In The Play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead

In the play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, which was "devised by" (1) Athol Fugard, John Kani, and
Winston Ntshona, Sizwe Bansi is stranded without a work permit in Port Elizabeth. The only solution to his dilemma is summarized in Kafkaesque terms by his benefactor Buntu:
Related Results
African Influence Even Zoe can't stop this Rose from wilting; THEATRE Challenge and response: the changing face of theater in South Africa Fugard as director: an interview with the cast of 'Boesman and Lena.' - Athol...
You talk to the white man, you see, and ask him to write a letter saying he's got a job for you. You take that letter from the white man and go back to King William's Town, where you show it to the Native Commissioner there. The Native Commissioner in King William's Town reads that letter from the white man in Port Elizabeth who is ready to give you the job. He then writes a letter back to the Native Commissioner in Port Elizabeth. So you come back here with the two letters. Then the Native Commissioner in Port Elizabeth reads the letter from the Native Commissioner in King William's Town together with the first letter from the white man who is prepared to give you a job, and he says when he reads the letters: Ah yes, this man Sizwe Bansi can get a job. So the Native Commissioner in Port Elizabeth then writes a letter which you take with the letters from the Native Commissioner in King William's Town and the white man in Port Elizabeth, to the Senior Officer at the Labour Bureau, who reads all the letters. Then he will put the right stamp in your book and give you another letter from himself which together with the letters from the white man and the two Native Affairs Commissioners, you take to the Administrative Office here in New Brighton and make an application for a Residence Permit, so that you don't fall victim of raids again. Simple. (25-26) The problem is that Sizwe Bansi knows no white man to start with. In the circumstances, Buntu's evaluation of the situation is straightforward: "There's no way out, Sizwe. You're not the first one who has tried to find it. Take my advice and catch that train back to King William's Town" (26). However profound the personal implications for Sizwe Bansi may be, the problem as formulated by Buntu appears to be a purely social one. Within moments, however, another dimension grows from it. When Buntu suggests, as the only other "way out," a job on the mines, Sizwe refuses point-blank. "You can die there." Whereupon Buntu, prompted "into taking possibly his first real look at Sizwe," remarks, "You don't want to die." And Sizwe affirms, "I don't want to die" (2627). The statement is echoed in Antigone's acknowledgment in The Island that "I know I must die" (76), and in the resignation to "a susceptibility to death" in Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act (82). This is Unamuno territory: "The man of flesh and bone; the man who is born, suffers, and dies--above all, who dies" (Unamuno 1). The man who dies and who does not want to die. It is also Camus territory, as we know from Fugard's illuminating Notebooks, and from Dickey and many other commentators. It is not irrelevant to note that, according to Walder, one of the Serpent Players' major productions, only months before Sizwe Bansi, had been Camus' Les Justes (AF 81).
Much of the impact of this moment in Sizwe Bansi derives from the way in which it represents an interface between the play's two key dimensions: the sociopolitical and the existential. Sizwe Bansi has long been recognized not only as "an indictment of the depravity and inhumanity of apartheid" (Vandenbroucke 123), but also as a "watershed" of a "new theatre" in South Africa (Mshengu 46). Stanley Kauffmann even dismissed the play as "superficial" because it was, he believed, "only about the troubles of South African blacks" (Rev. of Sizwe 26). On the other hand, it is well known that Fugard himself has always aimed at transcending the "merely" sociopolitical. Significantly, in the seven-page introduction that precedes the three Statements plays, he concerns himself with some of the dramaturgical and philosophical problems he confronted in them, without a single reference to their ideological or sociopolitical context.(1) "Facts," writes Fugard in a characteristic pronouncement, "are flat and lacking in the density and ambiguity of truly dramatic images" (Statements iii). In a corroborating passage John Kani provides a cameo of Fugard as director, trying to outwit the censors: "Find a simpler statement. Disguise this statement. That is politics. Try and find the artistic value of the piece" (qtd. in Vandenbroucke 118--my italics). In the present post-apartheid era(2) it is perhaps time to take a more dispassionate look at some problems illuminated by Sizwe Bansi Is Dead: not only the interaction between sociopolitics and theatre within a given text, but the dilemma of the writer as a person with both artistic integrity and a social conscience. Or, in terms of Fugard's own explanation of his improvisational technique in his preface to the play ("The basic device has been that of Challenge and Response" [Statements vi]: the problem of reacting to an ideological and/or political challenge (apartheid and the struggle for liberation) with a response on a different level altogether--theatrical, existential, and moral. In several interesting respects N. Chabani Manganyi provides an early articulation of the terms of the problem: Sisyphus is the absurd hero. Pushing the rock uphill is the price I pay . . . for what? I am not Camus, nor am I the West. I the black Sisyphus am social--not metaphysical. It is the social which constitutes the horizon of my futile labour. Going downhill I come face to face with the social--my tormentors. I make the only logical jump I know, i.e. ignoring suicide in favour of something so painfully pragmatic--murder. . . . I did not participate in the rebellion of the West. Yet I carry the burden of the questions they raised. (16)
