/ARTS WEEKLY/THEATRE-KENYA: Revisiting Chilean Playwright’s Work

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Katy Salmon

NAIROBI, Mar 4 2003 (IPS) - ”How can those who tortured and those who were tortured coexist in the same land?” Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman asked when writing ‘Death and the Maiden’ in 1991.

It is a question many Kenyans are asking themselves right now. Torture victims of the 1980s have been touring the former government’s Nyayo House torture chambers, reliving their experiences and demanding justice.

While everyone agrees that something must be done to come to terms with the Kenya’s disturbing past, it is harder to decide the form that this justice will take.

Kenya’s new government, which took power in December, says it is going to set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the parameters of which have yet to be defined. Will this be enough? If the guilty confess, will the victims able to forgive?

In the play, Paulina comes face to face with a man she believes – judging from his voice, his laugh and his smell – to have tortured and raped her 15 years earlier. The man, Robert, has dropped by to have a drink with her husband, Gerard, whom he had rescued from the roadside after Gerard’s car got a puncture.

Paulina ties Robert up, stuffs her knickers in his mouth, and decides to put him on trial. If he confesses to his crimes, she says, she will free him – though it is unclear whether she herself believes this.

Her husband, Gerard, a lawyer and diplomat, in incensed. Not least, because the President just appointed him to investigate past crimes and he believes his wife’s actions could cost him his job. He pleads with her not to become like ”them” by conducting a show trial whose outcome is already decided.

Instead, she should stand back, forgive, and let the law take its course.

But Paulina does not believe that the ”same judges who never intervened to save one life in 17 years of dictatorship” will now bring justice to the victims. She is adamant that she must carry out her own trial.

Death and the Maiden is an absorbing psychological thriller – with the audience struggling to guess whether Robert is guilty and whether Paulina is going to kill him. Unlike the Roman Polanki’s film version, in which Paulina frees Robert, the play has a much more ambiguous ending. The audience are left to decide for themselves.

”The play offers no easy answers. It doesn’t give you an answer at all,” agrees director Keith Pearson.

But from the beginning of the play right to the end you are constantly involved in making that decision yourself as a audience member.

”Do you revenge yourself? Do you enact retribution? Or do you forgive? Or is there something you can extract from that person that brings it to closure?” he asks.

Dorfman wrote the play to deal with his own past, having been forced into exile after a coup overthrew Chilean President Salvador Allende. The new regime created a commission to investigate the human rights abuses but it would neither name the perpetrators nor judge them.

”Justice would not be done,” Dorfman charged.

Now it is up to Kenya to decide what kind of justice it wants.

‘Death and the Maiden’ was first performed in Kenya in 1993, just after multi-partyism had been reintroduced, with a smattering of Special Branch agents in the audience. The resonance with the situation in Kenya was not so strong as they were still living under a quasi-dictatorship.

This time around, with the former ruling party KANU finally ousted after 39 years in power, the play ”seems to be lifted straight from what we’re reading in the daily press”, says Mumbi Kaigwa who plays Paulina.

The anti-corruption advocacy group ‘Transparency International’ sponsored the production in order to ”encourage discussion on how we as a nation move on”.

It seems to have worked.

”Everybody was glued to the edge of their seats trying to make up their minds for themselves how they would deal with their own past,” says Pearson.

”Many of the people in the audience were treated very badly in the past. So it is going to be very interesting now to see how far they want to push retribution, reconciliation and forgiveness,” he says.

”For me, before the play, it was really much more black and white – that there should be a truth and reconciliation commission so that all the things that have happened can come out,” says one audience member Betty Muragori.

”If people talk about what has happened and there is no justice, what would that be all about? What would we benefit from it?” she asks.

For the actors, it was an equally thought-provoking experience.

”I am honoured to have been chosen for this play. I feel very strongly about what is happening in our country. I felt that very, very strongly for many years as I watched things going from bad to worse,” says Raymond Ofula, who played Robert.

”I really feel deep inside me that those people who did all the evils that they are said to have done – which I believe most of it happened – have to be called to account for their deeds”.

”Just like Paulina in the play is saying, ‘Why does she have to be the one to accept everything, to live and let live?’ I think the victims should be heard,” he says.

For one audience member, playwright Wahome Mutahi, a survivor of the Nyayo torture chambers, the most exciting fact about the whole controversy is simply that Kenyans are now able to discuss these issues without fear of persecution.

”For us artists, it is a new lease of life after many years of looking over our shoulders as we wrote, directed and performed in plays. Let us celebrate the new freedom by using our art so that the past may not be repeated,” he says.