Well I guess I needed a good old cry today and the next episode in my queue is this heart-rending story of the Cardassian war orphan, Rugal, adopted by Bajorans who had brought him up to hate his own race for everything they had done to the Bajoran people during the occupation, and as a result of visiting the station, he is eventually forced to be returned to his own biological family on Cardassia against his will.
Rugal’s Bajoran parents hadn’t purposely treated him abusively. They loved him, but they just couldn’t help but project on to him all the ‘sins of the fathers’. He is terrified of Garak and all Cardassians, and inevitably hates his own Cardassian self.
Rugal is temporarily removed from his Bajoran parents and placed with the O’Briens. The Chief is as nice as he can be but he is very prejudiced against Cardassians, having fought against them in war. It makes for some awkward conversations, but as the boy speaks, he mellows and feels sorry for him.
Rugal’s biological father is heartbroken, initially by losing his son in the first place, and again when Rugal rejects him.
Of course the whole terrible affair has been orchestrated from day one by Gul Dukat for his own political purposes, with zero conscience. In all of this he is the one Cardassian who lives up to the negative stereotypes of Cardassians.
In the Real World
Generally speaking, I tend to view Cardassians as analogous to Nazi Germans and the Bajorans as the Jewish people, and the Cardassian Occupation tries, but falls short of representing the Holocaust.
But I’m not sure in this case that that analogy fits at all. Firstly of course, Germany isn’t Bajor – the Jewish people were living in Germany alongside the Germans, and were in many cases fully immersed in and assimilated with German culture, it would be like assimilated Bajorans living on Cardassia. The Germans didn’t leave at the end of the war so there were no German war orphans as far as I am aware, and certainly very few Jewish people remained or would have been in a position to take in more children. I have heard several stories of ‘Aryan’-looking Jewish children who had been stolen and raised by Germans, but because they didn’t look obviously different from their adoptive parents, they weren’t told of their origins.
If the roles had been reversed? I can’t imagine that Jewish parents would have raised their German adoptive child with the kind of unintentional cruelty of Rugal’s parents, but who knows? War is so terrible, perhaps it can make good people cruel?
So I can’t think of a real world situation that comes close to what happened with Rugal in this Cardassian story.
But what about Adoption in general?
I had wanted a big family, but after my 4th baby I had become ill and had years of unexplained secondary infertility and a run of miscarriages that were never properly explained (I found out later, too late, that one of my chronic health conditions included a hormonal imbalance).
So in 2014 we started looking into the possibility of Adoption. In the UK, private adoptions of babies just don’t really happen. As far as I know, almost all adoptions go through the Care system, and it is rare indeed to be able to adopt a baby. The only situation in which babies become available for adoption is if the mother has had previous children removed from her care, in which case the unimaginable, if necessary, cruelty of removing a newborn from its mother will be perpetrated on them by the State. Usually in that case, the baby is offered to the adoptive parents of the previous child(ren).
Adoption is the most Primal of Wounds.
Researching adoption through the Care System was like opening a ‘can of worms’. We did not go ahead for various reasons, but it became my hyperfocus for about 4 years. I realise that it is a necessary thing, but it is also utterly fraught with trauma, for birth parents, adoptive parents and especially for the child, for which there is a crucial lack of support.
The saddest thing is that although most adoptive children now have the opportunity of a continued postal contact with their birth parents and siblings, for some it is necessary (due to previous abuse or potential risk) to be cut off completely from their birth families. Suffice to say that lots of therapy is necessary for all parties involved (dare I say, including the Social Workers who have to make the hard decisions).
In this episode, the adoptive and biological parents agree to a hearing in which Commander Sisko presides, and he makes the decision to allow Rugal’s biological parents to take him home to Cardassia.
I think, that in the real world, especially given Rugal’s age, his thoughts and feelings and wishes would have been taken into consideration, and it could have been agreed to gradually and gently acclimatise him to Cardassian culture through a process of education and regular communication with his birth family, until he felt safe and ready to visit Cardassia, without any threat of force. At least I hope that is what would happen. We all know of course that the Courts, the Social Workers, and even the parents don’t always get these things right.
LLAP, Kira x
Apologies, by the way for the lack of pictures this time. I did try to insert a couple. I don’t know whether it’s WordPress, my computer, or my wifi but something isn’t happy, and it didn’t work.
The Bajoran Exile 