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.
You can tell me that I’m an old woman, that I’m not as sharp or as quick as a young person. And I would answer that you’re right, that today, a day when I’m writing my testimony, I’m very old, but since my mind had stopped for so many years and took a nice long nap, slept in its madness, it’s not as worn out as the minds of other people of my same age. Yours surely has never taken a nap in restorative insanity, because the crazy ones, when they do stop reasoning, also stop producing and fall away from the corrupt social mechanisms. I bet you’ve never wanted to allow your madness to snatch away your ambition. You are very sane. Oh, no doubt about it. You are very sane today, but when you reach my age you’ll wipe your drool with a hundred-dollar bill thinking it’s a rag.
Now tell me, how can it be that after so many years, European citizens, North American citizens, or citizens of any other country who grant themselves the right to defend human rights—with all their attendant sense of superiority when waving their flags—are able to watch the rebels or soldiers of the regular Congolese army, day in and day out, systematically massacre their girls and women? As you already know, sir, in Africa generally and in the Congo in particular, the family economy is built on women. Men don’t work. Women do everything. They are charged with fetching water, washing clothes in the river, finding food. The more fortunate are able to sell a few products gleaned from the earth, and whatever else the rebels allow. Four- and five-year-old girls prepare food for their brothers. When I arrived, I was surprised to find the men so idle, playing cards or sitting on the porches of their homes. So one day it occurred to me to ask one of these men why only women worked. He responded that men are warriors and they can’t work because they have to be ready for war at all times. I thought about it again when I heard an intelligent and very good woman say something, a woman I’ll call V for valiant to cloak her identity. In the Congo, V said, women have become a weapon of war. The rebels know everything depends on women, so they destroy them; they rape them so they can’t work for days. Some suffer so much they end up taking their own lives. They don’t have to bother killing the women themselves. Systematic rape is enough to ruin this country. So V then told a story to everyone who had come to that informative meeting to address the situation of Congolese women. There were twenty of us. Most were European. You already know the things I’ve seen and lived through. Well, believe me when I tell you that while listening to V tell her story, I confronted the truth about absolute cruelty for the first time. I felt the same shock, the same sense of disgust, the same impotence, the same desire to scream or to run nowhere and everywhere all at the same time. V told us the following story:
V had a friend, Jeanette, from her same hometown. The rebels kidnapped her together with her five children. They raped and tortured her for a week. At the end of the week, they gave her a room and nursed her back to health. They gave her water; they cured her wounds to the extent possible. They even fed her meat for several days. It had been a long time since Jeanette had eaten meat. Jeanette asked the soldiers why they were taking care of her after having hurt her and wanted to know if they would please let her see her five children. One of the rebels answered: “Now you say you want to see your five children? Now, after we’ve taken care of you for seven days? Now, after finally eating meat?”
V didn’t need any further clarification. She didn’t have to say it; all of us who had listened to her story understood what kind of meat Jeanette had been eating. One woman stood up and made her way through the chairs nearly crawling, wobbly. Outside of the little room we heard someone scream, “Please, someone call a doctor!” A boy had just passed out too. Obviously, no doctor ever came, and now that scream of the newly arrived white person seemed so bogus to me. A doctor to alleviate someone’s wounded sensitivity? Should he have warned V that her story wasn’t appropriate for the general public? No, not only did she not acknowledge it, she wasn’t the slightest bit ruffled by our expressions of horror, the scream of someone who surely had to wait for that moment to learn the nature of true pain. V kept still, her hands on the table, grave, looking each one of us in the eye, each and every one of us, and in a very poised tone of voice said, “Je suis désolée. I don’t mean to wound you, but the Congo needs help.”
Delivery: 2011–2014
Despite what she wrote in her letter, Yoro never left the Congo, though she had changed mines. She went from mining coltan to mining gold at a site controlled by armed groups called Chondo. She was no longer there by the time I arrived, though something happened there that I’d never forget. Outside of the mine there was a man who weighed on a rudimentary scale the gold each miner extracted. He placed a match on one of the scale’s little plates, and on the other one, gold. For no reason, right before my eyes, they slit a woman’s throat and stole her tiny seed of metal, which passed from the scale to the hands of the man who had slaughtered her. It was the first time I’d ever seen someone’s throat being slit. I’ve often wondered if I’d ever experience it myself; if the circuit linking my eyes to my brain would still function for that last second to see and smell the same earth that wo
uld cover me, the ultimate freshness of the root tangling around my waist in a welcoming embrace into the nothing.