Related Results
With reference to Arthur Miller's Incident at Vichy, Manganyi highlights "the interface between personal troubles and public issues," concluding that "It is the personal troubles, the individual destinies, that add a dimension to the problem of the historically extreme situation" (35, 37). In this context the artist occupies a special position through his preoccupation with "images" rather than "action." As Manganyi notes, the artist's "first solution for the problem of subordination and
its consequent violent and rebellious impulse is symbolic rather than actual. He responds at a more primitive level by placing his whole weight behind ritualisation on a symbolic level in the place of a real murder as a social act" (66). Sizwe Bansi opens with a now famous improvisation by the character Styles (a photographer) on themes provided by whatever news is topical on the day and in the locality of the performance. We know that this improvisation, which in the printed version of the play covers about fifteen pages and in the filmed version about thirty minutes, sometimes stretched to as much as an hour and a half once John Kani was in his stride (Vandenbroucke 123). Whatever the importance of this variable introduction of political satire and reference in any given performance, its dramatic significance lies in its contribution to the definition of the character Styles and his history. And the mise en scene assumes a peculiar circular form which is of decisive importance for the reading of the play I am attempting to offer here. The play opens in the here and now of Styles's photographic studio, where he finds himself, facing his audience, waiting for a customer to turn up. From this point Styles returns to his beginnings, his first job as a worker in the Ford Factory in Port Elizabeth, and traces the vicissitudes of his life along the route which will bring him back to this studio, as T. S. Eliot puts it in "Four Quartets," to "know the place for the first time." There is indeed, in Styles's seemingly lighthearted excursus, an acknowledgment of Eliot's proposal that "every moment is a new and shocking/Valuation of all we have been." This interaction of "time past" and "time present," in many respects the lifeblood of drama as a literary mode, establishes a base and a model for the further evolution of the play (Eliot 145, 125, 117). Undoubtedly the Styles story contains a strong and explicit political text: the lack of choices available to him as a black worker in a white-owned factory; the dreary realities of job reservation, of group areas, of the whole complex of laws that define apartheid as a system; the futile pleasure derived from a momentary reversal of white and black roles (when Styles makes a fool of "Baas" Bradley by saying in Xhosa what cannot be said in English, by standing erect while the foreman is "kneeling there on the floor," by "wearing a mask of smiles," by changing the customary order of perception as a key to the racial power play at work in the scene--"We were watching them. Nobody was watching us"); the process of transformation into a self-made man with his own studio (5-8).(3)
Related Results
Below this explicit text there are signs of a more problematic ideological subtext. Two such signs are the economic choice implied in Styles's evolution (which appropriates precisely some of the practices of apartheid that have proved most successful in establishing a society of haves and have-nots, exploiters and exploited), and the choice of language in the play. The choice of private enterprise as a response to the dehumanization of the apartheid system is in itself significant. Consider a similar response by Sizwe Bansi when he thinks of "start[ing] a
little business" as a "way out" of the vicious circle described by Buntu (26). The choice of private enterprise certainly goes against the ideological grain of black South African playwrights who define "the system" not only in terms of racial oppression, but most particularly in terms of economic exploitation. For example, Zakes Mda's ex-soldier Janabari, in We Shall Sing for the Fatherland, says: "Serge, I have been trying to tell you that our wars were not merely to replace a white face with a black one, but to change a system which exploits us, to replace it with one which gives us a share in the wealth of this country" (44). If so, it would explain something about the curious confusion of metaphors which arises from Styles's account of his life's journey. Upon first acquiring his studio he faces a problem of infestation by cockroaches, and the first remedy he reaches for is an insecticide, "The Mass Murderer! Doom!" (9). Clearly, in this scene the cockroaches become a metaphor for the black masses infesting the white capitalist's "condemned" premises. This becomes most evident in the failure of the attempt to "doom" the "pests." But for the metaphor to work, Styles himself becomes, at least temporarily, allied to the forces of white repression. An even more convoluted situation arises when the failure of the first attempt to evict or kill the cockroaches is followed by a much more efficient method: a cat called Blackie does the job. Even if one resists the temptation to tread much further through this particular labyrinth of metaphors, Styles's appropriation of the strong-arm tactics that traditionally characterized the apartheid regime sends some unexpected signals.
