Resumo de Black Battles With Dogs - Koltès, Bernard-Marie

A french transnational corporation is building a bridge in a remote place inside the jungle of Senegal. Alboury, a young black man, arrives one night at the camp asking to the foreman for the corpse of his brother, who used to work in the construction. Horn --the foreman-- says he's sorry for him, explains the causes of the tragic accident and invites Alboury a glass of whiskey and to talk about the matter. But Alboury needs neither condolences, nor explanations, nor a glass of whiskey, he only wants what every human being has the right to receive: a dead brother's body. Horn, clearly incapable of solving what seems so simple, dismisses him and tells him to return on the next day. Cal is an engineer of the company, parisian as Horn, of feverish character and vehement will. Speaking with Horn, he's told about Alboury's visit, and starts crying a desperate defense of his part in the black's death. Horn calms him down, he tells him that he will take care of everything. Cal reproaches him for his racional and indirect methods. In Cal's desperate arguments, it becomes evident his fear to Alboury, to the black guards of the camp, to the town and its possible reprisals, and to that whole damn lost continent. Horn, exasperated, finally declares: "Everyone saw you when you shot!". After this, the spectator is witness of the deep psichological evolution of the characters throughout the play: the vain and consecutive attempts of Horn to discourage Alboury of his purposes; Cal's consternation and impatience, his failure to find the corpse hidden by himself, and his final resolution of killing Alboury, "that damn nigger who what really wants is to take revenge". We watch Leona, a parisian woman invited by Horn to visit Africa. At the beginning, she shows to us as a somewhat crazy girl needed of love and protection; later Cal would declare her as a simple slut; and finally we would recognize in her a lonely woman, anxious for escaping from a world to which she believes that she doesn't belong, willing to be black and thus to be accepted by Alboury and his people. And towards the end of the story, we discover that neither Alboury was that simple ingenuous black man, who could be easily convinced of anything for a few bucks. Horn remains astonished after hearing his ultimate sentence: "If I can't have my brother's body, I'll have his murderer's". But the action is not going to be done by Alboury's own hands, but it will be the invisible guards of the camp the ones who will carry out the fair revenge longed by a man, by a family, by a whole country. The main topic of the drama is neither racism, nor colonization, nor human exploitation. That's only the backdrop. The work talks to us about the lack of comunication between people, about de latent lie and distrust in every relationship. For centuries human have grouped together in societies; it is in our nature to do so. We feel safe between people similar to us, and we distrust of the ones who don't belong to our group. A country's citizens repel the foreigner, a jew doesn't seat to eat with a christian at the same table, an african can only be an employee of a european, but never his partner. Human beings are like a huge tree: two leaves forget that they belong to the same branch, two branches forget they belong to the same trunk. And the tree, as it keeps growing, every time it gets more branched out. The white (the "dogs"), the more "grown up", don't have anyone left, their "group" has been reduced to their single person. Alboury (the "black"), more primitive than the white, still has his people, his tribe, to which also the invisible guards belong. If the comunication between Cal and Leona is hypocritical and suspicious, the "dialogues" between Horn and Alboury show the most shocking isolation. Horn is unable of saying anything but lies, and Alboury, although honest and direct, is misunderstood by the foreman. With "Black battles with dogs" we realize that men are more loneevery day, and that the truth will finally become something impossible; we are witnesses of the great emptiness of human relations.

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