Pat Davis's Open Salon Blog

"Ruined" is a tour de force

Sun, 22 May 2011 23:05:59 -0400

Those of you who have seen this play already know that "Ruined," by Lynn Nottage, is a tour de force. I almost missed the play--I almost didn't go. Missing it would have meant missing a pivotal experience, one that has changed my understanding of what contemporary, politically informed theater is and what it can do. Through an astute balance of humor and tragedy, powerful language and structural perfection, Ruined manages to take on themes that are political and contemporary but personal and deeply powerful. The result is a play that feels Shakespearean in its depth and reach and power. Nottage whittles the complex and brutal conflict in the Congo down to the manageable world of a brothel. Within its walls, a battle of life and death is fought, as four women who have suffered rape and sought refuge in the brothel struggle to survive and reclaim their dignity.

Under Charles Randolph-Wright’s direction, every element of Arena Stage's production enhances the intensity of the script. There are no blackouts. Instead, when set changes are required, the lights dim to reveal a thatched pattern of shadows on the floor, which the tables and the bar are lowered smoothly into. Beds smoothy arise, and before the audience can take a deep breath the next scene is unfolding. The live music which Randolph-Wright has incorporated—Sophie’s role in the brothel is to sing and she is accompanied by a band—bring a welcome respite from the heaviness of subject that could otherwise overwhelm us and at the same time suggests the women’s determination to create their own world within the brothel and within themselves, a world separate from the tragic warring outside, a world in which there is dancing. The outside world always threatens to invade and conquer the small, safe space of the brothel. Its creator, Mama Nadi, is a the Madame who demands that soldiers turn over their bullets to her before they sit down. Mama Nadi is played to perfection by Jenny Jules—strong, sassy, and clever, she is lovable within the first few minutes of the play, even as she is buying young women to be her newest employees. Jeremiah W. Birkett , as Christian, is tender and compelling. Jamairais Malone plays a saucy, over-the-top Josephine, and Babs Olusanmokun is a terrifying, forceful Commander Osembengo. The outstanding cast is rounded out by Rachael Homes (Sophie) and Donnetta Lavinia Grays (Salima) who powerfully portray the vulnerability of women who have lost nearly everything. Clifton Duncan (Jerome Kisembe) embodies in every gesture evil undergirded by power.

This evil does not win, however. Though set among the darkness and depravity of war, Ruined is about the persistence of joy and hope and the possibility of reconciliation. The play is a reminder of what theater, at its best, can do, and Arena’s production is a reminder of Arena Stage’s dexterity and excellence. How lucky I am to live in the DC area.

Check under the Hood

Thu, 13 Jan 2011 21:01:25 -0500

For the first time on Tuesday I engaged in civil disobedience, standing outside the Justice Department with a group of 60 others who were willing to risk arrest. We wore orange jumpsuits and black hoods. We were doing our best to make visible the 173 detainees still at Guantanamo, to bring the reality of their existence into the streets of Washington on the ninth anniversary of GITMO's opening. Over half have been judged by our government as ready for release--as innocent. As not, after all, terrorists. Yet they remain there still, wrongly imprisoned, as they have been for years. We stood in the lightly falling snow, a phalanx of police officers behind us. Poet Luke Nephew recited a poem. His words rang off the stones of the building. "We are not here to make angels out of prisoners. We don't know them. But we know that they are still men. And so we defend those who disappear under hoods and into jumpsuits, bringing back into the light every CIA black site because right now there is a man under that hood . . . There is a man under that hood who is being treated as less than human. . . .To the people of my country, please, do not pretend that we are seeking freedom or justice or any common good until we are ready to recognize the human rights of every single man under that hood." Organized by Witness Against Torture, the vigils will continue until January 22. Over a hundred people around the country are fasting in solidarity with the detainees. All this as President Obama is preparing an executive order authorizing indefinite detention.

More Dead in Honduras

Mon, 3 Aug 2009 01:08:32 -0400

Roger Abrahim Vallejo has died. Shot in the head by Honduran police on Thursday, he was a high school teacher who recently had married and become a father. He slipped into a coma and died on Saturday morning.

On Sunday, as he was returning home from Vallejo's funeral, Martin Rivera, also a teacher, was stabbed 27 times.

Teacher's union leader Milton Bardelas told the http://hablahonduras.com/2009/08/02/asesinaron-a-otro-docente-en-honduras>Honduran news media that the killings were part of an orchestrated campaign of intimidation against the teachers union, the largest and best organized union in the country.

Why does this matter to us? Our government is permitting the repression, after permitting the coup in the first place--if not facilitating it. Therefore this blood is on our hands. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm really tired of all the blood.

