After a number of incidents in my childhood — when I was expelled from the movies, teased at school and asked personal questions about my origins — I demanded photographs of my mother, pregnant. Then, when I wanted to see pictures of myself as a newborn, there weren’t any. I rifled through my mother’s papers looking for some official document explaining me. I never found one.
In retrospect it all makes sense. At the age of 20 my father told me that I was adopted and that my biological father was possibly aboriginal. It took 14 years for me to discover the true story and an additional nine years to write it down. Original Skin, which opens at the Market Theatre this week, is the culmination of this process.
Adoption is difficult to describe because it is loaded with guilt. In her book, Twice Born, author Betty Jean Lifton writes: ‘Adoptive parents demand that their stories end happily ever after, although they must know that even families with blood ties cannot be promised such a simple-minded plot. Even blood children must one day go off on their own lonely journeys of self-discovery.” This form of emotional bondage robs many adoptees of the words to describe themselves and their situation. This becomes untenable for a writer.
I was working as a TV writer in 2005 when I applied for a British Council scholarship to the Crossing Borders project. The successful applicants were teamed with a British mentor, who gave us dedicated feedback and helped us to find our creative voices. During the process I began to discover the hidden language of the silenced child and decided to write a play.
Robert Colman agreed to direct. Together we patiently sifted through Child Welfare records, while I wrote down experiences of growing up in white South Africa. It was only when the central metaphor of a woman returning home to pack up her childhood bedroom emerged that we began to build the work.
As I began to inhabit this mythical space an underlying message began to emerge. The story of adoption hid another story — the shame and prejudice of life under apartheid. And as I refined the narrative under Colman’s guidance, the humanity of the characters emerged. Colossal meanness, arrogance and pride were all reduced to a human scale. The title, Original Skin, with its layers of meaning, alludes to guilt, the breaking of a taboo.
My biological father is Ghanaian. I had to make sense of this new African identity, with English as my mother tongue and crème caramel as my favourite dessert. Like South Africa, I have had to examine the concept of an African identity and try to heal the wounds to the psyche inflicted by 300 years of racist domination. I am oversensitive to race and paradoxically mistrust and fear white people; yet I am regarded as umlungu by many blacks. The racial dynamic is a hot potato for me.
Growing up I was just like a white, middle-class, geeky kid. The accident of my exotic looks gave me a different take on the stories we all enjoyed. For example I was disappointed in the film, The Lord of the Rings, because I had always imagined the elves as black or coloured. After all, Tolkien started his life here and the Shire was based on Hogsback.
The disjuncture between what I looked like and what I was supposed to represent, has given me a particular take on the culture that I claim as my own. As African-American essayist and novelist James Baldwin wrote: ‘The most crucial time in my own development came when I was forced to recognise that I was a kind of bastard of the West; when I followed the line of my past I did not find myself in Europe but in Africa.”
Baldwin made his peace with his failure to wholly identify with the great masterpieces of Western culture: ‘I would have to appropriate these white centuries, I would have to make them mine — I would have to accept my special attitude, my special place.”
As with many who were adopted I once idealised my biological parents, thinking that when I found them I would find the acceptance that I so desperately needed. When, at 34 years old, I finally discovered my biological parents, I had to acknowledge that I belong — and yet I don’t belong — to two families.
When my white Australian mother chose to resign from taking responsibility for my life, she was choosing to take responsibility for her own. This decision touched the rest of her life and it has touched me too. The rejection has probably been my most difficult challenge, but I started the quest for self-determination young and I am as tough as old boots. The contradiction of growing up as a black child in a white family during apartheid made me into a permanent outsider which, after all, is a gift for a writer.
Even though I assert that I am African, apartheid gave people black attributes that, with my white middle-class background, I do not have. I found a home with pan-Africanism, because it has space for everyone, whatever shade of black they are. But how am I supposed to love pets as an African? Never mind swimming.
My biological father did not see the problem. A product of Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana, he is an enthusiastic swimmer who feels that there is nothing that black people cannot do. Black people can be just as vicious as Hitler or as loving as Mother Theresa, as clever as Einstein, as stupid as George Bush. Racism and its dark sister, ethnicity, I have learned, are the strategies of the terminally unimaginative.
The greatest challenge in telling my story was to do so without bitterness, self-pity or anger. I have been provoked and I assert that some things are not forgivable; it is not my job to absolve anybody. I am a writer and an actress, I want to make work that is respected. This story has been a burden at times; I have felt upstaged by my own life story. Original Skin is my attempt to make a truce with the circumstances that made me and others like me — black African people on a quest for their true identity.
Original Skin is on at the Market Theatre’s Barney Simon Theatre until June 22