eclipsed

Eclipsed is a play beautifully written, directed and acted by African-American women. And, guess what, it talks of African women (with a little bit of American ancestry too). It talks of Liberian women and their life during the war that ended in 2003. It talks of the 'wives' of the rebel fighters; it talks also of the women who decided to become soldiers themselves; and it talks of those women who helped both groups by working for peace.
The first group is the easiest to sympathize with. Raped, abused, enslaved in their early teens, killed. Danai Gurira gives them some sparkle of joy and a lot of sense of humor, but their lives cannot but look appalling, unbearable. These things are certainly not new, but Gurira portraits them in the most moving and brilliant way. She bring the audience from laughters to tears, and back.
However, what I am more fascinated with is the dialectics between power and knowledge that takes place throughout the play. In her introduction to the piece Gurira herself recalls being impressed by the “feminine, glamorous, intimidating, powerful, belligerent, and African” female rebel fighters, as much as by “another group of Liberian women, who did the unthinkable”: “through courageous and selfless means they ended a senseless, vicious conflict”. The play itself ends with a young girl holding a book and a gun, undecided. The author, both in her words and in her work, shows a more multi-faceted attitude than her Yale book-devoted audience might have expected. Knowledge, education, books, are all good, important instrument to female and human emancipation. But fighting as a man, among men, after those men gang-raped you, gives a sense of empowerment that books cannot give in the short-term. Ultimately, they are going to. But becoming a perpetrator gets you out of the circle of victims much faster. Gurira does justice to the experience of the female soldiers, showing their desperate attempt of overcoming their passive fate. And it does justice to the unfairness of a world in which rebelling to injustice may lead to connivence with those you are rebelling against; in which a woman's advancement may be constituted by moving from the status of third wife of the commandant to being the protegee of three fellow soldiers; in which many people cannot afford the moral luxury of refusing Hobbesian truths.
She does also justice to the complexity of the experience of those people who can afford the luxury of morality, such as the courageous women who marched against the war, who entered into the war zones and worked for peace. Gurira's portrait of Rita is as sophisticated as that of all the other characters. She appears, at first, a bit snobbish and detached. We then come to know that she is looking for her abducted daughter (and tricked to think that there's going to be some resolution à la Menander, forgetting this is, notwithstanding the frequent amusement, a tragedy). This in itself wouldn't even make her a bad person: after all, she is doing things for all the other women too. But at the end, she is beyond 'doing nice things'. She found her lost child among the daughters of some other mother, and she addresses them as such.
Her love is what ultimately may persuade the female soldier whose name is Mother blessing" to choose knowledge over power. And it is thanks to Rita's noble love, and thanks to the love coming from the hilariously vital newly-mom Bessie, that we exit the theater with the taste of hope in our tears.