Listening as my mother described being raped, though heartbreaking, was not as traumatic as watching the HBO Documentary, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. It's my belief that the director, documentary filmmaker Lisa Jackson (herself a victim of a gang rape), felt similarly while listening to the Congolese women tell their stories. Such is the power of untethered emotion laid bare on the altar of abject disregard and abandonment by civil society.
My interest in the Congo tracks to the first time I saw Casablanca. For you non-cineastes, that’s where Louis and Rick escaped to after ditching Ilsa and Victor to ‘embark on their own beautiful friendship.’
I remember thinking, “Ok, so where is Brazzaville?” For many years, I kept an article by the amazing and talented Helene Cooper in the space above my Mac. The headline from the New York Times article read thusly: “In the Congo, Trolling through the Lives of Those Too Wretched to Merit Aid.” This article is a reminder that the people in Walungu province suffered a tragedy that defies description. Of course, just like most people, I don’t do anything…except look at the article once or twice a week. Empathy, but not action.
Because of Cooper’s article, I watched the doc. If I had a DVR, I would have stopped watching twenty minutes in. I'm not given to squeamishness. I’ve seen teenagers shot with handguns and rifles. I’ve watched my Grandfather put a ring in a bulls’ nose. I saw people do things to cats, dogs and other live animals that would drive PETA into shock. And, when I was a young man, I spent years working at a busy airport. For those who have never had this experience, allow me to say that nearly every possible experience along the human continuum occurs at airports. Airports are a microcosm of mankind’s evolutionary pattern. Babies born in elevators- old men dying on jet bridges.
Nothing prepared me for this documentary. There were no reenactments, no hidden video of actual rapes—no stunning mise-en-scene-- just beautiful dark-skinned human beings describing their observations and experiences in chilling monotone. And, that they told the self-lacerating stories in their proper native French created an atmosphere ever more nightmarish.
Rwanda’s genocide left me speechless. I don’t understand it – nor, do I understand the current events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). I assert it is the true nature of evil—no empathy for ones fellow man, no interest in anything but oneself. It is what spawned Hitler’s final solution—the absence of all goodness. It is a snapshot of a world without God. It is a world pregnant with the DNA of King Leopold--the first butcher of the Congo.
An OB-GYN doctor at Panzi Hospital in the DRC—one of the few locals providing aftercare to rape victims—described how several patients were so viciously raped with wooden instruments that their uterus, bladder and vaginal walls were punctured. Surviving, of course, equates to a lifetime of perpetual incontinence. Ponder such humiliation.
But the most unimaginable lay just around the bend. One pregnant woman--from the province of Bunyakyjer— was captured by rebel soldiers. After being repeatedly raped by the soldiers, her children were made to ‘jump up and down’ on her belly until she aborted her fetus. Or, there is Sofie’s story—this smooth-skinned kid of 11 looks like she should be starting at forward on the 7th grade basketball team. Of course, this beguiling possibility doesn't exist because she was raped by soldiers and now has a son. The Interhawahine soldiers saw no distinction in age—they raped girls as young as five and women well past 70 years. One soldier described his passion for the septuagenarian: Well, she is not too old for me.”
A U.N. Peacekeeper— veteran of many missions — framed these events: “I have not seen, in my experience as a soldier, anything like this—as a human being, I am not comfortable talking about what I have seen.”
Honorine, a cop and mom of four, has become the 'Olivia Benson' for the DRCs small police department. Honorine trudges deep into the bush to find victims and obtain police reports. She is relentless in these efforts. She and her volunteers prepare statements using manual typewriters. Honorine promises to help usher in “the rule of law” by bringing perpetrators to justice.
Long ago, I abandoned the naïve belief that ‘people are basically good.’ I’ve seen too much on the journey. Human beings, I believe, are raw material for evil. It is only by the ubiquitous presence of God’s grace that any goodness manifests around humankind.
Life gets tougher in America—the oppressive weight of despair encroaches into the lives of small towners and big-city dwellers. But conversely, I know a guy selling Ferrari’s and Aston Martin's who says, “He can’t keep ‘em on the lot.” The chasm between the 'haves' and ‘have nots’ splits like I-35 when you pass Hillsboro— in times past, this chasm was bridged by a pale veneer of hope…a brittle possibility that ‘someday, I, too, can have opportunity.”
But opportunity floats like a ghostly vapor for those living in Bukava.
There are few things that we, who are so far away from the DRC, can do to alleviate such suffering-- or at least ease the pain. So like most Americans, drunk with 300 channels of HDTV and an ever-expanding list of 'first world problems,' I sit and stare-- sometimes catatonically-- and wonder how I ended up here and not in the DRC. And of course, I do nothing to help the Congolese women because all conceivable actions seem pedestrian. I don’t know where to begin. Thus, I place my lamp beneath a barrel and write words about their plight instead of getting up and doing something real.
Notwithstanding, tonight, in Bukava, someone old enough to be my grandmother or young enough to be my granddaughter could be raped by a soldier. And I, of course, I sit alone, Malbec in hand, fretting about whether the Lakers will lose enough games to draft Emmanuel Mudiay. I wonder what that says about me.
@Lindell153 (Follow Lindell on Twitter)
So he, alone, climbed out of the sewer and within
minutes came face to face to face with a German patrol unit...."