Related Results
What marks the Styles circle above all else is his resort to role-playing, which is, interestingly enough, a strategy in any number of resistance plays by black writers in South Africa. Much more than a mere device to resolve the problem of tedium presented by straight narrative, roleplaying operates within several systems of signification. In the first place, role-playing extends the scope of the character's involvement in the narrative. Instead of being merely this individual implicated in this situation (a photographer and exfactory worker in his township studio), Styles becomes a crowd, reaching beyond the twentyseven members of an extended family who turn up to have their photograph taken (15-16) to a whole community (the township), a whole society (the blacks in South Africa). "The most powerful moments in the Statements plays, their most memorable images, take us beyond the private pain in which [Fugard's] own concerns are rooted," says Walder, "to suggest the shape of suffering and hope for an entire community" (AF 94). In this process the plurality already hinted at in Styles's very name is actualized.(5) This is the strategy through which Styles legitimizes his concern, not with himself as an individual or with other individuals, but with "the simple people, who you never find mentioned in the history books" (12). In short, his concern is identical with that of Brecht in "Questions of a Reading Laborer":
Who built the seven-towered Thebes? In the books we find the names of kings. Did the kings lug the quarried rocks to the place? And the often destroyed Babylon-- Who rebuilt it so many times? In which houses In the gold-shimmering Lima did the builders live?. . . Every ten years a great man. Who paid for the food? So many reports. So many questions.(6) Inhabiting the stage with a multitude of invisible yet highly significant people--a startlingly effective demonstration of Derridean presence of absence and absence of presence--Styles not only highlights the Camusian tenet Je suis, donc nous sommes, but also proposes its converse: We are, therefore I am. In the second place, role-playing makes it possible to represent the all-encompassing yet invisible System on the stage. The representation of the objects and victims of the System is inevitable and inescapable--that is what the play is "about." But for the full effect of both their suffering and their possibilities of resistance to be communicated to the audience, the subjects of the System must also be represented. That is why Styles's impersonation of "Baas" Bradley carries such peculiar weight. It demonstrates not only the existence and omnipresence of the System's subject, but also the possibility of subverting him by appropriating him in a totemizing function. However, if this has a positive side, namely the discovery that "Baas" Bradley can be manipulated and dominated in this representation, it can also be read negatively. Even when he is not physically present he continues to inhabit the minds of his victims--who can only, through play-acting, acquire a temporary ascendancy, because he is and remains there. After all, what does not threaten does not need to be exorcised. Through play-acting, and only through playacting, can the actor, in the primary sense of "actant," enter into a full understanding of the System, which helps to subvert it from the inside--even as it confirms it.
Related Results
Representation of the System also bestows a function of relative power on the representer. Both as photographer and as narrator/producer, Styles captures, like a writer, "in my way, on paper the dreams and hopes of my people so that even their children's children will remember a man" (13)-a statement (and this is, one is constantly reminded, one of a triptych entitled Statements) which is confirmed by the camera's flash at the very end of the play. But the statement, as we know from Fugard's injunction quoted earlier, is offered in (distorted by?) disguise; and this is yet another function of play-acting in the text. This raises once again the question of the play's potential for involvement in ideological discourse through acting as a response to a very specific sociopolitical challenge. Of course, disguise need not imply denial, rejection, or even repression. It may be an acknowledgment of a variegated or stratified reality. This would involve the primary facade adopted by black people in the face of apartheid, which Lewis Nkosi refers to as "the fantastic ambiguity, the deliberate self-deception, the ever-present irony beneath the
mocking humility and moderation of speech" (qtd. in Vandenbroucke 119). It would also involve the demonstration of what Vandenbroucke calls "the facade as facade" (119), and thereby blur the boundaries between the political and the existential. Even so the question remains whether the disguise of the political statement through play-acting may not be seen as a withdrawal into the comparative safety of aesthetics.(7) This problem will have to be returned to later, once the text has been scrutinized in greater depth. Another fascinating ambiguity highlighted by the processes of role-playing involves the identification of apartheid (the ideology of oppression) with death (the existential experience of the neant), and of political survival with life. Many commentators have noted the play's context of omnipresent death: the proximity of Styles's studio to a funeral parlor (10), the extermination of the cockroaches (9-10), the death of the old man two days after posing for his photograph (22), the funeral of Outa Jacob, who accepts "the terms of his contract with God" (28), the death of Robert Zwelinzima, who literally provides Sizwe with a "Book of Life" (32-33), etc. The commentators have also noted the play's concomitant insistence on, and even celebration of, the forces of Life (as a representative example see Vandenbroucke 121, 124). In the process of roleplaying, the past itself is identified with death, and the theatrical act with (re-)incarnation--which affirms the present as life, and opens the possibility of a future. This, more than anything else, elucidates the importance of the Styles improvisation which introduces the play. For it is only in the process of drawing, with all its meanderings and ambiguities, the first circle of the play, the Styles circle, that the audience is conditioned to evaluate the second, which gives the play its title. Styles does not merely establish a prologue to the play, but rehearses the conditions for its interaction with the audience. He does not simply precede the narrative, but surrounds it and contextualizes it. Approached in this way, each of the two parts becomes a "dangerous supplement" to the other.