The Chondo mine was the third world’s bottomless pit. It was the seventh world. There couldn’t possibly be anything worse lower down. Though nowadays I believe there is always something deeper down, always something worse, substantial enough to sustain all the strata over a buried surface. I think I never actually saw the sturdy bedrock of hell, and yet how deep I went. When they took me to the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga region, the last mine that I would have to see, luckily, I stopped counting hells. It’s an endless descent, because in that descent is the journey to death, the journey of the restless wanderer.
You must have an idea already of what they extract in Shinkolobwe. Nobody had to explain it to me beforehand. You know why? Because the closer the jeep got to the mine, the more fragile the vegetation became—more and more frail, drier, yellower, deader and deader. Also the noises indicating the presence of animals grew fewer and fewer until there were none. Silence. Once there, only silence. There was a small artificial lake ahead, which the Belgians, pressured by the Americans, built to conceal what was below. But the dimensions of what lay below the lake were fabulously ambitious, and the mine never ceased its clandestine operation. The mineral was exported through Zambia. Most people said it was copper, others cobalt. Perhaps. But the most valuable resource there was uranium. Uranium, sir. Once again, oh yes, uranium. But what sets this mine apart from Rössing is that this uranium is not some garden-variety uranium. It’s the selfsame uranium that fed the bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Life’s like that sometimes, isn’t it? Just when you think you’ve overcome what hurt you the most, you find yourself in a river whose current isn’t taking you to the outlet, but to where it’s born, forcing you to flow the course for a second time. That’s where I was, smack in the pit that exterminated my city. By day the mine didn’t seem to function, but large groups worked there by night extracting the uranium, whisking it out of the country illegally in trucks, passing customs at the border with rigged radioactivity detectors and moving through random controls for a few bucks in bribe money. The inanimate are the only ones with a right to life in this land. People kill each other, animals go extinct, vegetation burns, but the raw material of money abides. The continent of the human rights of the dollar. Human beings are no more than conduits, copper wires. Dollars won’t save your life, though if you’re alive they allow you to move. He who has money and is alive can move, money guarantees mobility, but not survival—that depends on chance. This took place in 2011. The second night in Shinkolobwe, in a tunnel whose ceiling filtered the radioactive water from the lake, I learned conclusively that Yoro had died. I had expected as much, don’t think I hadn’t already calculated that likelihood.
I DIDN’T WANT TO TELL YOU about Yoro’s death earlier, because I wanted you to read the story following the same steps as I did. So there you go, Yoro was dead, it had happened in 2011, in a tunnel raining the same acid drops that had filled the open mouths of my thirsty Hiroshima. I discovered the news at the end of my life and hereby document it at the end of this testament, which probably has more pages left to write than I have days. Yoro. Dead. But no, I didn’t crumble; I’d come undone so many times by now that I lost the capacity to feel that depth of sadness anymore. I’m going to let you in on a secret. I really like to be touched. Poor Jim, I used to bore him to tears asking him over and over again to caress my arms, my hair, and my legs while we were watching a movie or before we fell asleep. I tried to stroke myself to liberate him from my whims, but it was never the same. The only caresses that relaxed me came from someone else’s hand. The explanation, or what I tell myself at least, is that the skin processes pleasure only when the origin of a touch is a surprise, when the brain isn’t aware of its coming, can’t anticipate its intensity, the exact point where or when it’s going to take place. The same as sorrow, I think. Sorrow, like the pleasure of a caress, materializes only in virgin territory; for it to take effect it has to happen as if for a first time. In my case, after having experienced a multitude of sorrows, I find that nothing takes me by surprise anymore; I’m an arm, a leg, a piece of hair groped in the same place so many times, I’ve lost the capacity for despair. Yet I could and can feel joy because despite what I’ve done, I’m a good woman, and good people never lose their ability to feel joy. The news that Yoro had given birth to a girl didn’t compensate for the loss, but it gave me enough joy to continue forward. I’d asked myself so many times if the pregnancy she spoke of in her letter had been carried through to term. The answer was yes. She gave her daughter, as she had promised in the letter Jim could never read, her same name. Yoro, her daughter, Jim’s granddaughter. In a sense also my own granddaughter, only in a sense, or at least that’s what I thought before finding out what I’m going to explain now.
