Rape,Representation,and the Endurance of Hegemonic Masculinity

The History of Rape in International Law and Culture

The cultural scripts that govern understandings of rape have emerged most significantly in law and in literature. Although the two are linked, witnessing rape in law is constrained by the tenets of testimony, which, in turn, are linked to evidentiary truth. Literature, on the contrary, is free to exceed such bounds and to include representations of interior states of mind and being, as well as complex explorations of the contexts in which perpetrators and victims encounter one another, to probe more deeply the multiple truths and perspectives that bear upon this age-old crime. As I show below, cultural representations have often bolstered jurisprudence on the subject of rape, and both have emerged from the longue durée of patriarchy and its manifestation of what we now call toxic masculinity.

There is much to be said about what has been stated—and more significantly, what has not—about the crime of rape in the history of jurisprudence. Without rehearsing the injunctions to abduct, rape, and impregnate women found in the Old Testament, I will start in the European Middle Ages, with the words of Henry de Bracton (1235, quoted in Pallotti, 2012), the most prominent jurist of his time, in his treatise On the Laws and Customs of England:

The rape of virgins is a crime imputed by a woman to the man by whom she says she has been forcibly ravished against the king’s peace. If he is convicted of this crime [this] punishment follows: the loss of members, that there be member for member, for when a virgin is defiled she loses her member and therefore let her defiler be punished in the parts in which he offended. Let him thus lose his eyes which gave him sight of the maiden’s beauty for which he coveted her. And let him lose as well the testicles which excited his hot lust. (pp. 288-289)

Here we find the divinely sanctioned revenge of the Old Testament patriarchy—an eye for an eye—in a crime that was defined as one against property (either husband’s or father’s), rather than person, the person of the raped woman.

From the start, rape as a crime was restricted to the loss of virginity, so there was no redress for a married woman or woman whose “value” had already been compromised, nor was the woman’s consent the point upon which legal redress rested. Indeed, in the case of gang rape, de Bracton (quoted in Pallotti, 2012) makes clear that “to defile a virgin and to lie with one defiled [are different deeds]” and therefore “only one shall be held for the defilement, though several may be liable for lying with her” (p. 298, n. 6). Only the act of defiling—that is, “taking” the woman’s virginity—is a crime (and this construction of virginity as a materiality to be “taken” demands our attention too—this thing, this hymen; this non-thing, this patriarchal icon of purity and value; this symbol, this badge of which the bearer often knows little until it is gone and she begins the traumatic process of paying the price for her own lost worth).

Here is a famous example that illuminates the intractability of rape representations that have dominated the historical and cultural record. Lucretia, or Lucrece, who lived in 6th-century BC Rome, was married to Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus, who received in his home Sextus Tarquinius, son of the last Roman King. Tarquinius had come to Rome on a military errand; legend has it that the two men were debating the “virtues of wives,” which caused Collinatius to bring the party of men to his home to demonstrate the perfect virtue of his own wife, to catch her in the act of being good, as it were. And indeed, there she was, the perfect embodiment of patriarchal authority, weaving with her maids. Rather than what, precisely? What was it that the doubting Tarquinius hoped he might find that would compromise the relative power and position of Collinatius via the body of his wife? Here we find the eternal suspicion of women and female sexuality on early display, with predictably catastrophic consequences. Apparently enamored, Tarquinius stole into her room in the dead of that night and offered her two choices: submit to his sexual advances and become his wife and future queen, or he would kill her and one of her slaves and place the bodies together, then claim he had caught her having adulterous sex. Lucretia, the story goes, “chose” the former; the next day, riven with shame, she stabbed herself. Her grief-stricken husband paraded the bloodied body through the streets of Rome to garner support for a revolutionary committee, which then overthrew the monarchy, thus forming the Roman Republic.

