South Africans are no newcomers to trauma. Transition and progress aside, guilt, poverty, paranoia and anger have left us with an inherent sense of dread.
Daily events and news headlines that would put people elsewhere into therapy are things we have learned to deal with.
At this year’s National Arts Festival I witnessed how directors and performers have chosen to explore and deal with trauma, a fundamental step in the retrieval of humanity in post-apartheid South Africa.
Something Dark, a one-man physical theatre production, is written and performed by Lemn Sissay. London-born and of Ethiopian origin, Sissay is a published poet. He tells the story about how he was taken away from his Ethiopian mother at infancy when she arrived in England pregnant and seeking help. She wanted someone to foster him for a short while but he was not returned to her.
Sissay spent the next 18 years either in foster care or in children’s homes, during which time he searched for his mother and his identity.
His performance attempts to express the loneliness of exclusion and the anger that comes with abandonment and the inevitable racism in a white-dominated society. Yet, as an act of retrieval, he says he “took comfort in the idea that this couldn’t really be happening. I had to be my own family. I had to always be smiling and happy.”
He insists that his play and his poetry are “not part of a healing process. This was to put my story on record. Art is not therapy — therapy is therapy.”
His method of dealing with trauma reminded me of James Ncgobo’s stage adaptation of Fred Khumalo’s memoir, Touch My Blood, also on at the festival. The creators have processed traumatic memory, distancing the audience from it and underplaying it by allowing little time for the heaviest of events — trauma is followed by song.
Another play, Thirteen Cents, based on the late Sello Duiker’s novel about a street child-turned-rent boy, does exactly the opposite. In dealing with life’s difficulties it is unrelenting.
Director Aldo Brincat’s task was kick-started by his initial feelings when reading Duiker’s story. “When I read the book I thought that this boy deserved to be released,” he says. “It made me feel like suicide is sometimes understandable.” I agreed — death seemed like the only way out for the lead character, Azure, owned and raped by gangsters and older men.
As an audience member, I must confess, I wanted Azure to die. I sat with clenched fists as the play became harder and harder to deal with. The lights shone on the audience, highlighting the character’s inescapable exposure and exploitation. This, after all, is what the boy went through daily on the streets.
The heightened realism of Thirteen Cents was nightmarish. For the first 10 minutes or so the audience couldn’t tell if the action was real and neither, it seemed, could the lead character. By the time Azure comes to some realisation of his circumstance it is too late. “The trauma creeps up on you,” says Brincat. “It creeps up on the street child and it sucks you in.”
In their underworld the characters, bruised and broken, are at one with the pigeons and the rats, more at home with the city’s animal life than with its people.
The experience of the lead character in Thirteen Cents goes beyond fiction. For youth like him there is no place to hide — he may get under a chair during a sexual assault, but beyond that there is no escape.
Referring to Brincat’s production, I asked Sissay what he thought a boy such as Azure would need to overcome his traumatic experiences. “Therapy,” he says, “which is as important as food and creativity.”
On my last day at the festival I saw Savo Tufegdzic’s locally made movie, Crime. I pondered long and hard on whether to watch it — I am easily disturbed by images of violence against women. The lead character, Michelle, has captured and tied up one of two men who hijacked and raped her in the recent past.
Crime is merciless in its exploration of violence and its effects. Besides the obvious trauma of her assault, Michelle suffers the further distress of not being able to tell her husband what happened to her. After half an hour I walked out. I approached Tufegdzic to ask about the point of his work.
“I want this movie to make people angry, but not paranoid,” Tufegdzic says. He hopes that the viciousness of the movie “will start conversations”.
Tufegdzic questions whether South Africans have become desensitised to trauma. “We bluff ourselves,” he says. “We’ve forgotten how to cry — crime is just dinner-table conversation.”
What I saw of the movie made me think of what Alex Perry, journalist and author of Falling off the Edge, said at his Wordfest talk a few days earlier. Perry said that in South Africa “violence seems to be the whole point of the crime”.
Could this, I wondered, have something to do with the trauma experienced by the criminals themselves?
Tufegdzic is unapologetic in his approach to the country’s criminals: “When someone starts cutting you up, don’t tell me that you are expected to feel sorry for them.
“We must stop using the word survivor,” Tufegdzic says. “A crime victim is a victim. The word survivor makes it sound like they got out of an aeroplane crash.”