing outright.
Class ended early that day, and I didn’t know it would be the last one. I took Birgit back to my tent. She had arrived only that morning under a new mandate from the HCR, and she was making a quick inspection of the camp to get an overview of the living conditions before returning with a permanent team. She hadn’t known I was there, and was completely astounded when her attention had been attracted by the laughter under the tarp canopy, and she’d seen a young woman teaching a group of little children. At first, she hadn’t wanted to believe it was me. It’s too good to be true, she’d thought.
“To come face to face, in the first camp I visited, with the very person I was looking for! It was unbelievable! You may not know this, but one of the reasons I was intent on returning to this country and searching the camps was to find you. Tanisha and I felt so miserable at not being able to rescue you. Of course, there are thousands of people we’d like to rescue—I mean, we wish we could rescue everybody! But sometimes, for some unknown reason, we become especially attached to one particular person. It isn’t fair, I know, but we can’t help it—you’ve become special to us. Oh, I’m so happy to see you, Lao! We’ll get you out of here! This time we won’t abandon you!”
She was doing all the talking. But that was okay—I was so choked up that I don’t think my throat could have let out a soun
d.
“I’m going to send an e-mail to Tanisha and let her know that I’ve found you. She told me she was trying to get a scholarship for you and had some very promising leads. In any case, if she can’t arrange something in the United States, I’ll bring you with me to Sweden. You’ve suffered enough. How is your mother?”
“She was killed in a bombardment.”
“My god. Oh, Lao, I’m so sorry! . . . Did you find your brother?
“No. But after what happened in Kandahar, I don’t have much hope.”
And I told her everything I’d been through since we’d last seen each other. When I finished, she said:
“You remember the Belgian journalist Katelijne? She came with me this morning to do a report on the refugees. I’m going to let her know you’re here, so that you can tell her your story. It’s essential that the rest of the world understand what’s happening. Katelijne was very impressed by your friend Mélanie, and told me that the last image she had of her has remained vivid in her mind. She’d like to do something for her . . .”
“Mélanie is dead,” I said simply.
“Oh, my god!” she exclaimed.
We fell silent. I took out the little purse that contained all I had left in the world and that by some miracle hadn’t gotten lost. Birgit watched me, wondering what I was looking for. I took out the photo of Mae, unfolded it, and showed it to her.
“When you send your e-mail to Tanisha this evening, please tell her that I read the magazine she gave me. And tell her that if she ever manages to bring me to America, I’d very much like to meet Mae Jemison.”
“Who’s that?”
“Tanisha knows, and she’ll understand.”
“Okay, I will! I have to go now. I’ll give you Tanisha’s response tomorrow afternoon, when I come to pick you up and take you out of the camp. You could use some new clothes and some shoes—I’ll bring those as well. Is there anything else you need?”
“A fresh pair of panties, please.”
“Of course!” She hugged me once more, then added before leaving the tent:
“Cheer up! Tomorrow you’ll be getting out of here. Meantime, don’t go away—I’ll send Katelijne over.”
Katelijne arrived soon after. She came with her loyal cameraman, and was delighted to see me. The first thing she asked for was news of Mélanie. Obviously, Birgit hadn’t told her.
“Mélanie was run over three times by the vehicles that rescued you.”
Katelijne was speechless for several seconds, as if she’d been punched in the stomach. Then, trying to hide her distress, she said that I absolutely had to repeat for the camera everything that I’d told Birgit.
When I saw the lens of the camera pointing at me, I was suddenly overcome with weariness. I felt as if I had told my story ten times, twenty times—and I couldn’t bear any more. I didn’t want to retail my misery before the world. No, at this point my personal history mattered very little, since I had already escaped from the mess. In a few hours I’d be leaving the camp, and in a few days or weeks Tanisha would send me an airline ticket and I’d finally get out of this godforsaken country that had murdered my father and mother, killed my Auntie Tamila, and wiped my brother off the face of the earth. Few people had my opportunities. I’d been rescued and was able to escape because I knew some people who had influence abroad. But not everyone was so fortunate, and in any case a country couldn’t base its future on a mass exodus of its people. True, I was happy to be leaving—but I wasn’t proud of it. For if everyone did the same, who would see to the future of the millions of children condemned to live out their lives here? Those children had as much right to a future as children in Europe and America, and the first thing one had to do to improve their lot was inform the world of their sufferings. And these began with the sufferings of their mothers. That’s why the stories of those women deserved to be made known, rather than mine. So I ventured a suggestion to Katelijne: instead of me, she should interview my neighbor in the tent and her twelve-year-old daughter, since they’d been through a worse hell than I had.
Katelijne agreed to this idea, and the woman did, too. She sat in front of the camera and unhesitatingly gave the harrowing account she’d already given to me. Katelijne was amazed.