This story bears all the hallmarks of the epic or heroic rape, repeatedly imagined in the cultural tradition, that positions the raped woman as what Matthes (2000) calls “the foundation of the founding” (p. 26).Those hallmarks include the equation of woman with nation, and further with nation-building; the securing of the social contract of the nation state through the sexual contract that ensured male rights to women’s bodies as a means of exchange and a foundation upon which to base the alliances that built the fraternal order; and the dishonor and shame that accrue to the raped woman, in spite of her heroic function as foundation for the state, and that relegate her to the disastrous fates of silence or suicide. Lucretia’s suicide also demonstrates the function of the raped woman as an interaction between men (just as marriage and all other contracts involving women were and often still are simply interactions between men), and the resulting patriarchal ambivalence toward women who have suffered rape. As Seifert (1994) argues,

The rape of women carries a message: a man-to-man communication, as it were, telling the other side that they are incapable of protecting “their” women, and thus hurting their manly pride. . . . We can say that men see the abuse of “their” women as a degradation of their masculinity. What counts is not the suffering of the women, but the effect it has on men. (p. 58)

This theme of women raped in wartime constituting the doubled sign of masculine power in the act of rape and masculine impotence in the failure to protect is everywhere in the historical and cultural records; significantly, these competing fantasies of masculinity most often leave women silent, shamed, stigmatized, or dead.

Over time, however, the law shifted to consider rape as a crime against a person, rather than against property, although this important development did not interrupt the sense by which rape still constituted a crime against the men who had a stake in the woman’s body, rather than against the woman herself. Indeed, inasmuch as this shift centered the issue of consent, it surely was not helpful to women, who now bore the burden of proof: Was the woman raped by force, or did she “give” herself away? As remains true today,

failing to prove lack of consent, a woman could become complicit in the crime; therefore, the raped victim must not only refuse consent to her assailant but also make her refusal unambiguously evident to an audience that prejudicially questioned women’s sexual motives. (Solga, 2006, p. 58)

Virginity testing is an ancient practice that continues to the present day as a means of controlling women and their sexualities; in this way, credibility, innocence, and the possibility of a successful appeal to authorities for redress rely on a woman’s discursive and physical performance of her own violation. Only by making visible what cannot be visualized and translating it into material “signs” can the victim legitimate her legal action. Significantly, de Bracton (1235, quoted in Pallotti, 2012) “instructs” a raped woman about how to present herself as a credible victim:

She must go at once and while the deed is newly done, with the hue and cry, to the neighboring township and there show the injury done her to men of good repute, the blood and her clothing stained with blood, and her torn garments. And in the same way she ought to go to the reeve of the hundred, the king’s serjeant, the coroners and the sheriff. (p. 290)

Virgin or non-virgin, the stigma of rape, the idea that the woman allowed/wanted/was complicit with the act, particularly if she should conceive a child from it; the stain of shame and dishonor borne by the woman—all remain hallmarks of rape (both “peacetime”/criminal and “wartime”/crime against humanity), central to the problem of its cultural representation in the aftermath.

Let us fast forward now to the history of legislation regarding rape in wartime. The founding legal text on the conduct of war is the 1863 Lieber Code, published by the U.S. government during the American Civil War; in this document, rape was one of the acts of “Wanton Violence” for which its perpetrator would be subject to capital punishment. Indeed, the Union government prosecuted more than 450 cases of rape, though most did not result in the death penalty; significantly, the Lieber Code allowed women of color their first opportunity to testify in a court of law, as early as 1864, when this right was still denied to people of African descent in the United States (Feimster, 2013, para. 5-6). The Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 stipulated in Article 27 that, “women will be specially protected against any attack on their honor, and notably against rape,” though it did not rise to the level of a war crime within the Conventions. Scholarly consensus has it that rape was not defined as a crime against humanity until the 1997 case of Jean-Paul Akayesu, mayor of the rural commune Taba, in the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR), and the conviction in 2000 of Radomir Kovac and three others in the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY). However, according to an April 18, 2017 article in The Guardian, recently released documents from the 1942 United Nations (UN) War Crimes Commission

demonstrate that rape and forced prostitution were being prosecuted as war crimes in tribunals as far apart as Greece, the Philippines, and Poland in the late 1940s, despite more recent suggestions that this was a legal innovation following the 1990s Bosnia conflict. (Bowcott, 2017, para. 6)

It remains to be seen what scholars will find now that the UN War Crimes Commission files are open for general review. Until further findings are made public, however, we recognize that the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda set crucial precedents, recognizing rape as a form of torture, as a crime against humanity, and as an aspect of genocide. As a side note, the cases brought before the ICTY and ICTR are remarkable for having demonstrated the failure of fixed notions of gender identity in rape: The ICTY prosecuted the first ever case of sexual violence as a crime of humanity against male victims, against Serbian commander Dusko Tadic, and the ICTR prosecuted the first ever case against a female perpetrator, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, convicted of genocide and genocidal rape in 2011. Finally, the first conviction by the International Criminal Court in the Hague for rape as a crime against humanity was delivered in 2016 against Paul Bemba, a former Congolese vice president and rebel leader; however, the guilty verdict was overturned in 2018 by appeals judges, leaving victims, unsurprisingly, without reparation.