What I’m going to tell you now I read in a document given to me by one of Yoro’s caregivers in the mine. Yoro had entrusted it to her, afraid someone might try to take her daughter away. The document certified Yoro’s last name, a name Jim knew but had always kept hidden from me. He never used the name when referring to her. And when I saw the name, the whole puzzle clicked into place. Sure, it could have been a coincidence. But that didn’t even cross my mind. If her name was the same as mine, it was because Yoro was flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, and my encounter with Jim had been no coincidence. In a flash it all made sense. I watched my entire universe levitate, in a single instant, right before my eyes, the entire meaning of a story lasting years revealed itself. As I said, my encounter with Jim hadn’t been off the cuff. Jim had searched me out because I was his daughter’s father, her biological father, and when he found me as the true woman that I am, it was only natural that he would fall in love with what was the closest thing of all to Yoro.
This must all seem very complicated to you. But it’s not really. I explained how in the days following the attack and throughout the occupation, the American doctors weren’t allowed to treat atomic victims. But they did have other rights. Like the right to carry out experiments. The right to remove a testicle the bomb hadn’t damaged and extract the sperm—apparently those little cells were stronger than I was—to inseminate an anonymous womb. Yoro was born, a baby destined from her first day of life to express the consequences of radiation on a fetus, on a child, on an adolescent . . . for however long she lasted. That was the reason for the periodic medical reports the foster families had to send in. But the signs of radiotoxemia had only begun here, in the mines. Yoro’s radiation sickness began manifesting itself when she worked with tons of atomic water over her head, extracting from rock the same material that had killed her at birth, but without which she would never have been born. Yoro was a daughter of Oppenheimer; a daughter and later a mother of uranium.
The same woman who showed me the document Yoro had entrusted to her said the only thing Yoro had done the last few days of her life was to pronounce her daughter’s name over and over again. As I said, she had given her daughter her own name, hoping to make her identification more probable: Yoro, like to cry in Spanish. I’ll never forget what Yoro asked in her letter: for Jim to care for Yoro so she could live to contradict the verb llorar. For me, Yoro, my daughter, had been fully identified by the fact that they’d given her my name. Who knows if it was motivated by some last-ditch act of compassion toward me as her father or, on the contrary, a complete lack of interest, creativity, or simply scorn, thinking Jim would never want or be able to find me. They thought so little of me that they gave my daughter my last name, like someone who hides in a closet not because they think it’s a good hiding place, but because he or she knows that nobody would look there. But Jim looked for me, found me, and revealed who I was. I loved Yoro. I looked for her as if she were my own daughter, never realizing that she actually was, crying over her absence throughout my entire life. Why did Jim hide the fact from me? you might ask. I don’t really have an answer for you. Probably
the shock of encountering me a woman cast Jim into a knotty process of assimilation, so he must have needed time to work up a way of sharing the news; but death, as you know, took him too soon.
How many times did I wonder what happened to my genitals after the explosion? How many nightmares did I have of my penis and my testicles crawling around looking for me to no avail? Jim knew about it even more than I did. He’d always known. He knew where the precious element of my testicles had gone, what came out of me, my daughter. He was privy to the significant details of my life and he loved me like no other man ever had or ever will: as a woman and as the father of his daughter.
SO, AS I SAID, they told me in the mine that all Yoro the mother did was repeat her own name, which was her daughter’s name. In response to any question she gave the same answer: Yoro. And not because she’d gone mad, I’m sure, but hoping to make the name stick as long as possible, so the word would be on every tongue and spread until Jim, having read her message, came to find her. Think of the words she used in her letter: “If you can’t find me, please find your grandson or granddaughter, who will have my same name, and please allow her to live to contradict it.” I like to think that aside from having a practical motivation, Yoro had inherited my sense of how significant names are. I’m sure attentiveness to names derives from other traditions close to my own. Take the Chinese characters, for instance, used to express own name, which are formed by the words mouth and moon. Some say it’s because on the last day of each moon the Imperial Guard would call out the names of the men who were to stand in for their companions for the next few days; others—and this is my favorite explanation—argue that its etymology derives from something else: the name of a newborn could be whispered by the father to the mother only by moonlight. It was whispered as something sacred. I call myself H, which doesn’t mean it’s the initial of the name my parents gave me, parents who couldn’t even get my gender right. I chose this initial with something very clear in mind. After realizing that Yoro knew the meaning of her Spanish name, I started asking someone from Spain to say certain words. Eventually I asked how they pronounce the word Hiroshima in their language. “Iroshima,” they said. “The h is silent. We call it the mute letter.” It seemed marvelous to find a letter that existed without a voice. It’s a letter like me, with a presence, a body, but aphasic. That’s how I realized it was my name, the mute one, the one whose city had been razed. I’m H, the mute daughter of mute Hiroshima.
The Story of H Page 27