Alex Dodd
Even a telephone conversation with gifted storyteller Antoinette Pienaar leaves you feeling like your blood’s flowing at a different pace through your veins. I’m in an office in the metropolis and she’s miles away on a farm drenched in winter sunlight, yet when we’ve finished speaking my heart is somehow beating at a deeper, slower frequency.
This is the drug her audiences queue for. People stand in old gereformeerde church halls bargaining and begging for a single ticket. Oudtshoorn starts to feel like Broadway. All because of the way this strange, tall woman from Beaufort West weaves a tale. It’s like someone has just told you a bedtime story and it’s all going to be all right now. Things make sense. Her voice heals.
Yet not before summoning the dragons – not without a heavy dose of strm und drang. Pienaar whips up a hell of a fuss on stage – sweating and shouting like a thing possessed. Nervous children might be scared. For those resisting the truth, she should come with a health warning.
As with Andr Brink or Antjie Krog, when Pienaar speaks in Afrikaans or even in heavily sculpted English, she elevates her mother tongue to a kind of song you wish you knew the words to. That’s why even the European tourists were reaching for the Kleenex at her Klein Karoo festival shows.
Although deeply idiosyncratic, in the sense that her work has grown as naturally as a cactus out of her unique Karoo world, her tales and songs are as universal as the highest hymn or the the wail of a Bedouin minstrel. “Dis net soos Italian opera [It’s just like Italian opera],” she says.
Pienaar passionately adheres to the old Afrikaans proverb: Sit jou eie sterretjie aan. (Light your own star.) All her stories grow out of indigenous myths – tales she hears from local farm labourers with whom she regularly communes in an effort to build greater literacy in the region, hand- me-down yarns from old Karoo tannies and stories she herself divines in the magical light of the moon or the mysterious, dark rifts of the Swartberge. And it was so that her latest story Eporia (which she’ll be performing in Grahamstown at this year’s arts festival) came into being.
It’s a tale of an African mermaid. “Mermaids in Africa?” I ask incredulously, thinking mermaids come from Copenhagen or somewhere cold where princes live. And, on that cue, I am whisked off on a journey over the phone and into a magical world that leaves me feeling as ashamed of my cynicism as Pienaar says she did, when the farmer from Herold first told her about the Bushman paintings of mermaids on the rocks above a huge pool in a nature reserve about 30km away from Oudtshoorn. “I had no doubt they were mermaids the first time I saw them,” says Pienaar. “They’re not just badly painted humans. They’re perfect. You can actually see the swimming motion. The action is clear.”
She tells me about a middle-aged coloured woman called Elsie Gaika who has marks on her face that look like the rainbow-pearl markings in a shell when you hold it up to the sunlight. When she was a child, Gaika saw a mermaid. You’re not supposed to stare at mermaids, says Pienaar, but this particular little girl did. The mermaid splashed her in the face with water. And to this day every time Gaika looks in the mirror she sees that indelible splash of rainbow-pearls.
Pienaar tells me about a Laingsburg farmer who got such a fright when he saw a mermaid that he took out his gun and shot her. “Can you imagine shooting a mermaid?” she asks in disbelief. “Can you imagine that?” It was three days after the farmer shot the mermaid that those epic floods hit Laingsburg. “There is no reasonable explanation for that wall of water.”
There are those who can’t bring themselves to swallow Pienaar’s mermaid stories hook, line and sinker – their rationality just can’t stretch enough to accommodate her take on the world. There’s no doubting that she’s certainly not the “run-of-the-mill boer who goes to rugby”. She’s a bold boer. A brave pioneer. But you’d be surprised at the souls who do allow her in. Magnus Malan, for one. She spotted him in the third row at one of her shows howling with laughter – so much so he had to ask his wife for an extra handkerchief. At first Pienaar felt slightly unnerved by his receptivity. But the oracle can’t exactly choose her audience.
Certainly Pienaar has embraced hers – touring the kerksaals (church halls) and civic centres in all the Karoo dorpies. It’s amazing nobody’s thrown tomatoes, called her a witch or accused her of being the Antichrist. Some might have. But that’s Pienaar’s power really – to go beyond the crimplene straight to the heart. Beyond whatever dogma to truth. Mermaids are about as outlandish a concept as immaculate conception. But it is the wisdom behind the tale that matters, and in Pienaar’s case there’s a deep trove of that stuff.
Eporia will run at the Grahamstown Festival from July 3 to 8 and at the State Theatre in Pretoria in August