This brief, incomplete history of rape jurisprudence and representation reveals the inadequacy of the law to fully encompass the perspectives of victims and perpetrators, both in its determinations to characterize and prosecute rape as a crime of war and in the ongoing power struggles that can reverse important precedents for political and social reasons. The remainder of this article will focus on the importance of opening space for victims’ voices to be heard above the bureaucratic din of legal decisions and human rights reports, even while arguing that literature can provide means for representing both victims’ and perpetrators’ experiences beyond the stereotypical narratives that typically accrue to those subject positions. I conclude with a reading of Dongala’s Johnny Mad Dog to show how the deeper imaginative work of literary texts can reveal toxic masculinity as a powerful social current on both local and global scales, particularly as it informs encounters within the political and economic tides of wartime. Dongala’s narrative, centered upon characters burdened by the subjectivities associated with gendered norms in places marked by instability and violence, provides a blueprint for both the problem of wartime rape and potential solutions, as I explore through a study of Laokole’s final act of violence in the novel.

Silence

In spite of some legal triumphs, post-genocidal atmospheres remain characterized by pervasive, debilitating fear and shame; even still, rape survivors, particularly in Rwanda and former Yugoslavia, have been key to achieving such legal precedents, often at great cost to themselves. Cecile, Victoire, and Seraphine, three of the five Rwandan survivors whose testimony brought about the world’s first conviction of rape as a crime of genocide, share one certainty: Telling their stories, and reliving that trauma, was worth it—but only because they won the case. As Jina Moore (2016), a journalist who interviewed the women on the occasion of the release for The Uncondemned (2015), a documentary by Michele Mitchell and Nick Louvel that tells their story, reports,

They’re proud and comforted to know that the Akayesu verdict is studied in virtually every human rights law class in the world, and that women in Congo and South Sudan and Burundi and beyond might feel brave enough to tell their own stories too, because the Akayesu verdict proves that individual voices can also be evidence, that rape is not just a personal trauma but an international crime, that genocide was and is real. (para. 89)

As with other cultural texts, the documentary extends the legal process by providing greater access to the interior lives of the survivors and the contexts for the crime of genocidal rape and the legal proceedings created to address it, and, in this case, emphasizes the difficulty for survivors of speaking about or testifying to their experience of rape.

In fact, silence as fact, sign, and symbol pervades representations and discussions of rape, in wartime and peacetime alike, raising an imperative, as Seifert (1992) argues, to “[b]ring . . . the violence back to cultural consciousness and make . . . it public” (p. 7). Seifert refers to this imperative as the “sine qua non for change,” maintaining that

History has placed a cloak of silence over the atrocities committed against women . . . that denies the historical meaning of rape and its structural importance in gender relations. To suppress and ignore that experience means, within the context of a culture, to blot out female experience and thus female subjectivity. (p. 8)

Seifert’s contention resonates with Oliver’s (2001) assertion of witness as an ethical imperative, a “response-ability” that is foundational to the construction and maintenance of subjectivity itself in the following three senses: It establishes the subject’s right and ability to address others, establishes the subject’s right and ability to respond to others, and establishes others’ responsibility to respond to her “in ways that open up rather than closing off the possibility of response” (p. 15). We can behold the brutal foreclosure of such “response-ability” (and with it, the possibility of ethical witness) in the words of defense attorneys at the International Criminal Tribunal for Former Yugoslavia trial of Dragan Zelenovic (convicted of gang rape, torture and enslavement at the Foca prison camp, part of the ethnic cleansing of Bosniak Serbs, 1992-1994). Those attorneys argued that “since the accused had not killed the women they had sex with, the acts should not be taken as a serious crime.” They also claimed that, “the rape itself is not an act that inflicts severe bodily pain” and used this denial of women’s suffering, which as we have seen dates to the beginning of recorded history, to argue that the victims “were not exposed to any severe physical or psychological suffering.”

