/ 8 July 2011

Bastards: they’re everywhere

Bastards: They're Everywhere

The figure of the bastard, that child banished from the family home, forced its way into several of the productions I watched at this year’s National Arts Festival

in Grahamstown. I am using the word not in its evangelical — and limited — sense but with all its transformative potential when two different people, genres or philosophies meet.

The bastard is a product of two people who come together in a passionate moment and later decide not to take ownership and responsibility for the offspring of their union. The child, as a result, is left to wallow in loveless seclusion. Abnormal Loads, a production by this year’s recipient of the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Drama, Neil Coppen, looked at the fate of the offspring of a miscegenation.

It’s heavy, heady stuff, dealing with a heritage that goes back two centuries. It’s set in a mountainous KwaZulu-Natal, a majestic landscape one assumes is the natural setting for the enactment of this kind of history. It begins as Vincent Bashford Liversage (played by Mothusi Makano) is listening to audio Zulu lessons. The black man learning Zulu reminded me of the European priest taking a crash course in basic Zulu before embarking for South Africa.

Vincent, who lives with his overbearing grandmother, Moira Bashford Liversage (played by Alison Cassels), is not well, afflicted by a headache that won’t go away. Several negative HIV tests later and with no respite, a family servant suggests it might have to do with his unresolved paternal heritage. But access to this history is sealed — his grandmother imagines him as the natural heir to the original and imperial Bashford, martial and strutting majestically through the blood-soaked valleys of KwaZulu-Natal.

Celebrating both histories

Vincent is not quite suited for this role and is unable to explore fully his role as bastard. But by the end of the play, aided by a mind-altering herb (impepu) and the family’s domestic worker, he is about to find his heritage. One hopes he will fulfil his potential by finding and celebrating both his black and his white histories.

Last Pro in Yeoville
, featuring the characters of a trumpeter, Poiho (Lunga John Radebe), a white prostitute, Camellia (Onida Cowan), and Billy (Seputla Sepogodi), a painter-cum-writer, deals with the issue of mixed-race offspring.

The production is set in a tastefully adorned Yeoville flat overlooking a street patrolled by pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers. These are society’s outcasts, its bastards. More than two decades before, two of the characters had a fling that produced a child, whom they gave up for adoption.

Brought together again by chance, the two contemplate their lives and the fate of their unloved and unacknowledged child, who, for all they know, could be buried in an unmarked grave somewhere.

The action of The Table, a production by Sylvaine Strike, unfolds around the object of the title. A Jewish matriarch, Sara (Annabel Linder), gathers her family, two sons and a daughter, for a meal on the eve of the unveiling of the tomb of her late husband. Also sitting at the table are the maid, Flora (Janet Hampton Carpede), and her daughter, Amo (Khabonina Qubeka), who was adopted by the family when she was 10. One of the sons, Levi (William Harding), is in love with Amo, a fact resented by Levi’s sister, Ruth (Karin van der Laag).

What is revealed at the end of the drama is that Amo is, in fact, family, the scion of the dead patriarch and the black domestic worker.
Had Sara not revealed this dark family secret Levi and Amo would have slid into an incestuous union, possibly giving birth to offspring with recessive traits.

Refusing to accept responsibility

I am sure some elements in Zanu-PF think of Britain’s role in Zimbabwe as that of the parent who refuses to accept responsibility. If we follow this thinking to its logical end, the millions of Zimbabwean exiles strewn across the globe (including in unlikely places such as Afghanistan) are the bastards of this union. Rob Murray’s Benchmarks (and Is It Because I’m Jack?, a comedy written by Mike van Graan) dealt with the figure of the Zimbabwean.

Benchmarks
, which is set on a bench, features three actors in masks (Liezl de Kock, Daniel Robinson and Thumeka Mzaziya). Each initially remains secluded in his or her own ghetto, but by the end of the play they are reaching out to their neighbours. Welded into this human drama is the theme of xenophobia. Mzaziya, playing the character of a Zimbabwean widow, is set on fire by marauding mobs and is then befriended by a kind government bureaucrat (whose mask suggests he is white).

In a longer review I wrote about the production I quibbled about the way the play dealt with xenophobia. I argued that the scourge of xenophobia will continue to haunt us until poor black folk learn to live together. A kind white person may give help (indeed many white people have reached out to immigrants), but the black person has to return to the township and the informal settlement. A conclusion that doesn’t consider this, I think, presents problems.

Perhaps for the first time in its history, the festival invited a hip-hop act to perform at the festival. British rapper Soweto Kinch, with a history degree from Oxford, is not just a wordsmith — he can also play the saxophone.

On Saturday night Kinch collaborated with pianist Bokani Dyer, this year’s Standard Bank Young Artist for Jazz, Swiss vocalist Andreas Schaerer, Dutchmen Anton Goudsmit (guitar) and Jeroen Vierdag (bass) and local star drummer Kesivan Naidoo.

It’s important to mention that Bokani (trumpeter Steve Dyer’s son), would have been classified a coloured by the apartheid bureaucrats.

The result of this bastard union between musicians of varying philosophies was a séance-like experience, intoxicating and choking. It was an idea of jazz in the here and now, with young and old cats boldly drawing out the genre’s main, serrated ­outlines.

I will attempt to hand out a truism by way of conclusion: if you want to know a truth or secret about a nation, look closely at how it treats its bastards.

The National Arts Festival in Grahamstown ends on July 10