No matter what happens in Honduras in November, the military and oligarchy will have been permanently strengthened, and the forces working to improve the lot of the poor and marginalized will have been weakened through exactly these kinds of acts.

The Committee for the Defense of Human Rights in Honduras is investigating reports of another death, that of Pedro Pablo Hernandez, and of an attack by soldiers and police on Jorge Avila. Meanwhile, according to Artistas Contra El Golpe, Fidel Ernesto Medina Salazar, last seen in police custody, has disappeared.

It's easy for our government to keep its current policies in place when no news of murders or disappearances shows up in our papers. Please, OSers, be vigilant and strident. Let's demand that the repression stop! Rep. Raul Grijalva is leading a congressional effort to urge the Obama Administration to increase U.S. pressure on the coup regime by canceling U.S. visas and freezing bank accounts of coup leaders. You can ask your Representative to sign Representative Raul Grijalva's letter http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/1439/t/9410/p/dia/action/public/?action_KEY=1298>here>

Aren't You Sick of Hearing About the Repression in Honduras?

Sat, 1 Aug 2009 00:08:19 -0400

It's been all over the news in the last two days. The police shot a protester in the head in Honduras, injured 26 more, made mass arrests, beat journalists. What? Did you miss the four-sentence blurb in the New York Times?

A fuller report, published on Friday by the Mexican daily La Jornada, follows below (my translation, with abridgements).

On Thursday the de facto government of Honduras severely repressed the resistance, as President Jose Manuel Zelaya Rosales met in Managua with a delegation from the United States Department of State, led by US Ambassador Hugo Llorens, and only hours after coup president Roberto Micheletti had expressed his willingness to support talks in Costa Rica.

Riot police, supported by soldiers, broke up a march by the Resistance Front, which was protesting the coup and had planned to block for hours the highway to the north of the country.

Similar actions occurred in Comayagua, where 70 people were arrested, and Santa Barbara, as well as near San Pedro Sula.

At the wail of a siren, the police began to throw tear gas canisters out of a helicopter and police officers broke into three parts a march of around three thousand Zelaya supporters and began coralling and arresting the protesters. Some thirty demonstrators took refuge in a car repair garage near El Durazno. The police reached them even there and brought them out. Before being put into patrol cars, a number of demonstrators were beaten.

“Although they had already surrendered, they bloodied themselves with our colleague Carlos H. Reyes,” said a witness. Reyes, a man of 70 years of age who suffers from diabetes, is a leader of a beverage workers union and an independent candidate for the presidency of Honduras. The beatings by police left him with a fractured arm and an injured ear.

Outside a police station where the demonstrators who had been arrested were taken, a witness recalled the moment an officer fired into the head of man now lying on the ground. The officer maintained that demonstrators themselves had shot the man. The injured man, a high school teacher named Roger Abraham Villegas (38 years old), was taken by his own comrades to a hospital. Before being treated, his heart stopped twice.

Several dozen demonstrators remained under arrest at the police station, inlcuding Popular Block leader Juan Barahona. [La Jornada identifies by name five additional demonstrators hospitalized with injuries, as well as five more injured demonstrators who remained at the police station.] The resistance movement has reported 26 injured.

According to reports by the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), “in the hallways of the emergency room at the School Hospital of Tegucigalpa, police officers and apparent police and military intellligence agents were seen, whose mission is to identify leaders of the resistance, follow them, and later arrest them.”

The police also attacked reporters, who usually are able to cross the roadblocks to go toward the border, although not without difficulty. A camera belonging to Telesur was destroyed. Roberto Barra, of Prensa Latina, and Óscar Estrada, of Habla Honduras, were beaten and their equipment was damaged. Estrada said the police threatened him, saying, “It’s your fault that this country is fucked. Here there is nothing to report. If you’re Nicaraguan,” they added, “we’ll kill you.”

“What they did was a true roundup. And just yesterday the coup leaders had spoken about dialogue. Can you dialogue when they are repressing in this manner?” Bertha Oliva, president of COFADEH, said to La Jornada.

President Zelaya said he had asked the United States to help “detain” the repression. “It’s a barbarity in the eyes of the world,” he said in a press conference.

The coup government, meanwhile, extended the curfew along the border zone, perhaps because this Friday the 48-hour work stoppage decreed by the resistance was expected to continue. The government’s announcement of the extended curfew was followed by the voice of a woman addressing all Hondurans: “It’s not by spilling the blood of innocents that we will overcome the current crisis. Your life has no price, help us maintain the peace.”