“Tell me . . . A woman who’s been raped usually hides that fact. She’s ashamed to speak of it, or else speaks of it only if assured of anonymity. Why have you agreed to speak of it so openly, revealing your face to the world?”
“I wasn’t raped in private—the crime was committed in public. Seven soldiers brutally violated me in front of about fifty people, including my daughter. I couldn’t possibly conceal it. Look at my daughter. She’s twelve years old. What man would want to marry her now? What diseases might those soldiers have given her? And who’s to say that she isn’t pregnant as well? For we’ve been utterly abandoned and have no access to a doctor—no one at all to help us, listen to us, care for us. We’ve got to make the outside world understand what’s happening here! The whole world must be told that the people running our country are criminals, because they’re the ones responsible for those soldiers—they’re the ones who sent them. They can’t go on claiming that those men are simply social misfits who have run amok. No! A responsible government can’t expect to get away with such excuses and let such terrible crimes go unpunished. By remaining silent, we’ve become invisible. Well, I’m no longer hiding! I’m showing my face and declaring who I am: my name is Lea Malanda!”
She spoke her name emphatically, looking straight into the camera, as if flinging a challenge in the world’s face. What was there to add after that? Nothing. Since Katelijne plainly could not find any words of similar intensity to comfort the woman who had just announced her name so publicly, she merely listened and nodded. I don’t know if that was good television. Katelijne had told me viewers liked reports from Africa that featured scenes of blood and gore, starving children stretching out their hands imploringly, dramatic images like the ones she’d wanted to make of Mama. In this case, she had only the defiant words of a humiliated woman—one of a great many such women—who described her sufferings before the world without losing her dignity. I hope Katelijne wasn’t disappointed.
We’d been listening so intently to Lea Malanda that we hadn’t noticed the half dozen women who had gathered around us. They seemed liberated by what Lea had just said—seemed to realize that the true shame would lie in continuing to keep silent about what they had endured, and that their freedom was beginning with this effort to make their voices heard. Only minutes before, they had been reluctant to display their humiliation before the world, but now all of them were eager to speak.
“I wasn’t raped, but I want to tell you about another sort of shame. I sold myself. Yes, look at me, listen to my words: I sold my body for four tablets of chloroquine to save the life of my child, who was dying from malaria. The child is alive today because I spread my legs for a price. When will we be done with such humiliations? Even in this refugee camp, there are still people who force us to pay with sex for a box of powdered milk, a bit of space under a plastic tent, a bowl of rice. Some of the staff ask us for money before they’ll give us rations cards.”
“And since I didn’t have any money, I agreed to sleep twice with a man just so I could get that stupid card!” exclaimed another woman angrily, brandishing a rations card—which, thanks to Doctors Without Borders, I had received for free.
“Were we born women merely to suffer?” asked the one who’d spoken previously.
She could not go on. Her question remained hanging in the air without a reply, and she began to weep. In her arms she held the child for whom she’d sold her dignity—a little boy of shocking thinness. In his case, the expression “skin and bones” was not just a figure of speech but the description of a harsh reality. And that thinness contrasted grotesquely with the roundness of his swollen belly. I was no doctor, but I was probably right in thinking that the child had reached an irreversible stage of malnutrition. In a f
ew weeks, more likely in a few days, he would surely be dead. And still the woman clung tenaciously to her little son, enveloping him tenderly in her maternal love even though the battle was already lost.
I looked at Katelijne and tried to gauge her emotions, wondering if she, a European, could identify with the sufferings of these women as closely as someone from India or Afghanistan, or a Palestinian or a Somalian. I think she could. Weren’t we all human? Any person can understand and share the pain of another, if only he or she makes the effort to do so. Katelijne, like Birgit and Tanisha, had made the effort.
Chapter Twenty-nine
Laokolé
Arumor that the president of the republic was coming to visit the camp began making the rounds first thing in the morning. Soldiers soon appeared everywhere, telling us to clean up our tents in case the president passed through and, as an extra incentive, promising us double rations if we gave that august personage an enthusiastic reception. We could count on getting a hit of meat or fish, and perhaps even some sugar. They selected a few children and issued them new clothes and shoes for the welcoming ceremony. They asked us to make ourselves look our best, as if we had deliberately taken pains to be in such a deplorable condition.
For me, the most important thing was to find out whether this visit by the head of state would preclude all other visits. If so, it meant that humanitarian organizations were barred from the camp and Birgit wouldn’t be able to get me out till the next day. A real disappointment, since I was already celebrating the fact that I’d spent my last night there.
Three hours before the president arrived, we were told to go and stand behind the line of soldiers guarding the podium where he would be speaking. We were thoroughly searched beforehand, as if poor refugees like us could possibly have weapons that could be used to kill the head of state. On the dais, one of the six children chosen for the welcoming committee—all of whom had likewise been standing there for hours waiting—collapsed headlong, doubtless from fatigue and hunger. He was removed with all possible speed.
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