A word about…words. Specifically, the heavily saddening and angering words occupying headlines and constellations of hashtags in the twitterverse over the past few days: World Food Day, International Day to Eradicate Poverty, famine, refugees, the Horn of Africa, crisis. “Awareness” and “Activism” seem like heavy words these days, full of either rage or depression. But awareness is not just grief and statistics, which too often lead to an immobilizing depression of their own.

So, a word–or not a word so much as an image, an image of a victim of an atrocity in East Africa:

Meet Sitawa Wafula.
I first saw Sitawa this summer in a Nairobi nightclub, where she performed at an open mike to celebrate the release of the latest issue of Kwani?, Kenya’s first literary magazine. Sitawa stepped onto the stage and quietly adjusted her hair wrap before stopping the show with the announcement that she was a rape victim, and proceeding to recite a breathtaking poem about a woman’s sexual identity. I was in town through the UNHCR, mobilizing a the Survival Girls, a theater group for young Congolese refugee women, and just that day in our workshop my girls had started to talk about rape–about how even speaking of being raped, much less seeking medical help for it, was avoided at all costs by women across Africa, at the risk of being spurned by their families and deemed unfit for marriage. But here was an East African woman, not just admitting what happened, but relating the information publicly and without shame.

Sitawa slipped out before I could find her that night, so I asked the event emcee for her number and texted her an introduction of the Survival Girls. I asked whether she’d be willing to visit the girls during that Sunday’s workshop. “I’ll come with my adventure cap on. See you there babe,” she texted. Later we arranged over the phone to meet at Nakumatt, an upscale mall. “I just got hair, and it’s big. So I will be the girl with the biggest hair,” Sitawa laughed.

Sitawa’s hair wasn’t all that huge, but her earrings were–big teardrop-shaped beads that came down to her shoulders. It was Sunday, and she wore a frilly pink dress. We shared some chicken tikka. Sitawa had been raped on Sunday June 15th, eight years ago. “My project is called Sunday Fifteen for that reason,” she said between bites. “I go into schools and tell girls what to do if they are raped. Not to wash their clothes, not to shower, to go within 72 hours to the hospital. I also raise money for girls who are too poor to buy pads for their periods. They go through the trash to find others’ used pads or sit over a hole for the life of the period. Occasionally their family will forget that’s where they are and get angry that they haven’t done their chores, and the entire time they have missed school.”

I couldn’t believe the wonderful fortune of meeting Sitawa; she couldn’t have been a more perfect guest to a Survival Girls workshop. We headed to the slum of Kangemi, where the Survival Girls live, and into the community’s church compound. The pearly-eyed old man guarding the entrance nodded and gestured with his arm, indicating that the girls he knew I was looking for were already inside. In the sharp sunlit air we heard them and made our way toward the scraps of sound floating over the red tin roofs:…We love yoooou…Africa my motherland…we need you…

The girls had come up with that song the workshop previous as an introduction to their theater piece, which they created to address rape and the refugee experience of seeking asylum in a new country. Three girls entered from stage left, three from stage right. They stepped and swayed in unison with their arms outstretched toward each other, and when Sofia, the eldest Survival Girl, clapped once, they all dropped to their knees with a cry and Dianne began her monologue, bellowing about the rainfall of bullets.

They girls broke into smiles and waved when Sitawa and I rounded the corner. Sitawa introduced herself and the girls positioned a bench for us to sit on, explaining that the compound had no free rooms. After praising their Sunday-best church outfits I turned to Sitawa.

“Do you mind telling your story?” I asked her. “The girls have developed a piece that talks about some of the same topics. I thought then they could perform the piece in full for you.”

The girls settled onto the brick steps and perched on the edge of the bench. Sitawa began in her high voice, telling the story in English and sometimes Kiswahili.

She had been raped by someone who knew her, someone she trusted. Her boyfriend’s best friend. They were on their way to church together, walking the same route as usual. He gave her a soda with something in it, something that made her pass out. That was in the morning, and when she came to, she was naked, in a bed, and the clock said 4pm. She touched herself and there was substance on her. He was there, and he raped her again, and this time she was conscious.

When Sitawa reached this part of the story, her shoulders drooped. “After that,” she said, “for months I couldn’t…” she let out a breath. “I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t want to see anybody. I didn’t want to go anywhere.”

I stole a look at the girls’ faces. They were all looking at the ground, quiet, attentive, respectful. Some of them had been gang-raped by men they had seen hack to pieces their parents and brothers. The group became a theater project when the girls said they wanted to perform the words they wrote, and when I realized that the extent of their trauma made embodiment of text not just helpful but necessary for any real reduction of post-traumatic stress to begin within them, within selves orphaned, dislocated, soaked in shame and often rendered immobile with despair. This stasis of hopelessness seizes upon trauma victims through the release of calmatives fired by the brain stem, and it happens often to physically threatened and overpowered young women. If your nervous system judges you too small to “fight” and too slow to “flight”, you get “freeze”. A depression that is much more than conscious-mind deep, the motionless numb of a “freeze” indicates that your brain stem has judged you unable to escape and doused you with a calmative–literally, your body has prepared itself for injury. If the men who told your father that he had to rape you or die, and he refused, and you watched them slaughter him before they took you out back, gang-raped you, and left you to die, you’ll be in that choiceless void of remove for a very, very long time.

Sitawa finished her story and the girls thanked her. She and I took our seats on the bench and the girls assumed their places. It was their first time performing for anyone but me.

I played a monkey called Swift in the Ives short play “Words, Words, Words” in high school, and six of Bluebeard’s doomed wives in college. Observing the directors of those two plays was all I had to go on when Sofia turned to me during one of our first workshops and said, “Ming, we want you to correct us.”

I had been content simply to be the reason for the girls to get together, to get to know one another, and make some art unhindered by the neighborhood boys peeking through the windows of whichever compound room we could claim. Just sitting quietly in the corner while they conferred and practiced was the most important thing I could do for the girls, as far as I was concerned.

“Correct you?” I asked. “Do you mean, direct you?” I looked at Sofia; she and the other girls, who stood behind her, nodded.

I figured out the directing thing when I realized it was like editing creative writing, which involves mainly a sense of pitch and order. Something had to sound right, verbally and, as it turned out, spatially. Every time they ran through the piece, I took harried notes: “1) Palome look up. 2) Nana NEEDS to either look upset or just hide her face, not believable. 3) Valentine needs to block better. 4) Dianne come in sooner. 5) S & S, stop fidgeting! 6) transitions IN UNISON!”
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