All changed, changed utterly: A terrible beauty is born,” WB Yeats wrote in the poem Easter 1916 about the Irish nationalist uprising. Those are the lines that came to mind as I watched the play Truth in Translation, a production that seamlessly captures the experiences of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission interpreters. It is a beautiful production, but a different kind of beauty that does not have anything at all to do with being pretty.
The play premiered in Rwanda, the scene of one of the most brutal acts witnessed in recent years, which saw up to a million people killed over three months. Michael Lessac, the director of the play, admits that there are other genocides that rank with the one in Rwanda, but the singularity of the Rwandan experience was the macabrish efficiency with which the killers worked. He said the seed of the play was a desire to share South Africa’s healing experience with the rest of the world.
‘It began with an idea that we want to tell a story, and tell a story through the young interpreters.”
But why the translators, why not the receivers or givers of the violence? ‘The translators sat between the victims and the perpetrators. They told everyone’s story,” he said. ‘We wanted to tell the story through people who felt both sides. They were never able to turn away, for two-and-half years.” Unlike the rest of the world, who could ignore what was going on by not reading the papers or watching the news.
The production is intense and much of this is borne by the music. ‘Hugh Masekela took the real testimony (delivered at the commission) and turned it into something of beauty and pain.” The music, all composed and arranged by Masekela, carries the burden of memory, of pain, of the sordid experiences and of human strength.
Even though the translators were told not to get involved, to detach themselves from the stories that they translated, it is through the music that they become one with their subjects, and where their simultaneous positions as screens and as subjects of the commission ebbs and flows.
I don’t remember how the American writer James Baldwin became part of the conversation, but soon we were talking about him. ‘Baldwin would have understood what happened here,” said the New York director, paying homage to a fellow New Yorker. Indeed, Baldwin wrote about human cruelty to other humans: ‘The world has never lacked for horrifying examples,” he ventured to say.
‘Even if Birmingham [Alabama] is worse, no doubt Johannesburg, South Africa, beats it by several miles.” Or in the play The Amen Corner: ‘Son, don’t try to get away from the things that hurt you. The things that hurt you, sometimes that’s all you got. You got to learn to live with those things and use them.”
The play does not shy away from the testimony that hurts us, and makes use of a montage of props, such as the digital projections that are shown on the screen made of shirts. ‘The shirts represent the ancestors that are still present,” Lessac said, vaguely.
In Rwanda, though, they assumed a different meaning. The shirts reminded them of the killing fields; some of the victims were mechanically ordered to remove their clothes before facing the machete. ‘The screening means different things in different places,” said Lessac.
But, for me, this just accentuated the chaos that the play is really about. One finds oneself trying to absorb the vivid music, make sense of the dialogue and attempt to watch the projections on the shirt screen simultaneously. This is akin, I thought, to translating the truth of a process that is sticky with emotion, pain and memory. The result, inevitably, is something resembling the Tower of Babel. How, then, did the interpreters deal with such bitterness, chaos and passion?
On the stage, the actors just drink their way into therapy. ‘They were always on the road. The only way to decompress was by going to a bar. They did not debrief,” said Lessac, which is why the bar is central to the play. ‘It was at the bar that dark humour came out. It is also where their humanity came out, the chaos locked inside them.” That torrent of feeling is painful, he said, and it is a pain that cries out for healing. Yet, he noted, you can’t heal by revenge.
I was at the Market Theatre in downtown Johannesburg for a whole Sunday afternoon seeing Jillian Edelstein’s documentary, Truth and Lies, about the making of the play. Here the Truth in Translation actors’ horror at the genocide is all too palpable. They are overcome with emotion and can’t quite put their disgust into words — much like what the translators at the commission may have gone through. ‘It intensified the production,” said Lessac, adding that ‘it also intensified the feeling that what happened was a truly powerful thing that the rest of the world should know about”.
Lessac observes that South Africa’s transition is so important that it has created possibilities for dialogue throughout the world. After a four-week run at the Market Theatre, the play will tour Colombia, the western Balkans and Northern Ireland.
When it was shown in Rwanda, some of the audience came back the following day thinking there would be another episode. Rather strange for a play that is beautiful without being pretty. But then, as Yeats wrote, all has been changed, changed utterly, and a terrible beauty born.
Truth in Translation is on at the Market Theatre in Johannesburg until September 24. Call 011 832 1641 for more information