Related Results
A second circle opens as Sizwe, significantly indicated in the text or theatre program as an anonymous "Man," makes his appearance at the very moment when Styles appears to close his own. But as a result of what the spectator has already witnessed, the Sizwe circle is differently loaded. The strategy of the Styles circle had been to draw a cyclic life story, starting at the end (i.e., the narrative or theatrical present), then going to the most distant past, and proceeding back to the starting point. The Sizwe circle is not a simple repetition of this strategy, but is just as much the product of Sizwe's narration as of Styles's creative intervention. From the moment Styles greets Sizwe as "a Dream," he at the very least co-invents and co-imagines Sizwe's life.(8) It is Styles's evocation of a possible future for Sizwe, his conversion of Sizwe from a static image, a mere "card," into a life, a "movie," which makes the reinvention of the past possible. Interestingly enough, this also involves a transformation from straight narrative (Sizwe's account of his life to Styles) via a transitional stage of slightly more highly charged dramatized narrative (the encounter with Buntu is acted out in front of the spectators, but still involves the telling of
his story), to full-blown role-playing (the re-enactment of the scene where the dead body of Robert Zwelinzima is discovered, urinated upon, then robbed of its identity document). The real point of the play's discourse, and its interaction with both its sociopolitical and its philosophical context, is confronted in the final debate about the significance of adopting the dead man's identity. If Styles demonstrates that survival as a "man" is possible only on the condition that the self-respect and the dignity of the individual is guaranteed (15), the argument presented by Buntu (who in the second circle represents a "role" played by the same actor who was Styles in the first) is that Sizwe's only hope of survival lies in his renunciation of that dignity and self-respect embodied in his name. "Survival," writes Fugard in his Notebooks, "can involve betrayal of everything--beliefs, values, ideals--except Life itself" (164). It becomes, inevitably, a debate--the immemorial debate--about "having" and "being." The nameless "Man" who "is" both the old Sizwe and the new Robert, appears to affirm the notion of an identity divorced from all processes of naming. And as Sizwe (who announces his own death almost as soon as he appears on the stage: because, in fact, his appearance is conditional upon that death) assumes more and more the role and the identity of Robert (38-41), a process as theatrically impressive as the transformation of Arturo Ui, the distinction between a "man" and a "ghost" becomes more and more pertinent. If a black man is dehumanized in the perception of whites to the point of becoming a mere number and a ghost, argues Buntu, then "All I'm saying is be a real ghost, if that is what they want" (38). Or, in other words, "What I'm saying is shit on our pride if we only bluff ourselves that we are men" (43). If the spectator's moral sympathies reside inevitably with Sizwe, who is reluctant to shed his notion of identity as the essence of a name,(9) the Styles circle, which has established the processes of play-acting as the raison d'etre of the play itself, predetermines the outcome. Names, that first circle has demonstrated, are indeterminate and random: in fact, only by playing the game of the relative, which manifests itself as an endless series of versions and possibilities, is survival, and life itself, conceivable. But what, then, becomes of authenticity? And what becomes of the possibilities of authentic revolution or of any radical change in any given system? This is where a crucial problem of the play becomes obvious. Can one ever act oneself out of a given situation, or only ever more and more deeply and fatally into it?