And yet the witnesses prevailed in the ICTY, if by prevail we mean that their claims were acknowledged as part of the legal and historical record, and some perpetrators were held accountable (though with sentences mostly ranging from 7-20 years, we might question the message sent by the sentencing). They prevailed because they broke silence, claiming the authoritative first-person voice, that of the survivor-witness, not only in the halls of the Tribunal, where they required intense security measures to do so, but also in their communities and among themselves. This reclamation of voice is also a gesture toward rebuilding subjectivities profoundly damaged in the foundational act and cultural consequences of wartime rape.

Echoing Seifert’s emphasis upon the cultural significance of silence and voice, Solnit (2017) takes the proposition to an even more foundational level when she asserts that “by redefining whose voice is valued, we redefine our society and its values” (p. 24). Such emphasis upon the cultural implications of silence in complex dialogue with the individual or psychological ones causes us to question the trope of unspeakability that characterizes the discussion not only of sexual violence, but more fundamentally of pain itself—and that has been a central tenet of the analysis of trauma in art and literature. Such theories are indebted to Scarry’s (1985) seminal The Body in Pain, which expanded upon earlier scholarship about the representability of the Nazi holocaust in claiming that the experience of physical pain defies articulation, partly because it destroys the capacity for language and partly because of the difficulty of finding words and images to capture the pain induced by atrocity, or that which Oliver (2001) calls “the horror beyond recognition” (p. 8).

Significantly, however, later critics have questioned Scarry’s universalizing formulation, arguing that, in spite of the “unthinkability” and “unspeakability” of atrocity, testimonies to it are regularly thought and spoken with varying degrees of comfort, fluency, resistance, and repercussion in the everyday worlds of family, community, law, and politics. This critique reinforces Morris’s (1991) important reminder that “pain is always historical—always reshaped by a particular time, place, and culture” (p. 6). Indeed, as Herman (1992) argues in her groundbreaking study Trauma and Recovery, the first to bring the “private” pain of women into the field of trauma studies, which had previously focused almost exclusively upon the “public” trauma experienced by men in wartime: “When the victim is already devalued (a woman, a child), she may find that the most traumatic events of her life take place outside the realm of the socially validated reality. Her experience becomes unspeakable” (p. 8). Like Seifert, Herman offers a very different inflection upon the unspeakable: Rather than a universal linguistic and psychological condition that remains fixed across cultures and histories, this “unspeakability” is a highly particular, contextualized, and intentional form of gendered silencing. As such, given its specificity and the possibility of sociocultural change (as opposed to the near-impossibility of transforming a universal, existential condition), this silence can be challenged. As we have seen, it can be broken.

If this is so, then we are invited to question how such silence might be productively broken and what the breaking of silence does. The idiom of “breaking” the silence surely has something to teach us about the qualities of different silences in that it captures the violence of rending or tearing the state of muteness, that is, imposed silence. Indeed, as Solnit (2017) asserts,

Silence is the ocean of the unsaid, the unspeakable, the repressed, the erased, the unheard. It surrounds the scattered islands made up of those allowed to speak and of what can be said and who listens. Silence is what is imposed; quiet is what is sought. (p. 17)

To be sure, silence signifies a wide range of states of being: some wretched and horrifying, others peaceful, serene, contemplative. Seifert’s “historical cloak of silence” that suppresses atrocities committed against women is of the wretched and horrifying sort, and for them, experiencing silence as the quiet of peace may no longer be possible. Either way, the introduction of sound into a silence-scape implies the vehemence of a strike or blow: When a peaceful silence is broken, it can be jarring; when an imposed silence is broken, the backlash can be fatal, as those women who have testified to their experience of sexual violence and been stigmatized, shunned, or killed as a result surely demonstrate.

We break silence around the historical experience of rape with sounds, images, and texts in an endless variety of forms, yet it is an open question what those sounds and images achieve (and what they achieve depends heavily upon what form they take and in what contexts they are circulated). At the core, however, as Hesford (1999) stresses, if we want to see change in rape scripts and cultures, we must redefine “publicly the experience of rape from the victim’s perspective, rather than from the perspective of the rapist and of law enforcement officials” (p. 203). When rendered into literary terms, Hesford’s injunction translates into point of view, narrative, or testimonial voice, literary keys to calibrating audience response. More generally, in the context of wartime rape, the embrace of the survivor’s point of view demands the restoration of her body/mind/soul to the story of what was, the wresting of that story from men who would deny it, as for instance those defense attorneys in the ICTY.

