Marina Perezagua - The Story of H

What can I tell you about my time in Africa? You were born on a beautiful continent, for the little I’ve actually seen from the surface, but they’re boring holes in it, hollowing out the inside of the continent. One day you’ll be sleeping in your bed and wake up suddenly underground, or you’ll go to your daughter’s room and discover a deep hole when you open the door where the miners are excavating and throwing the useless material atop that little girl whom you tucked into bed and kissed good night just a little while before. You’ll be left clutching the doorframe, paralyzed by the vision of a white nightgown disappearing into the brown, the gray, the blue-black flesh of this earth. And from there you’ll watch all the horrifying cogs and gears at work. You’ll see how the buried body will slip and slide through those tunnels like a recently cast nut along a factory assembly line, where nobody believes they’re assembling the weapon that will end up burying you like another nut falling on the same assembly line, and so on and so forth till the continent is nothing but a big factory spitting nuts out so some guy in another hemisphere can destroy things on the cheap.

I remember shortly after arriving being invited to a party where I saw a Belgian artist fashion a sculpture—or that’s what he called it—that was highly acclaimed and that, after a while, I associated with the African massacre. Before the eyes of his country’s dignitaries and all the people invited to the opening, he grabbed a jerrican full of liquid aluminum and spilled it into the mouth of an ant colony. He waited a few seconds for the liquid to solidify, then dug out a big block of earth, which he cleaned with a pressure hose, exposing the passageways that the ants had excavated. The silver aluminum tunnels showed the beauty of the insect labyrinth, but there was no sign of life there whatsoever. Sometimes I think this will be the only salvation for these lands. A giant sculptor might come along to spill liquid iron into the thousands of tunnels of this human ant colony before it’s completely hollowed out and all of us fall to the bottom: men, elephants, snakes, antelopes, monkeys. Though by that time I think I’ll be far away from here. I won’t be alive, not here or in any other place. But Yoro will. Yoro is already safe, and I laugh at you. I despise you. I feel joy. Nobody will take that joy away from me. Even if they torture me before executing me, I will think: “The torture will last one, two, seven days. But my happiness will last an eternity. It will outlast my body, my conscience, because it will be the sound repeated in a chain, an alpha gorilla pounding his chest to claim his territory, the sound of the rain that comes to fill the crevices left by the parched earth.” You have no power over that feeling of mine and it will prevail: happiness, free laughter, the spark in the air, the fall from corporeal confinement.

“THE CONGO ENDS UP CHANGING even the best person,” I once heard a UN soldier say. You remember I told you what happened one day on the North American television program This Is Your Life, when a victim of Hiroshima and William Sterling Parsons, the commander of the Enola Gay who dropped the bomb, were put together on the same set? Well, a few years ago I saw another example that I found as sad as that program. You’re perfectly aware, sir, what I’m talking about, but I’m thinking once again of that reader who still has her or his full capacity to empathize, the reader able to feel pain before the suffering of others. To that reader I want to explain that there’s a video used to train personnel for the largest international organization in the world, the United Nations. The video I’m referring to is called To Serve with Pride, and it has the subtitle “Zero Tolerance for Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.” It informs UN bureaucrats about issues anyone belonging to the United Nations should be fully aware of already. The video defines their conception of sexual exploitation. Later, when everything was about to go down, the video became one of the interlocking pieces of the puzzle enabling me to recognize the sinister final image.

Now as I write, I imagine the members of the UN peace mission sitting down with a notebook and, pen in hand, taking notes while they’re explaining what they understand to be sexual exploitation. It appears as though it’s not such an obvious thing that someone working to defend peace knows what pedophilia is, just to give an example. On several occasions the video ponderously enunciates the rules, such as “payment with money, jobs, goods, or services in exchange for sex is prohibited.” The video also describes a few real-life cases as practical illustrations for the theory. And so it tells the case of a sixteen-year-old girl who was brought to Liberia as a prostitute and who was confined there in a place called the Sugar Club. When the girl sees a UN vehicle at the door of the establishment, she thinks she’s saved and, relieved, runs to the car to ask for help. The driver rapes her and later informs the owner of the club that the girl had tried to escape. It’s like what happens in those popular tales when a princess gets lost in a forest and thinks she’s safe when she sees a little house with the lights on. She doesn’t realize that it’s in the house and not in the forest where the greatest threat lies, or maybe she comes to understand it only when the soldier pulls up his zipper. Another illustrative story on the video: A UN worker gave some cookies to a young girl in exchange for sex: he got her pregnant and subsequently skipped town. The mother got by selling bananas to care for her boy, at less than a dollar a day. The boy was called mzungu tali tali, an insult that means “not black or white”; an out-of-the-ordinary child who was denied treatment even by the Congolese doctors, who alleged they couldn’t understand the mystery of difference, this mixed body.

There’s a sequence in the video that I find particularly disturbing. The sanctimonious voice-over says (I wrote it down word for word in my notebook): “Victims face other consequences besides possible discrimination, the threat of AIDS, or unwanted pregnancies, because the worst of all possible damages is perhaps that of robbing a person of their dignity.” It would seem the United Nations also attributes supernatural abilities to itself: it thinks it can take a woman’s dignity from her. Those nasty little pieces of work in uniform think dignity is located in a woman’s cunt and with their phalluses they wield the power to strip it out.

Should anyone forget or not have caught the message clearly enough, there’s a recap at the end, kind of like at the end of a recipe where the cook enumerates the ingredients again. So they insist:

REMEMBER:

No sex in exchange for money, work, goods, or services.

No sex with children.

You have the obligation to denounce sexual abuse or exploitation.

MONUSCO. That’s the name of the peacekeeping mission specific to the Congo, an acronym for United Nations Organization Stabilization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But I think it should be called mollusk in English, mollusque in French, that slimy creature that recoils and hides when approached. What name do they give your mandate? Oh yes, it’s a “monitoring” mandate, meaning they’re there to do nothing, maybe play some cards. These missions send soldiers to the Congo for counting the dead and observing. Yes, a big bunch of Peeping Toms, or voyeurs of death in the best-case scenario and, in the worst, perverts.

MONUSCO has airplanes, state-of-the-art technology, and the very best in trucks. In the Congo, people say the mission is there to do nothing, and though the group is flush with resources, they’re only good for transporting minerals and doing business with the companies that later sell it on the international market. It’s also said that the members of MONUSCO sell arms to rebel factions or exchange them for gold or other precious metals, which means they are the ones financing the armed conflict. They call coltan blue gold; I don’t know if it’s for the color, which is more like black, but knowing what I’ve come to know, I think it’s in honor of the blue helmets the UN soldiers wear. UN Security Council Resolution 1857 grants this organization the responsibility of overseeing and controlling the gold and coltan routes. And behold its undoing. The demise happened the moment they named as judge of the criminals the very criminal himself, the instant United Nations personnel were authorized internationally to control the routes that form part of its own corruption. Sir, you can tell me a thousand and one times that the UN soldiers didn’t do anything. I could tell you the same thing: you’re absolutely right, they did nothing. But that would be only—how can I put it?—the best-case scenario, when they dedicate themselves to this monitoring work that though useless and entirely cynical is idyllic when compared with other actions.