Related Results
The problem becomes even more complicated as one approaches the end of the second circle: Sizwe's transformation into Robert Zwelinzima is complete, his letter to his wife is rounded off, his excursion into the past restored to the present. Simultaneously, he returns to the pose struck for the photograph Styles has set up on 17-19. (Would it be over-indulgent to wonder whether this double unfolding of a life in a single moment--first Styles's, now Sizwe's--is a demonstration of the old belief that this is what happens at the moment of death?) As Sizwe's smile, which is an affirmation of life, is petrified into a photographic image, both circles of the play are rounded
off--and closure means death. Surely it would not be far-fetched to see in this circular action a theatrical manifestation--and affirmation--of the closed circle of sociopolitics within which the action has been located and from which no exit is possible. The System, in the devastating formula proposed by Statements . . . , has "no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end" (84). In this vicious circle the ancient hero as the man who conquers is reduced, at best, in the familiar Camusian terms, to the one who simply manages to endure. All three Statements plays offer this image of closure. In Sizwe Bansi it resides in the circularity of the action, the confinement of Styles's studio, the inescapable present to which all flights of recollection or the imagination return. In The Island it is encapsulated in the image of the island itself, from which none can escape. Even if John, whose sentence has been remitted, is to return to the outside world in three months' time, the society he returns to embodies the deadly system that has created the island as prison. As in The Tempest, mainland and island are supplementary to each other, and life is inevitably rounded with a sleep. Ultimately, even if the play does hold out the hope of release for John in the future, the final action of the play is a repetition of the beginning: an endless running in a circle (77).(10) In Statements . . . all the vicissitudes and open possibilities of life are forever frozen in half a dozen photographic images, in an implacable series of "statements": "And then at the end as at the beginning, they will find you again" (107). Moreover, through their presentation as a triptych with a common title, the plays interpenetrate one another: the photographs of Statements . . ., images of death, inform the images of life taken by Styles; the finality of the island image also rounds off Sizwe Bansi and Statements . . .; the ancient play performed in The Island becomes a silent accompaniment to the action in all three, illuminating the ultimate acceptance of the fact that "Because life lives, life must die" (82).
Related Results
The only way the System can be beaten, it would seem, lies in a denial of identity, in playing the game, in remaining fully within closure. If Sizwe confronts the world as a "new" man and challenges it on its own terms (Vandenbroucke 122), he offers no hope, and no example, to anyone else. His confrontation cannot but remain a purely personal motion. If John leaves the island, his departure neither brings nor affirms freedom for anyone else--in fact, he is as much an exception to the rule as Sizwe, his "freedom stinks" (71). The condition of man is reduced to being "nothing" (Statements . . . 108). Even when Buntu provides the means of survival it can never be more than temporary. Sizwe embraces it in the full knowledge that a black man cannot stay out of trouble: "Our skin is trouble" (43). The System is all-powerful and all-embracing; if Denmark's a prison, then is the world one. Yet the end of the play is not defeatist; the rounding of the circles appears to challenge the finality of absolute closure. Buntu's last words to Sizwe are "See you tomorrow" (44), and in the final paragraph of his letter to his wife Sizwe undertakes "to send some more [money] each week" (44). Vandenbroucke even asserts that "Inasmuch as individual action can make a
difference, Sizwe Bansi is far more hopeful and optimistic than the plays written solely by Fugard" (124).(11) If there is justification for this it would have to be located in strategies to break the either/or deadlock of traditional approaches to ideology and existentialism, to politics and theatre. Most particularly, it would have to be located in strategies to escape from the aesthetic insularity of the rounded play, to break out of the deadly circularities of structure, to transcend the fate of the individual--those solitary males whose plight dominates the action of Sizwe Bansi, of The Island, and to a large extent even of Statements. . . . The most obvious device, already broached in the discussion of role-playing, involves the peopling of the theatrical space of the play with a wide variety of representatives from the society which surrounds the action and the actors. In Statements . . . the policeman represents not only the System, the forces of law and order, but--notably through the statement of Mrs. Buys-the outside world which invades the lovers' haven. In both the other plays the two central actors themselves represent the absent multitude--all the more persuasive because in their invisibility they come to inhabit, to possess, the actors. In Styles and Sizwe, in John and Winston, as I have indicated above, an abstract System finds its local habitation and its name. The characters conjured up through the role-playing inhabit an intermediate space between actors and audience, moving in both directions, and thereby involving both. By the same token they go a long way toward fusing the "purely" political and the "merely" aesthetic. One particularly pertinent strategy in the attempt to break out of the circle involves an appeal to the absent woman. This is illuminated by a crucial observation in Notebooks: "A sudden and clear realization . . . of how, almost exclusively, 'woman'--a woman--has been the vehicle for what I have tried to say about survival and defiance" (198). In Statements . . ., of course, the woman is physically present as "the other person on the floor" (85). Yet from the beginning, even before the intervention of the Immorality Act, the relationship between the play's protagonists is in the process of breaking down ("Is there nothing any more we can do except hurt each other?" [93]). If she represents an attempt toward human wholeness ("And he . . . And I . . . And we . . ." [104]), it is the failure of this wholeness, through a progressive exclusion and denial of the woman by the man toward the end, that results in the irremediable bleakness of the outcome, a near-total darkness quite uncharacteristic of Fugard.
