Arte France presents Mamoudu Turay Kamara (Ezra), Mariame N’Diaye (Onitcha), Mamusu Kallon (Mariam), Mac Mondale (Richard Gant), Mercy Ojelade (Cynthia), Cleophas Kabasita (George Niam), Wale Ojo (Black Jesus); Director, Newton I. Aduaka; Writers, Newton I. Aduaka, Alain-Michel Blanc; Producers, Gorune Aprikian, Michel Loro; Executive Producer, Jean-Michel Dissard, Lamia Guellati, Co-Producer, Gabriel Kranzelbinder; Cinematographer, Carlos Arango de Montis. © 2007
Ezra isn’t an entertainment piece by any means. It could be presented as a psychology crash course paper in the study of ‘trauma in children of war-torn ravaged countries.’ Or a simple Civil War documentary. As a riveting story as it is and as close to my heart, reminding me how my only sister perished in such nonsense, I can hardly muster enough energy to review Ezra. I would be crying all through. But I ran upon an essay by Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson, The Poetics of Trauma–Granta—The Magazine of New Writing (149), that tickled me to look the way of Ezra.
The Poetics of Trauma is an essay about refugees’ experiences after brutal wars and the otherworldly gruesome experiences the commissions set up afterward. He covers the Nuremberg Trials and the Linguistic Analysis used by the Swedish Migration Board to investigate refugees from war-torn places worldwide. Such courts sprout, especially in West Africa, in Sierra Leone, where rebels amputated children and kidnapped them into conscripted forces in an aimless war. Nilsson, in The Poetics, quotes Emily Dickinson:
If any ask me why–
“T’were easier to die–
Than tell–
“This hearing is part of the healing process. Everyone must come to this hearing with an open heart to yield any results and contribute to the process.” The Commissioner of the Civil War Truth and Reconciliation Commission announced as he hauled a premature teenage boy, Ezra (Mamoudu Turay Kamara), in front of the Commission to tell an account of his involvement in the Civil War. Ezra may prefer death, as Emily Dickinson says in her poem, then recounts his nightmares from when the rebels kidnapped them (he and his sister) from the cradles to join a ragtag gang of rebels. Victims of trauma are never always willing to recount their experiences, even as they have the pains stored in tatters, in droplets of foggy thoughts. It could be as bothersome as blistering.
The kidnapped children were pumped with drugs for breakfast and dinner. To peal out information from a dipper recess of a foggy brain with mantles of traumatic experiences won’t easily be forthcoming. The court hearing in Ezra only highlights the traumatic nature of the three leading players, Ezra, Mariama N’diaye (Onitcha), and Mariam (Mamusu Kallon). Ezra loses its place by demonstrating so much misery that it couldn’t be an entertainment piece. I can understand if it passes as a historical, real-life parody of a civil conflict.
The aura of Ezra got me thinking of Beasts of No Nations (2015): human misery and all: taking your lifelong belongings on your head in a four-by-four leather valise, with two or three children pulling on your lappas as they clamor to hold on to you because they don’t want to be left behind. The chaos is heartbreaking; even the sky is dangerously red. This is Armageddon. This is a civil war!
“Children of the revolution, forget about everything you learned till now. Forget it all; forget your family; they no longer exist. This is your home, and the brotherhood is your family. From today, you will be born again as true children of this nation. And you will fight and die for it…. (Demonstrating as children conscript echo after him): This is A-K 47; this is your life.” So yells the Commandant, almost in the faces of his ten or eleven-year-old conscripts enlisting in his rebel rag-tag brigade.
On August 18, 1999, on a dusky dawn in an African village–the possible location of this film must be based on the Sierra Leone Civil War–on a high away bridge, a seven-year-old boy stands, his not-quite-filled-mouth tooth showing glaringly, reveling in birds chirping happily over the bridge. He runs to his class, and his teacher writes a composition topic on the blackboard: “Why I Love My Country.” Uncannily, a girl in the class looks away, inattentive to what the class is about as if expecting a menace. Boom! Rebels get into the village, and hell breaks loose. That is the beginning of Ezra’s traumatic journey when he and his sister get kidnapped by rebels and his sister’s tung cut by insurgents.