Hegemonic, Precarious, and Subordinated Masculinities

Ur-scholar of rape Brownmiller (1975) presented the classic account of sexual violence (wartime and otherwise) in her seminal Against Our Will, a volume that brought rape into public discussion in the United States and that shifted understanding of its motive from the masculine desire for sex to the masculine desire for power. Early in her treatise, Brownmiller imagines the originary moment of rape, tracking its evolution from an individual act of violence and usurpation to a shared, masculinist cultural event:

If the first rape was an unexpected battle founded on the first woman’s refusal, the second rape was indubitably planned. Indeed, one of the earliest forms of male bonding must have been the gang rape of one woman by a band of marauding men. (p. 15)

Not to put too fine a point on it, Brownmiller submits that “Men’s discovery that his genitalia could serve as a weapon to generate fear must rank as one of the most important discoveries of prehistoric times, along with the use of fire and the first crude stone axe” (pp. 14-15). This “discovery” continues to fuel the race to hegemonic masculine identity, as Brownmiller claims: “Men who rape in war are ordinary Joes, made unordinary by entry into the most exclusive male-only club in the world.” She continues,

In the name of victory and the power of the gun, war provides men with a tacit license to rape. In the act and in the excuse, rape in war reveals the male psyche in its boldest form, without the veneer of “chivalry” or civilization. (p. 32)

Such expressions of masculinity are endemic across the globe, including in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), in which conflict over resources and political power has raged nearly continuously since the post-independence moment, but most acutely for our purposes since 1998, the start of Africa’s Great War. Especially egregious in recent years has been the use of mass rape in the Eastern DRC, which has been embroiled in resource wars as well as identitarian conflicts born in the aftermath of the 1994 Rwandan genocide when thousands of Hutu citizens and militia members fled the Rwandan Patriotic Front (the Tutsi militia that finally put an end to the genocide) entering refugee camps set up in Eastern DRC. Fieldwork with soldiers from both government forces and extra-legal militias reveals a hegemonic masculinity that combines both the desire for masculine power within the cultural context of the Eastern DRC and a profound sense of sexual entitlement that precludes both empathy and remorse. This raw hegemonic masculinity results at least in part from the profound instability caused by the long conflict, which, as a researcher and a nongovernmental organization (NGO) worker Lwambo (2011) notes, produces

discrepancies between dominant ideals of masculinity and the actual realities of men’s lives. As men try to enact masculine ideals of breadwinner and family head, the current political and economic context puts them under increasing pressure. [Men interviewed] drew a direct connection between the resulting sense of failure and unhealthy outlets for asserting masculinity, which include lack of productivity and violence. (p. 2)

Translating these ideas into the terms of masculinity theory, Banwell (2014) restates the situation in terms of what she calls “toxic patriarchy as a pre-existing condition” for mass rape:

Men in Congolese society according to localized discourses of hegemonic heterosexual masculinity are supposed to have high sex drives, to obtain multiple partners, to bestow gifts in exchange for sex, and to be financially capable of purchasing one or more wives. . . . Subordinate masculinity turns into hypermasculinity in the war zone to resolve the tension. (p. 53)

As a Lt. Col. in the DRC Armed Forces explains,

A soldier, if he has no possibilities, no money so that he can go the normal way, if he has nothing in his pocket, nothing to give to a woman, he will take her by force. Physically, men have needs. . . . It is very difficult to stop him. . . . So a soldier needs a bit of money on his pocket and he needs to have leave. If that would happen it would reduce the rapes a lot. (Baaz & Stern, 2009, p. 509)

And finally, let us hear from one of those child soldiers himself:

I liked it in the army because we could do anything we liked to do. When some civilian had something I liked, I just took it without him doing anything to me. We used to rape women. Anything I wanted to do [I did]. I was free. (Peters & Richards, 1998, p. 194)

