'Matchstick Men’ tackles trauma of post-poll chaos

Trauma is not an easy concept to understand as one would have seen last weekend when Prevail Arts presented ‘Matchstick Men’ at Kenya Cultural Centre.

Trauma is defined in one dictionary as simply ‘a deeply distressing experience’, But the consequences of such experiences are not easily understood. Yet they can shatter relationships, turn one’s life upside down, and even disable someone’s grasp on reality.

Martin Kigondu chose to tackle the topic of trauma sometime after the 2007-2008 post-election violence that rocked the country and traumatised whole families and communities.

Shem (Emmanuel Mulili) is one man who’s been deeply traumatised by the violence that robbed him of his wife as well as of his parents when he was still a child. But as the play opens, one cannot see visible scars on his body nor detect a psychological scar when his friend (Bilal Mwaura) arrives late for their meeting.

There’s a white medic’s jacket on a chair in their meeting room which suggests this might be a psychiatric session. But then, who’s the doctor and which one is the patient? One can’t be sure since both men seem to have issues.

What’s more, as their conversation opens up and they start to address more intimate, personal topics, those subjects seem to get eluded, intertwined in word games and mental twists and turns that subtly steer the conversation away from examining the problems.

Shem seems to be especially good at this sort of subterfuge and stone-walling, remaining with what the Shrink (who we have figured out is Mwaura) believes are Shem’s secret demons. Yet just as their hour-long session is about to end, there seems to be a breakthrough in Shem’s steel-clad story (that even he doesn’t remember).

That’s when we see the Shrink step out of the room and tell his nurse he needs a ‘double session’ with this patient. But he quickly steps back into their interchange to try to unravel Shem’s traumatic experiences, first with his parents and then with his wife.

As it turns out, both of those events were deeply traumatising. So much so that Shem buried them down in the deep recesses of his psyche. He unconsciously stashed them so far away from his rational consciousness that they might never hurt him again.

Both traumas were associated with his close encounters with violence and death. They began in his childhood when he watched his cruel stepfather beat up his gentle mum.

The violence inflicted on her was so intense one night that Shem at age 11 was now strong enough to fight back. He pushed the man down a flight of stairs, at the bottom of which the stepfather lay dead. Yes, Shem had killed his stepdad.

The other truly disturbing experience happened during post-election-violence in 2008 when terrorists broke into his house, raped, killed, and chopped off the hand of his wife.

The loss of his wife by those exceedingly cruel and violent means must have had a profound impact on Shem.

He was transformed from being a sensitive, loving man into someone numbed by the trauma of witnessing so much evil. That was why Shem’s sister and her friend, the Shrink decided it was imperative to get to the root of her brother’s problem. Otherwise, the State could take him away to some mental institution, and his problem would never be unearthed or treated or fully resolved.

The Shrink had sought to expose these ugly experiences so that Shem could reconcile himself to what had happened in his life that had been so traumatising.

Matchstick Man is a masterful script aimed at unravelling the truth about one man’s traumatising experiences and breaking through the mental barriers that had obstructed his grappling with his demons.

At the end of the play, we naturally do not find out what Shem will do with all of this unadulterated information. He looks shocked by these discoveries about what he’s experienced in his life, and what he can do with this information.

The two actors have a wonderful chemistry that enabled them to naturally swing from a sensitive exchange of ideas into a well-choreographed brawl that went on for several minutes, but it was beautifully achieved.

The play ended rather inconclusively since Shem was now stuck having to address the guilt that he must have buried all those years. The Shrink had succeeded, but poor Shem.

Both Mwaura and Mulili gave sensitive, often incandescent performances in Matchstick Men, which I think Kigondu wrote to rouse greater public awareness of the problems associated with mental health.

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