Ezra, “You can fight for four days nonstop… you have no fear; you feel nothing…you become the gun. You are an AK47…you are not human. And if you don’t eat in two days, you start seeing visions…. My memory blanked it out for my protection. Maybe it is better that way. I killed people. Plenty of people. Other people’s parents, brothers, sisters and wives. May the spirit of everyone (sic: including my sister) who died in this war forgive me.
Ezra’s traumatized mindset is evident as he stands before the commission. As the commissioner states, the court is not punitive but restorative. The crux of Ezra’s story is about the effect of war on our children’s lives, including his own, in civil conflicts. The commission in Ezra must let go of Ezra to mend the damage grownup society dishes out to him.
Commissioner, to a lady of the Cloth, “Do you remember the event of January 1999?
Sister Cynthia Coleman, “I have told them, I don’t remember very well. Everything was upside down. I don’t remember how we got there. We just walked and walked for days. We don’t eat. Without food, I was sick. I remember there was blood. Plenty of blood and crying. Everywhere gunfire.”
Commissioner, “I saw your transcript. You said you saw a boy throwing a flame thrower into a hut.”
“Yes, not properly.”
“You said you saw another boy dancing as he was firing his gun into the building. Did you see any of those boys here in the courtroom?”
“I didn’t see the faces of the boys. I just remember they were shooting.”
“Was Ezra Gelehun one of those boys?”
“No, I said I won’t remember, but if it was Ezra, I should have recognized his face.”
The Commissioner holds up the bible to Cynthia. “You said, God will understand. He will forgive.”
“Our Pastor told us that it was not our fault. He said God would understand because we were only children trying to survive. If we would have said anything, they would have killed us.”
Ezra tells the story of the initiation of babies who had hardly shed their last diapers into the manhood they were unprepared for. A seven-year-old boy is whisked away from his fifth-grade classroom to a rebel army camp, where they plant into his head hatred for the government and the country in the name of justice. They feed them drugs, make brute animals out of them, and make them murder their mothers and fathers with no knowledge of them doing so. Such is the character in Ezra. First, the Commander terrorizes them and preaches to them like the natives initiate their youths into the poro societies in West Africa. Those kinds of societies, like “what happens here, stay here.” The commandant drugs these kids on and terrorizes them so much so that they live in delirium twenty-four hours every waking moment.
The scene in which Ezra and Mariam make an acquaintance and introduce each other and their misfortunes is an anthesis of Beast of No Nations, where there is no romance. Ezra, “What about your parents?” Amid all this chaos and the uncertainties of our characters’ lives, Ezra announces to the gang in the camp that Miriam is pregnant. There is a party that night like life is always good, dancing, not minding the traps laid by warring rebels awaiting them outside town. Then, ECOMOG attacks. Gunshots clatter all around them. Ezra’s pregnant girl is shot dead in the altercation. Talk about tragedy and trauma!
I believe the producers of Ezra, in their minds, only wanted to bring to the populace the traumatic experiences our families go through during civil wars. Only the leaders of civil wars have been incarcerated. The question is why such commissions would even be conveyed. Asking traumatic patients like Ezra and his sister to recount their kidnapping when rebels broke into their school compound, getting lost from each other, to when Ezra, at the fork of the road, trashes his sister Onitcha (tear-jerking scene) not to follow him because he doesn’t want her killed. To recount such an experience could be like…….
Ezra, “I don’t remember, I don’t remember, I don’t remember…….” He faints to the floor.
I don’t believe the producers, writers, and directors of Ezra achieved their goals or ambitions. The historic Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up to get the truth about the Civil War, but what should it do with the truths they seek? According to Dickinson, Ezra’s traumatic mindset couldn’t correctly recount his life in captivity, and even as trauma is there, the experiences are so gruesome and annoying that he won’t want to open old wounds. We can see how he faints on the floor, and the next time we see him, he’s in a psychiatric ward.
Freud: But I am not aware that the patients suffering from traumatic neuroses are much occupied in waking life with the recollection of what happened to them. They perhaps strive instead of thinking of it.