In contrast to La Jornada's report is the New York Times’ blurb: “Several people were wounded and more than 100 were arrested Thursday during clashes between the police and supporters of the ousted president, Manuel Zelaya, in at least four locations. The most intense violence occurred on the northern edge of Tegucigalpa, the capital, where one person was shot in the head. Leaders of the demonstrations accused the police of firing tear gas and live ammunition on peaceful protesters. Television footage showed some protesters armed with long sticks and pickaxes.”

Here’s a photo the New York Times didn't consider news fit to print: Abraham Villegas, after being shot by police. I don't know, who's scarier? Those demonstrators with sticks or the police?

So Who Cares About Zelaya?

Wed, 8 Jul 2009 19:07:37 -0400

An op-ed in the http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/07/opinion/07Marin.html?_r=1&emc=eta1/"> New York Times on Monday, written by Honduran journalist Roger Marin Neda, suggests that nobody in Honduras does or should care whether ousted president Manuel Zelaya returns to finish out his term. Marin quotes his friend Julia, a housewife who lives near the affluent Colonia Las Lomas neighborhood and runs a market out of her garage: "What do I care? Things will continue as usual. Nothing will change. All I want is that they let me live in peace to run my business."

Marin doesn't mention the 30,000 to 50,000 Zelaya supporters who gathered last Sunday at the airport in an attempt to welcome their president home, facing down soldiers with machine guns and, in two cases, giving their lives. No, he sticks with Julia (although, as a member of the middle class, she is hardly representative of the average Honduran). The Julia's of Honduras probably will be left in peace. They pose no threat to the de facto government and are, in fact, its support base. But to suggest that everyone has been left in peace, or will be, is an error, one that our mainstream media seems intent on promulgating.

The New York Times, for example, on July 7 reported that "at least one person" had been killed--although on July 6, coup government chancellor Enrique Ortez had confirmed for the foreign press that two demonstrators were dead. The Washington Post, in its Monday print edition, mentioned no deaths, leaving it at this: "Shots were heard." The tendency is clear. Our mainstream media is underreporting the repression.

Five Hondurans have been extrajudicially executed since the June 28 coup. I learned this, not from our newspapers, of course, but from the Guatemalan press. Guatemalan human rights leaders, who recently returned from a fact-finding mission to Honduras, released preliminary results of their investigation yesterday in a press conference in Guatemala City. Those killed were described as follows:

*On July 2, journalist Gabriel Noriega was shot to death by individuals traveling in a black vehicle with tinted windows and no license plates.

*In a place known as la Montañita, the body of a forty-year-old man was found with signs of torture. He had been mutilated (descuartizado, in Spanish--quartered).

* On June 29, during a protest, a union member was crushed by a military vehicle.

* Two Zelaya supporters were shot to death by soldiers on Sunday, July 5, as they waited at the International Airport for the ousted president's return. Nineteen-year-old Isis Obed Murillo was one of the victims. (The photo of his body that was published in the Honduran daily La Prensa has http://ecodiario.eleconomista.es/internacional/noticias/1390978/07/09/Manipulan-la-foto-de-un-muerto-tras-las-manifestaciones-en-Honduras.html">has caused an uproar because the blood covering his shoulder and pouring from his head was edited out.

A June 30 communique from a Honduran rights group, published on the International Peace Brigades website, states that the army, beginning at 2 A.M., raided homes and abducted youths in the Department of Olancho, where Zelaya is from. Many young people, fearing the army, fled to the mountains to hide.

Completely unaware of the irony, Marin writes in his op-ed that "middle-class members look at Venezuela and ask why we should adopt the ways of a country that does not seem to have progressed very much over the past decade, and where freedom of the press and other liberties have been suppressed." While in his own country, tanks roll through the streets. Foreign journalists have been arrested. A 6:30 P.M. curfew has been imposed, which means the rights to free association and free speech have been curtailed. Media outlets have been shut down. Hardly progress.

In giving space to such a biased, short-sighted view, the New York Times is in good company. A Monday analysis in the Washington Post claims that the biggest threat to democracy in the region is governments that "ignore checks and balances," not "bayonet-wielding soldiers."

Of course, the soldiers in Honduras are not carrying bayonets. They're carrying submachine guns. Another instance of downplaying. But it's understandable; imagine the difficulty of arguing that the biggest threat to democracy in the region is governments that ignore checks and balances, not soldiers carrying submachine guns.

If the military coup in Honduras succeeds, a dangerous precedent will be set for the entire hemisphere, and democracy, which is already tenuous in many countries of South and Central America, will be further imperiled. If only our papers could get beyond the Julia's and understand the danger this coup represents for the impoverished majority and for democracy as a whole.