The River That Swallows All Rivers
Honoring the Congolese Holocaust and its Ever-Growing Rape Victims
by
ANDRIA NACINA COLE
Andria Nacina Cole
Andria Nacina Cole was raised in a house full of women and learned everything she knows about storytelling from their mouths. Degrees in creative writing from the universities of Morgan State and Johns Hopkins taught her to tame that homemade style, though she still calls on it every writing moment.
In 2006, she was the recipient of the Maryland State Arts Council’s top grant prize for fiction, and as a result, founded the Flanked Women’s Writers Conference (www.flanked.org). Andria has published works in “Urbanite,” “Sensations Magazine” and “MaryElise Magazine” among others.
She has stories forthcoming in “Fiction Circus” and the preeminent “Ploughshares.” She has published a collection of poetry titled “Anthem: For Colored Women Only,” and is working tirelessly to complete a short-story collection tentatively titled “Clean Piles of Daughter.”
For Congolese womanhood and every moment of control sacrificed in the name of savagery. And to real magic – the kind fashioned from love, significance, labor, God and sweetness. Not that foolish, simple “potion” rapists hang their excuses from.
Eight Congolese women bearing the scars of a brutal war gather their meager belongings to make a haunted trek to Buakvu, where they hope to have their battered bodies repaired. Along the way, they reveal the horrors they’ve suffered and stumble across a child soldier whom they can’t decide whether to kill or love, not knowing the wretched Mai Mai – the very rebel soldiers responsible for their rapes – trail them.
“The River That Swallows All Rivers” chronicles the last three days of a two-week trek to Buakvu, Congo. Tintsi Bukasa (six months pregnant) and Madame Obey, citizens of the city Kindu, have suffered multiple rapes by the Mai Mai rebels and carry within them and all over their clothes the effects of severe fistulas. The women have been abandoned by their families, which is a customary reply to rape, but rather than starve to death, rather than die, they choose life and decide they will walk, in rubber shoes thin enough that the rocks beneath the feet pierce them, 400 km to the Panzi hospital.
Along the way they collect women like bees to sap. They find Faida, raped by two soldiers and a bayonet; Marie, punctured by more than a half dozen men (the same as Tintsi); and Hope, who will not open her mouth to relay her name let alone any phrase explaining what she has endured. By the time they are just days from Buakvu, they are seven in all, and claim Shashir as their biggest burden. Shashir cannot stand for any period of time without soiling herself beyond mending and, therefore, wears a diaper and sits on a pot when at rest.
Throughout it all she rants and complains about their rescue of her - she would have preferred death. As the play opens, the seven of them come across a young girl, Mani, tied to a mango tree and wearing 100 trivial cuts across her face.
With Mani revived and her broken ankle bandaged, they begin again. Just before they meet the jungle’s opening (they travel at night and through the bush so as to avoid anymore unfortunate meetings with rebels) a child, bankrupt about the eyes and simply dirty, emerges. The women are conflicted despite his height, his frailty. He might be a soldier. More importantly, he might indicate more soldiers to come. But the women cannot contemplate who he might be. They take him as he is and lob themselves between feeding him and gawking at him in distrust. As the women fight the bush, determined to have their bodies put back together, Mai Mai rebel soldiers skulk just beyond their periphery.
Among the rebels is Marien, boyfriend to the young girl Mani found tied to the mango tree. He accidentally called the soldiers to Mani, causing her perpetual rape, and lifted not a pinky finger in protest. He is on the verge of suicide because of his actions but offers the women their only bit of hope as the rebels begin to suspect their existence. The soldiers are determined to find the owners of the footprints they occasionally find on their own private trip to Buakvu. The women accomplish their journey minus Tintsi, who has died in premature childbirth, and the young boy, who hangs himself one morning as the women sleep.
They are unaware the rebels almost catch them, almost regurgitate their individual/collective nightmares, and that Marien, in an effort to repent his sins, is their savior. Each of the women is eligible for reconstructive surgery, except Shashir, who dies one night in her sleep after receiving the news. “I cannot fix you,” the doctor says. The remaining women have their bodies returned to them, though Anneke is HIV positive. The play concludes with those who remain, resting on a single bench draped in the hospital’s white dresses, their backs facing the audience, their shoulders, arms and even their legs shaking from the weeping.
Photo by Paula Allen / V-Day
“The River That Swallows All Rivers” is a theatrical production written by playwright Andria Nacina Cole, which later will be redrafted as an independent film. The production is set in the Democratic Republic of Congo and chronicles the story of eight women raped and brutalized by the Mai Mai rebels and abandoned by their families. These women decide to trek 250 miles to the Panzi hospital. The production portrays the horrors that women face in the Congo compounded by lack of healthcare – and the rise of HIV/AIDS throughout the country.
This project hopes to shed light not only on the current situation facing women of the Democratic Republic of Congo, but on gender-based violence around the world, and demonstrates how the arts can take a powerful role raising awareness and influencing social change. Art creates beauty, invites discovery, stimulates reflections, generates self-knowledge, promotes debate and challenges and shifts paradigms.
The FreeGirl Foundation hopes that viewers of “The River That Swallows All Rivers” will watch, learn and then act. It is meant to open the eyes of the viewers and, hopefully, inspire big steps in the direction of change for the United States as well as the Democratic Republic of Congo.
We are currently looking for a co-production partner. For information on “The River That Swallows All Rivers,” please e-mail Afifa Kashif at afifa@TheFreeGirlFoundation.org .
