Red Admirable

by Mary Elston

I went to a preview performance of The Overwhelming at the Laura Pels Theater last night. I met the playwright afterwards, right after the curtain had come down and I had stopped crying. J.T. Rogers is short and squarish, physically, although an additional fact is that he was wearing khakis.

“Thank you,” I told him, because that seemed to be the right thing to say. “Did you enjoy it?” he asked. His play is about Rwanda on the brink of genocide, and neither the theme of “Rwanda” nor that of “genocide” lends itself particularly to a enjoyable night at the theater.

“We cried!” I trilled and looked expectantly at him. Then I said “It was very disturbing.”

J.T. seemed satisfied and so we said goodbye and everyone went out for hamburgers.

The Overwhelming is disorienting in its breadth; it is superficially the story of a U.S. academic and his family temporarily transplanted to Kigali for research, and at its heart it is about life during wartime, the pervasive doubt and panicked fear of those living without law, code or contract. That’s not how theater should work, though; the medium’s power of intimacy works when it illuminates human relationships within a superstructure, however recognizable or abstract.

The play succeeded wildly in its premiere at the Royal Court, though, and I expect it will be well received in New York, too. Last night, the audience was enthusiastic. We are serving our time, we thought, and we tearfully congratulated ourselves for not sneaking into Legally Blond, after all.

—

I do not mean to criticize J.T. Rogers’s work as futile or self-serving; it is neither. It is theatrically affecting and, to a certain extent, politically useful. At one point, in a stroke of naiveté, the main character meets with a U.N. peace-keeper who tells him of his recent posting in Somalia. The peace-keeper is presumably referring to the October 1993 siege of the Olympic Hotel, during which seventy five captured U.S. Rangers were freed by Pakistani and Malaysian U.N. troops after an eight-hour battle. He tells the American,

Ninety U.N. troops were killed trying to rescue those soldiers!

The actor who hissed that line is a black man from San Diego. His character is written as Bengali. Either way, the audience knew what he was talking about when he said

They were men with the same skin color as my own.

As the we heard the word “ninety” everyone drew a collective breath. The transplanted U.S. characters in The Overwhelming are pretty dumb, but we hadn’t known anything about that, either.

As it happens, J.T. may have been taking some literary license. During the U.N. operation in Somalia that lasted from March 1993 to March 1995, there were 147 fatalities. Twenty-four Pakistanis had been killed in an open battle with Farah Aideed’s followers several months before the Olympic Hotel incident. The numbers don’t logically add up; it seems unlikely that only 33 other soldiers would have been killed in the remaining 22 months of U.N. presence.

The fact remains that none of us had ever heard of the sacrifices–however many there were, and in whatever month they took place–of the U.N. soldiers in Somalia. We don’t hear much about U.N. troops in general, and when we do, it’s not about peacekeeping, not their combat operations.

Pakistan is the top contributor of troops to U.N. operations; in September 2007, there were 10,629 Pakistanis in places like Sudan, Burundi, Haiti, the DRC, and the Golan Heights. Next came Bangladesh, with 9,728 and India, with 9.352. The United States currently has 307 active U.N. personnel; nine of them are military troops. Our country pays, however, an average of $3,799,356,252 a year to support U.N. military missions. In our distraction, we are paying for South Asia to die.

They were men with the same skin color as my own.

The poorest, darkest skinned, least acculturated children are the ones sent to die where there are no cameras. And where there are no cameras, there is no global memory, and about those places there are still no plays.

[All photographs are by Mark Jackson, who served during the Battle of Mogadishu as a medic with the 41st Engineer Battalion].

Mary Elston is a Middle East policy expert and activist living in the Bronx. She is beautiful and always heading West.