Consider this man (or perhaps boy’s) construction of freedom here: the freedom to take, the freedom to use, the freedom to harm in the name of “what we like to do, what we wanted to do,” and then consider how far removed this “ethic” is from that of the freedom extolled in the neoliberal order of unfettered, predatory, racist patriarchal capitalism? How different is this man’s violence from the violence of that system? As Banwell (2012) reminds us, the toxic masculinity of the Eastern DRC may have local roots and contexts, but it surely did not originate nor does it stop there:

Globalization has created a world gender order, at the top of which sits hegemonic masculinity. . . . For men who receive the benefits of patriarchy and capitalism, hegemony does not require physical and/or sexual violence (although it may use force and competitive aggression); rather it involves “ascendency achieved through culture, institutions, and persuasion.” For marginal masculinities, hegemony often relies on ascendency through violence. (p. 47)

Dongala’s 2005 novel, Johnny Mad Dog, provides a detailed literary portrait of just such a “marginalized masculinity” in his chilling 15-year-old soldier, Johnny Mad Dog (this, of course, is a nom de guerre). The novel spans a period of 48 hours of looting authorized by a militia leader—an event that corresponds to the reality that most troops in DRC, both militia and government, are underpaid, if paid at all; military leaders commonly encourage looting (including rape) as both incentive and reward for service. The narrative is built through the voices of Johnny Mad Dog and Laokole, also 15 years old, and a female refugee who, hearing of the impending raid on her village, takes to the road with her mother, brother, and thousands of other refugees fleeing the violence with nothing more than what they can carry. Johnny Mad Dog is one of several significant African child soldier narratives—others include Chris Abani’s (2007) Song for Night: A Novella; Uzodinma Iweala’s (2005) Beasts of No Nation; and Ahmadou Kourouma’s (2000) Allah n’est pas oblige, translated as Allah Is Not Obliged in 2004. Both Johnny Mad Dog and Beasts of No Nation were adapted into feature films. Together with perpetrator memoirs such as Ishmael Beah’s (2007) A Long Way Gone, this body of work comprises novels from the point of view of the perpetrator; all are lauded for experimenting with genre and form to deepen audience understandings of this complex figure.

Johnny Mad Dog is graphically realist, particularly in its reproduction of acts of violence so brutal as to be characterized by literary critic Coundouriotis (2010) as “the unraveling of the human”—although Dongala himself claims that they are not only real in the mimetic sense of recreating violence in writing, but also that there were “true” things that he could not bring himself to write. It is also allegorical in its presentation of the oppositions girl/boy, refugee/soldier, good/evil, victim/perpetrator, although allegory remains rooted in realism, as Coundouriotis argues: “The exaggerated polarities of Dongala’s fictional world are in themselves a commentary on the reality of the world he depicts” (p. 195). His doubled narrative repeats the same events—particularly the most brutally violent ones—from the perspectives of both Johnny and Lao. In this way, Dongala creates a dialogic imagination for readers; that is, he enacts through these doubled narratives the essentially dialogic nature of consciousness, as contrasted with the idea expressed in Descartes’s exhortation: “I think, therefore I am,” which, not insignificantly, is the model of individual human consciousness and being upon which the international human rights movement has been built. In Descartes’s formulation, consciousness and being are singular and autonomous, generated from the rational character of human thought; for Bakhtin, consciousness is not singular but multiple, always formed in dialogue with others, with the world, and best captured in the novel form. This dialogic imagination gestures toward the intersubjectivity theorized by Judith Butler and others as fundamental to consciousness, the idea that one’s self and sense of self are always formed in deep relation to others—also an antidote to the autonomous, individuated, Cartesian subject of the human rights regime. Too, the novel accepts the challenge of response-ability set by Oliver (2001) as the prerequisite to witness, which is, in turn, the precondition of subjectivity, both through the inadvertent exchanges (address, on one hand, and response, on the other) between Johnny and Laokole before their paths have actually crossed, and in the simple fact that both represent the “subjugated others” whom Oliver theorizes. Although readers may be well and truly horrified by the character of Johnny, there is no point pretending he does not exist “in real life” or that he is a monster outside the realm of the human; rather, as Dongala himself admonishes, we must account for him, for his violence and his victimization, both, particularly if we mean to unravel the rape scripts that, as we have seen, have both structured and saturated human history across time and space. The dialogic nature of the novel helps to account for both Johnny and Laokole, who both ultimately turn out to be victim-perpetrators.