Related Results
In The Island an accumulation of denigratory references to woman and the "place" of a woman ("You got no wife here. Look for the rag yourself" [50]; "I'm a man, not a bloody woman" [60]) runs parallel to expressions of lack and deprivation caused by her absence (consider especially the imaginary telephone conversation which concludes Scene One)--to be resolved in the crucial play-within-the-play which figures Antigone in the central role. If in Statements . . . it is the very presence of the physical woman that confirms the absence of femininity, the absence of woman
becomes an overwhelming presence in The Island. The ultimate degradations are possible because the figure of woman is absent from prison. This also happens, in different ways, in Sizwe Bansi. The Styles circle already anticipates it. Woman may appear to figure only as the provider of food ("Get the lunch, dear"), but she is also the guarantor of family cohesion and management: "Go to your mother. . . . Look after the children, please, sweetheart" (9). "Family" is a key word throughout the play. In the Styles circle the important role of woman is understated; but as soon as Sizwe enters she becomes the pivotal figure of the action. His experiences come to make sense, and to acquire an aim and a purpose, only by virtue of their all being interpreted in the letter to his wife Nowetu, which occupies the whole second circle of the play. Addressing himself to her in the distant King William's Town, 120 miles from where he has ended up in his attempts to provide for her and the family, Sizwe literally reaches out from the confinement of Port Elizabeth.(12) In perhaps the most poignant scene in the play, Sizwe strips off all his clothes to reduce himself to the barest existence of a poor fork'd creature--in which, like Shylock, he most acutely represents the whole of humanity. This is how he then defines himself: "Look at me! I am a man. I've got legs. I can run with a wheelbarrow full of cement! I'm strong! I'm a man. Look! I've got a wife. I've got four children" (35). Being a man means having a wife, means acknowledging femininity as part of the self. It is his very absence from home, the family, his wife, that has resulted in all his present troubles. Eventual restoration and return to the absent Nowetu is the only resolution, and it is symbolically prefigured in the act of writing to her. The importance of the subtext on male/female relations cannot be emphasized too much, most especially as it forms part of the interface that connects the existential and the political. Nowetu may represent the "female principle" as part of the existential experience, even possibly as part of a metaphysics of being--but she is also a black woman in a township suffering the degradations and deprivations imposed by apartheid. In the terms of Fugard's Notebooks, Nowetu is both "woman" and "a woman." In this respect, as in many others, the play does not represent an act of withdrawal from (sociopolitical) reality into the island of aesthetics, but rather the opposite: a demonstration of a new aesthetics as a plunge into Heideggerian "facticity" and an assumption of moral responsibility. Far from being "something out there," Nowetu is very much, and very urgently, someone in here.
Related Results
We have seen how role-playing in Sizwe Bansi can be read either as part of a mere statement (registering the past) or--worse--as an escape into the imagination. But play-acting transcends the mere recapitulation or remembering of the past: it is also a reshaping, a reinvention, of that past. Because "Who controls the past . . . controls the future: who controls the present controls the past" (Orwell 35). Which is why at the very least role-playing represents the artist's victory over whatever menaces him.
