The Sound of Cracking Bones

Elikia is a child, among so many others, who has seen her life overturned from one day to the next in a chaotic, lawless civil war. The girl, kidnapped from her family, becomes a child soldier. She is a victim, but she is also an executioner in an untenable situation that blurs the most elementary laws of ethics. How can she grow up and remain human when the reference points disappear beneath a hopeless daily brutality? It is little Joseph, the youngest child to come to the rebels' camp, who reminds her of her childhood, her family, her village and her humanity and gives her the courage to break the chain of violence into which she has been pulled. The Sound of Cracking Bones is a play in two voices. While Joseph and Elikia are on the run, experiencing doubts, fears and a wish to return to civilized life where children may grow up as children, Angelina, the nurse who greets them at the hospital where they take refuge, puts this painful reality into perspective and opens the window to a light that is uncertain—but a light, nonetheless.