For in the end, when Johnny and Laokole finally meet and Laokole is threatened with rape, it is Laokole who triumphs, first with her voice—breaking silence—and then with her body in an extraordinary act of retribution and survival:

The familiar expression “to meet one’s fate” occurred to me. So I decided to really go and meet my fate—to take the initiative and not simply wait until he gave me an order. With a determination that was part bravado, part movie gesture, I opened the unlocked door and entered the beast’s lair. (Dongala, 2002/2007, p. 311)

In this interior monologue, readers witness several important markers of Laokole’s character that contribute to the allegorical intentions of the novel: First, in spite of her impoverished background, she is sophisticated enough to understand “the movie gesture” and the difference between that (“a studied performance for an audience”) and bravado, which the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) defines as

boastful or threatening behavior; ostentatious display of courage or boldness; bold or daring action intended to intimidate or to express defiance; often, an assumption of courage or hardihood to conceal felt timidity, or to carry one out of a doubtful or difficult position.

I thought it worth quoting the OED in full, given the nuances of the word and the way in which they resonate with Laokole’s actions, capturing both her “boastful or ostentatious display of courage,” which might well be a description of the swagger that child soldiers must take on, and which is another expression of the intersubjectivity built through the narrative space she shares with Johnny. Her boldness stands in defiance of the patriarchal conventions that bear down on her from every side and completely undoes the child soldier Johnny, who is used to watching people cower before the barrel of his gun and, therefore, to do his bidding. Likewise, the nuances of the word bravado imply her ability to break silence with “intimidating” voice and action, especially action taken purposefully to conceal her fear.

It is this action, along with her sarcasm and defiance, that throw Johnny Mad Dog off kilter when he enters the house, and it is this advantage that makes it possible for her to turn bravado into action, as the final lines of the novel share, from the perspective of Johnny’s interior monologue:

I moved toward her. I didn’t see the Bible coming. Thrown with her left hand, the heavy book struck me full in the face, right between the eyes, with incredible force. Why hadn’t it occurred to me that the witch must be left-handed? I fell over backward from the blow. The nape of my neck smashed against the edge of the table, and I landed on the floor. I was dead, killed by a Bible. People had always told me to beware of women and books! The room was swimming around me. I had to get up, I had to kill her. My hand reached instinctively for the gun at my hip, but a heavy object came smashing down on my fingers. And then a fury began giving me relentless, repeated blows between my legs. The pain was unbearable. I screamed. I pleaded for it to stop—but the fury didn’t know what pity was, and continued to strike, to strike. I began pissing blood, my testicles burst, my balls were pulp. I was castrated. But the fury still didn’t stop. Now the pain filled my entire body. . . . I was in agony . . . was dying . . . I was dead . . . I . . . I . . . (Dongala, 2002/2007, p. 317)

To return to questions of representational ethics, what do these blows, delivered by an African girl (an aspiring engineer whose baccalaureate exams were postponed by war and who stands now alone with no family, no community, international or otherwise, no support, only the raw facts of her survival, her life, her belief in goodness, her aspirations, and the vulnerable girl child she has adopted), have to do with the ethical work of witnessing via cultural texts? What is the meaning of these rupturing blows to the very tool and symbol of hegemonic masculinity, the “weapon” or “pistol” or “missile,” as Johnny himself called them, but that are also the genitals of a child transformed by violence and trauma into a weapon?

We might be tempted to interpret Laokole’s action as what Hesford (1999) identifies as a

[transformation] of existing gendered power relations in the culture and in this specific [attempted] rape, but one that simply reverses the binary opposition male/power and female/powerless without deconstructing it. . . . The victim rewrites the rape narrative of male power by constructing herself as the one who inflicts pain and violation; the survivor literally maims and disarms the phallus . . . (pp. 206-207)

However, I argue that the conclusion also “challenges social prescriptions that sanitize the female psyche and dictate what constitutes appropriate female behavior . . .” (p. 207), modeling one of the keys to transforming the culture of hegemonic masculinity that informs the perpetration of rape. In the passage above, Laokole experiences Johnny as “a beast,” but Johnny experiences her as “a fury,” a “fury” that has no pity for the rapist. And indeed, Dongala’s strong statement about the devastations caused by toxic masculinity is punctuated here; as critic Kearney (2010) notes,

