Last weekend I attended a play presented by Boom Arts and The Cascade Festival of African Films, featuring Ifrah Mansour telling the story of Somalia’s civil war through the eyes of a 7-year old child.

I was bowled over. Don’t even know how to begin to describe it. It is a one-woman play, featuring a larger-than-life puppet as a stand-in for the mother, a back-screen that displays voices telling their war and immigration experience, and an actress who has a seemingly unlimited repertoire of movements and facial expressions. All of them are required in the story she is weaving, easing the viewers in by describing the early childhood, the normal life of a mischievous little girl with two brothers and a baby sister. Pranks, daily routines, playtime, family interactions all come to life.

We then learn how her parents use all kinds of ruses to avoid alarming the children when the flight from the violent action begins – claimed visits to aunties house, exploring the forests. etc. Their desire to protect them is shattered when one of their children gets killed and the mother thrown into paralyzing depression. The girl narrator, in the beginning all smiles and never-ending movement of a busy kid, depicts her fear and sorrow with increasingly slow movements, clinging to mother’s skirts, trying to understand what is going on around her, clearly having figured out that tragedy abounds.

Mansour is fierce. In her determination to face the facts and educate the world around her. In her willingness to confront the pain in the re-telling. In her unflinching description of the post-traumatic, longitudinal effects of living through war. Much of the projected background conversation focuses on the intergenerational conflict between not wanting to re-live the horrors by talking about them, vs. wanting to know one’s history.

The actress was born in Saudi Arabia and arrived in her parents’ native Somalia just as the civil war started in 1991. They lived through war, famine, refugee camps until being able to immigrate to the US, where they were settled in Texas without a single other black person to turn to. The need for community became as urgent as anything. She now lives and works in Minnesota, and the play, How to have Fun in a Civil War, is successfully traveling the country. Next stop, Albuquerque, NM.

Here is her life story, in her own words.

Music today is telling the story through song from the refugee camps.