Though it is indisputable that Nothing Human has an obvious class concern, there is also enough material to suggest a gesture towards something more complex. But to reach this greater analysis, one must be willing, at the risk of reaching for a neat interpretation, to problematize certain elements which can only be read as extraneous within the present framework. Why, for example, one wonders, does NDiaye take pains to impress Bella’s victimhood upon us? And where does Ignatius fit within this framework? And in the end, why does Bella expel Ignatius from his own home and claim it for herself?

It seems to me that there is a simultaneous gender dimension, a complex treatment of how women experience violence within domestic settings, that risks being crushed to dust under the weight of a simple class analysis. In this new reading of the play, Bella, who marches up and down the stage with her fancy red purse, is our entry point. We must be willing to go out on a limb, against Ignatius’s repeated counsel that ‘the rich woman is hateful,’ to take a compassionate look at her—and not just because she has just escaped a physically (and who’s to say not sexually?) abusive marriage. Marching up and down the stage, she is not merely agitated but also, one can argue, strikingly psychotic. The signs are there in the restless pacing; in the violent clash of opposites inside of her (we are never quite able to decide, for example, whether it is compassion or derision that dominates her feelings towards Djamila); in the many self-aggrandizing lies she tells herself—which, one sadly notes, she has to tell herself: about her family’s benevolence and sophistication. But it is her language that most strikingly gives her psychosis away: on several occasions, Bella bursts out in deranged speech right in the middle of perfectly respectable sentences. This happens enough times for her to lament, ‘Keep these loathsome words from jumping out of my mouth!’—for she is saying things she doesn’t want to be saying and which, given how violently she rejects them (‘They are loathsome!’) she doesn’t really mean.

Because these errant phrases are all about Djamila’s abuse (‘Again and again profaned but not me!’, ‘Under your body your industrious little body!’) they reveal more, it is possible to say, about the psychological effect that bearing witness to the gruesome events has had on Bella than she herself might readily admit. For wasn’t she, after all, also only a child at the time? Watching her friend suffer so terribly in the hands of her family must not have been the pure delight her self-deceiving nature might seem at times to suggest it was.

If this is not enough to engender sympathy for the formerly rich woman, then consider her last words to Djamila, spoken in an almost weepy tone: ‘They took you to keep themselves from taking me. Fucked you to keep themselves from fucking me. You are my friend. It was better, less grave, that it was you. We owe you a lot. You are my friend.’ This is a moment that chills the blood with its meaning—for what are these but the desperate rationalizing of a terrified little girl to the impossible question of what her family was doing to her friend; what, she knows, her family can very well do—and perhaps have done, in suggestive ways, argues Ajayi, in a post-production conversation—to her? The image is of a terror-stricken little girl physically trapped in a burning house but mentally racing through lush fields.

This reading of the play, then, views Bella and Djamila not only as two women on opposite sides of a class conflict but also on the same side of a gender conflict. It asks us to consider the different ways that class works upon gender (Djamila’s low class makes her a sitting duck for abuse while Bella’s high class protects her from directly experiencing it) without denying a commonality of experience (in the end, neither woman is truly spared). Djamila’s coldness and learned disgust for poverty are no more coping mechanisms than Bella’s self-deceit—and for each woman, the trauma persists: in Djamila’s ghost daughter and in Bella’s psychotic outbursts. The point here is not to create a false parallel between both women’s experiences—Bella’s witness trauma is by no means equal to Djamila’s direct experience of abuse—but to till the soil for meaningful feminist solidarity—a project that is in fact actualized in the play’s final scenes. Bella’s final words to Djamila do more than literally stop Djamila in her tracks; they change her persuasion towards Bella. Though she never vacates the apartment (and why should she when she has paid for it in blood), she does concede to offer Bella a job tending to it where before she would not even let Bella feel the furniture—an agreement that is mutually satisfactory now that Bella has moved into Ignatius’s apartment and will ultimately claim for herself. The final image, then, is of the women securely homed and the man displaced. Following researcher and author Diekara Oloruntoba-Oju, feminist solidarity will happen when a woman recognizes and uses as the basis for action something in another that she finds in herself. The question of what that thing is and what, even, that solidarity should look like, must perhaps always be context specific.