Through the accumulation of grossly inhuman actions, Dongala prepares us steadily for an ending in which the only solution for Johnny’s evil is to destroy him, although through his interior monologues that reveal his foreclosed aspirations as an intellectual as well as the savage brutalities he suffers at the hands of his “commanders,” Dongala enables us to respond with a degree of understanding to Johnny, and thus not to dismiss him as too reprehensible for empathy. (p. 82)

This fine balance resonates with the actuality of communal responses to child soldiers in DRC: As noted above, it is difficult for communities to re-embrace them, and they are marked with perpetrator identities that do not easily make room for understanding the ways in which they themselves are deeply victimized and traumatized (perhaps most seriously by the very acts of violence they were forced to commit). In many communities, then, as Coundouriotis (2010) reports,

We find an insistence on rituals of purification. As one subject explains, “If a person goes to fight a war, he becomes another person, because he learns how to kill other people, even his own mother and father. . . . During that time he only thinks of killing. . . . When he returns he has to be treated to become his own self again.” Rituals of purification become key to the process of reintegration and they “do not involve verbal exteriorization of the traumatic experience of war” because “people would rather not talk about the past.” (p. 193)

Could the ending of Johnny Mad Dog evoke such a ritual purification, not of the perpetrator-victim Johnny Mad Dog per se, but rather of the toxic masculinity he embodies as a (child) soldier?

Producing a protagonist who straddles the line of victim-perpetrator removes the narrative from typical human rights conventions, such as those characterizing the savage–victim–savior metaphor, whereby the speaker embodies unambiguous innocence, thereby testing the limits of the human rights paradigm: Dongala’s novel “elect[s] to foreground the dehumanizing necropolitical formations that defy the normative values of reason and autonomy that inform human rights discourse” (Coundouriotis, 2010, p. 194). In addition, we see how Laokole’s adoption of violence positions her as a victim-perpetrator as well, although

while her action at novel’s end may seem regressive, a return to savagery, when juxtaposed to the violence of the war, it is not savagery but survival, essential to all humans, and different from the fundamentally purposeless violence of the war. (p. 202)

Most significantly, however, I want to argue that the act of killing is more than an offensive act in defense of the self for Laokole, and more than a loss of self for Johnny. Rather, the initiative to violence and the contours of the act of violence itself suggest an awakening into subjectivity, not only for Laokole, but paradoxically for Johnny too. Within the logic of human precarity that the novel exposes, both Johnny and Laokole are marked for death; however, it is in the moment of dying, of death, that Johnny asserts his final words, the repetition of “I,” “I.” Rather than valorizing the “member for member” mathematics advanced by de Bracton in the 13th century as punishment for the crime of rape, I read the murder of Johnny via the destruction of his genitals as violence that signifies otherwise in both material and symbolic realms. The obvious symbolism of “burst testicles,” “pulped balls,” and castration codes the idea that the weapon of hegemonic masculinity—the missile/penis/phallus—must be destroyed, explosively so, to prevent its rising again (if you will). But is there something in the materiality of the violence that positions Laokole as the colonized person gaining subjectivity by embracing and mobilizing the violence originally conceived and employed by the colonizer, that is, within the radical frame first articulated by Martiniquan psychologist Franz Fanon? Is there something in the materiality of the violence that positions Johnny as liberated into subjectivity—the “I”—only upon the destruction of the weapon that he bears and blithely uses, but that arguably incarcerates his self and ultimately extinguishes his life? Without the burden of the weapon, the phallus, the mangled expression of masculinity into which he has been socialized as part of a local order with global origins and implications, Johnny is finally, at novel’s end—and, significantly, after the moment of death—an “I.” Without the novel’s dialogic imaginings, the interior life of this person otherwise stubbornly portrayed through the cruel façade of the stereotypical savage/perpetrator would remain largely invisible, inexplicable, and thereby unchanged, obscured within legal and media discourses that depend upon binary divisions of persons into victim (good) and perpetrator (irretrievably bad). It remains our work as cultural critics to tease out these complex meanings and to take up Dongala’s challenge to destroy the structures of toxic masculinity such that a boy need not be made to die and a girl need not be made to murder to be liberated into themselves.