The Dark Side of Charity

Kanyin Ajayi’s English adaptation of French author Marie NDiaye’s Rien d’humain reveals the dark side of charity while also asking audiences to consider how gender violence affects women of various classes. 

My first impression of French author Marie NDiaye’s work (her 2009 Prix Goncourt winner, Three Strong Women) was as bewildering, unsettling one with the sense that one is not quite sure what has happened. What, for example, is to be made of Norah, one of the titular ‘strong women’? A thirty-eight-year-old woman, she inexplicably pees herself on two separate occasions; has no memory of the months she spent living in a little house in Senegal; and ultimately ends her section by joining her detestable father (who has framed his own son for a murder he committed) on the poinciana tree the man has, weirdly, made his abode—a moment that reads disturbingly like a truce, all the more confounding for coming just after Norah swears her readiness to ‘confront him fair and square’ And what, one wonders, is to be made of the entire hour-long bizarrerie that is NDiaye’s 2004 play, Rien d’humain, brought alive in Alliance Française, Lagos as Nothing Human by Nigerian writer and stage director Kanyin Ajayi?

There is, of course, enough material to be able to say something, at least, about the play. So, one can say that Nothing Human presents a kind of power tussle between two women: Bella (Bridget Nkem), the only daughter of a once-affluent family; and Djamila (Ade Laoye), her adoptive sister and childhood friend, whose biological father worked as a servant for the family many years ago. Now, many years later, Bella has just returned to Senegal from the United States, broke, divorced and with three sons—and she wants to reclaim her luxury apartment, which she allowed Djamila to occupy with the agreement that the latter would move out when Bella returned. But, having made a good life in the apartment, Djamila refuses to vacate it. She more than refuses—she believes herself entitled to the apartment, claiming it as hers (‘This apartment is mine because I decree it!’ she proclaims.) In between these two women, acting as some kind of mediator, is Ignatius (‘Chukwu Martin), Djamila’s neighbour and lover, whose holy grail is to see Djamila’s mysterious daughter, whom he believes is his but of whom he has only ever heard. In the end, Ignace will finally get a glimpse of the child, only to then lose his home to Bella.

The plot, then, to the extent that there is one, is coherent enough. The bewilderment comes from certain bizarre elements that don’t lend themselves too easily to swift interpretation. Anyway, with only these three characters on a stage as spare as spare stages come, all is in order for an infinitely compelling, occasionally hilarious but ultimately perplexing dramatic hour...