Rizana, a play, by Jolly Somasunderam
This is a polemical tale based on the real life case of a poverty stricken Sri Lankan housemaid from a Muslim village in Sri Lanka who was beheaded in Saudi Arabia
for a crime she did not understand or commit. It illustrates the plight of the poor in an exploitative world of government apathy to poverty, vote-seeking politicians, corrupt public officials, ruthless businessmen and UN agencies engaged in serving the powers
that fund them. Rizana herself is a voiceless teenager who never appears directly but whose tragic story is told by her loving mother, her mother’s good friend and others. The irony of it is that Rizana’s family members are devout Muslims who venerate the fundamentalist Islam that Saudi Arabia exports around the world. It is Saudi Arabia,
with its medieval Islamic sharia laws and punishments and primitive social attitudes that destroys Rizana and her family’s aspirations but it is the naivety of the family that sustains them in this tragedy through their dogmatic belief in fundamentalist Islam and the Will of God.
Rizana is the poster child for the millions of poor migrant workers from developing countries who go to the oil-rich Middle East to work in slave-like conditions for a pittance because they are marginalized in their own native lands. The situation is worse for the millions of housemaids who are ill-treated and sometimes sexually exploited as Islam grants limited rights to females over males. International human rights organizations, all funded by corporations or Western governments, who clamour loudly on behalf of their
patrons, rarely talk of the egregious exploitation of these migrant workers in the Middle East. There is no national or international campaign to campaign for their human rights or regulate this trade in the poor from the Third World in the Middle East. Even the countries from which these poor are exported depend heavily on the remittances they send and are in no mood to offend tyrannical Middle East rulers by demanding fair labour contracts.
Rizana’s story is told through others as Rizana herself, as a young Muslim girl, has no voice in her future plans. She is the helpless pawn of others, including her own family. Her rustic parents, like millions of others in South Asia, seek to employ her in the Middle East
to alleviate their poverty. It is a choice between marrying her off to an 80 year old Muslim man as his fourth wife (the father’s choice) or sending her to Saudi Arabia as a housemaid (the mother’s choice). Saudi Arabia is a preferred destination as it is the holy land for Muslims. Since she is only 16 years of age and cannot qualify to work abroad, a corrupt foreign employment agency bribes the Foreign Employment Bureau officials to alter her age in the passport to the acceptable 18 years. Untrained and incapable of handling her numerous chores as a domestic servant to an exploitative Saudi household, the baby she
is feeding chokes and dies while she is alone and she is accused and found guilty of deliberate murder.
The her plight becomes a cause célèbre in Sri Lanka as the local media and politicians step in, responding to public outrage. The government’s best diplomatic efforts fail as under Saudi Arabia’s sharia laws the victim’s family alone can grant a pardon and this is stubbornly refused by the child’s mother. She is condemned in public as a wicked witch and cruelly beheaded.
The latter part of the story is taken up by the efforts of politicians in the Sri Lankan legislature who want to exploit this tragedy for their political advantage. This last section deals with the debates in the legislature and the vindication of the minister who is falsely blamed for failure to save her. Whether some of the lengthy speeches made in the legislative chamber can sustain the interest of the audience in a theatre can only be tested out in practice.
But the story of Rizana is an important one and the play draws attention to a larger human rights problem that the world must address.
Kenneth Abeywickrama
12 August 2013