It is more than a pyrrhic or private victory. It represents, in fact, the most basic function of the writer in a closed society where "normal" artistic creation is inhibited and everything is politicized: the need to record, the need to bear witness. It is the primary reaction, which precedes all resistance. "To mark the paper," insisted Winston Smith, "was the decisive act" (Orwell 8). This kind of "writing" implies a correction of "the conspiracy of silence" in South African history, in history generally (Fugard, qtd. in Gray AF 56). Unless one recognizes in this action, not a renunciation of sociopolitical action in favor of an aesthetic and/or existential response, but a highly charged confluence of the two, the often superficial debate about the efficacy of Sizwe Bansi will never proceed beyond the obvious. Thanks to this strategy, Styles's photography--like the creative collaboration of Fugard, Ntshone, and Kani that resulted in this text--transcends the level of mere recording or witnessing toward an act of the imagination which also has sociopolitical implications and repercussions. Because, through role-playing, not only the past is reinvented but the present ("reality" itself) is approached as invented, that is, as a version of the possible or the imaginable. What Styles does involves the recording of images: but it involves also the active stimulation, in fact the creation, of dreams. His studio becomes, in that much-quoted phrase, a "strong-room of dreams" (12). When Sizwe erupts into this space he is announced, not as a "customer," but as "a Dream" (17). This does not posit a simplistic binarity of "dream" versus "reality": if dream is the mask of reality, or reality the acting-out of the dream, each is informed by the other. And if reality itself is acknowledged--as happened consciously in the theatre ever since Calderon's La Vida Es Sueno--as imagination and fabrication (i.e., as version, or in postmodern parlance as text), it is, as Brecht would have it, not a fate to be endured but a fact which can be changed. Far from being a trap which ensnares its victim, the circle of the play is presented as a challenge to be responded to. In this lies much of the explosive revolutionary potential of the interaction between the existential and the ideological. Aesthetics here becomes an act of ideological choice--not of withdrawal but of immersion. This reading of Fugard's dramaturgy in Sizwe Band returns us to what he himself, at a time when he was a particularly enthusiastic exponent of Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theatre, regarded as basic to the theatrical experience: an "immediate and direct relationship with our audience" (Statements ii). It means that for a more comprehensive evaluation of the interaction between aesthetics and politics we should look at the text as performance, i.e., as part of an experience that has no "outside" to it. In such a reading the audience assumes a vital importance. The narrative in the play may indeed present images of closed circles in which Buntu's words reverberate ad infinitum: "There's no way out, Sizwe." But the act of confronting an audience with such images cannot but stimulate a response, and this in itself is already a breaking of the circle. In the narrowest sense of the word, the play can be read as the response by a group of artists to the challenge of a sociopolitical situation. In performance it is the play that acts as challenge to elicit a response from the audience. "Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows," said Orwell (81).
Related Results
African Influence Even Zoe can't stop this Rose from wilting; THEATRE
Challenge and response: the changing face of theater in South Africa Fugard as director: an interview with the cast of 'Boesman and Lena.' - Athol...
In conclusion I note that, in one way or another, all South African writers under apartheid faced the same dilemma; but there were, inevitably, a wide variety of responses. In Zakes Mda's play The Hill there is unmitigated gloom in the portrayal of the system of migrant labor as ultimately omnivorous. In The Road Mda presents violence as the only "way out" of the impasse of the System: the Laborer, driven beyond endurance, kills the Farmer.(13) A more subtle end is that of We Shall Sing for the Fatherland: after their death from exposure, two veterans of the wars of liberation, forced into a futile life of deprivation in the margin of the "new" society, return as ghosts to haunt not only the park in which they died but the conscience of the audience. In this manner an all but direct appeal is launched to do something about the injustices that have survived racism to be perpetuated in capitalism. One of the most forceful and exuberant plays from the Struggle is Woza Albert! by Mtwa, Ngema, and Simon. Going far beyond the statement of suffering under apartheid, it succeeds in combining political action with religious revivalism in appealing to the heroes of the past to replace the white man's Christ and redeem their people. Fiction, too, demonstrates the challenge of ideology to the artistic mind. As may be expected, apocalyptic writing by white writers has found the reconciling of political and moral conscience with Western aesthetics to be problematic. In many ways John Conyngham's The Arrowing of the Cane is an archetype of the liberal dilemma: faced by the end of his familiar world, the spoiled scion of an English settler family, renouncing all hope of procreation, withdraws into his cellar and commits suicide after secreting the narrative of his end in a fissure which resembles a vagina. Here writing turns upon itself. A crack in a wall is hardly a cure for impotence. Wholly unlike Sizwe Bansi, Conyngham's creative act celebrates its own white futility. Nadine Gordimer's response in July's People is fascinating. With great skill she establishes both her white and black characters as acting on behalf of larger social groupings. The white Smales family, seeking refuge in the remote community of their erstwhile trusted servant as Armageddon is unleashed on the country, represent "their kind." Their servant, July, represents "his kind." The hut in which they all are sheltered becomes archetypal, the mother of all huts, the womb. However, when in the brilliantly ambiguous final scene Maureen runs out toward a helicopter, "whether it holds saviours or murderers" (158), it is presented as an utterly individual act--"like a solitary animal at the season when animals neither seek a mate nor take care of their young, existing only for their lone survival" (160). What is ultimately important here, however, is not the privacy or the immediacy of her choice, but the fact of it: that is, the discovery that the interregnum between the convulsions of the old world and the emergent new can only be transcended through an act of conscious and individual choice which opens the way to the future irrespective of what that future may be. The remarkable coincidence of private decision and public responsibility, of individual integrity and social commitment, resembles in many respects the same fusion of opposites in Sizwe Bansi.
Related Results
African Influence
Even Zoe can't stop this Rose from wilting; THEATRE Challenge and response: the changing face of theater in South Africa Fugard as director: an interview with the cast of 'Boesman and Lena.' - Athol...
J. M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K also explores the Final War, and also focuses on individual choice in an endorsement, complicated with irony, of Voltaire's "Cultivons notre jardin." But once again, however private and imaginary the final action, it transcends the purely personal--in this case because Michael K's resolution implies the survival, not just of an individual, but of a set of values. These values are articulated only after Michael's identification with all the poor naked wretches who bide the pelting of a pitiless and universal storm. Which once again endorses the subtler meanings of Sizwe Bansi Is Dead and re-establishes it as, in so many ways, a key text from the apartheid experience. NOTES 1 The closest Fugard comes to it is in noncommittal references to the origins of three plays. About The Coat he says: "The coat in question belonged to a New Brighton man, one of many, who had been found guilty of membership of a banned political organization and sentenced to five years imprisonment." About Orestes: "I had an idea involving an incident in our recent South African history . . . a young man took a bomb into the Johannesburg station concourse as an act of protest. It killed an old woman. He was eventually caught and hanged." And about The Island: "[It] began with the notes and ideas I had accumulated over many years relating to Robben Island" (Introduction to Statements ii, iv, v). 2 I use the term "post-apartheid era" in a merely technical sense, referring to the period of political transition toward democratic rule, initiated with the unbanning of banned organizations and the release of Nelson Mandela in 1990. Not for a moment, alas, does this mean that the dismantling of a system of laws has brought about, in itself, an end to the practices and mentalities of apartheid. 3 When a Xhosa song is introduced, "Tshotsholoza . . .," Fugard's glossary identifies it as "an African work chant" (Statements 8, 109). Yet Cosmo Pieterse (cited in Vandenbroucke 123) points out that it is in fact a song from the resistance movement! 4 Even so, one cannot ignore the accounts, often both revealing and deeply disturbing, of the play's tremendous impact on black South African audiences during the darkest years of apartheid (for example, see Vandenbroucke 123). And certainly an alternative interpretation of the choice of English is possible, namely as the lingua franca of the black majority of South Africans. Rather than promoting a narrow black-national consciousness through the use of one specific African language (Xhosa in this instance), English may be seen to promote solidarity among all the oppressed.
Related Results
African Influence Even Zoe can't stop this Rose from wilting; THEATRE Challenge and response: the changing face of theater in South Africa
Fugard as director: an interview with the cast of 'Boesman and Lena.' - Athol...
5 Names play a significant role throughout the play. In "Sizwe Bansi" resonates "the great nation" (Vandenbroucke 119) or "the people are strong" (Walder 77). "Buntu" refers to the quality of generosity, sharing, humanity, characteristic of African communities. On a different level, the use of the actors' own names, Winston and John, as well as Athol (Statements 43), also complicates the weight of "reality" in the play (as it does in Woza Albert! by Mtwa, Ngema, and Simon, and in other plays from the Struggle). 6 "Fragen eines Lesenden Arbeiters" in Brecht's Chroniken (656--my translation). 7 In a lecture coinciding with the first performances of The Road to Mecca Fugard asserted, "The only safe place is inside a story." 8 This is further complicated by Sizwe's offering of his life story not only as a response to Styles's questioning, but as an autobiographical account in a letter to his wife Nowetu. I deal with this aspect later in this essay. 9 This is underscored in Statements . . . by the Man's vision of the ultimate deprivation as "A man without his name" (106). 10 In his notes on Boesman and Lena Fugard offers yet another view of his obsession with "the stupid walk round and round, 'Looking for a way out of your life'" (Notebooks 191). 11 A curious statement in view of his assertion, only a few pages later, that The Island "is more hopeful and optimistic than any of Fugard's others" (131). Both these pronouncements were, of course, made before the decisive turn toward optimism in Fugard's later plays, notably The Road to Mecca (1985), My Children, My Africa! (1989), and Playland (1992). 12 Buntu, too, is married (28); and the late Outa Jacob was accompanied, like Boesman, on all his wanderings by his wife (28). 13 Interestingly enough, this reaction is provoked not by sociopolitical circumstances but by provocation on a personal, emotional, and sexual level. The Laborer learns that his oppressor has also appropriated--and abused--his wife. COPYRIGHT 1993 Hofstra University COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group

In The Play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

In The Play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

In The Play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What is the main problem faced by Sizwe Bansi?

How does Buntu propose Sizwe Bansi can get a work permit?

In the play Sizwe Bansi Is Dead, which was "devised by" (1) Athol Fugard, John Kani, and

You might also like