kagablog

a knot is a strand going in a lot of different directions at once…the more you pull at any one of the directions, the tighter it sits…the anxiety of the knot lies in its contradictory nature, in that it’s going both forwards and backwards and a hundred other ways at once, looping in on itself, creating its own tension by covering all of the directions…

the only way to release a knot is to stop pulling in any direction at all, to relax…even the right direction will only pull it tighter, only constrict it more…so letting go is key…letting go of direction…letting go of right way and wrong way…

when the tension in the knot has dissolved one can again begin thinking of the right direction; but while the knot exists, it’s difficult to tell what’s the best way to head…

Sunnyside Sal is the story of an unusual friendship between two boys growing up in Pretoria. It’s a jauntily narrated novella set in the tumultuous early 1990s, when a whole generation was discovering that everything they’d been taught to believe was wrong. Fuelled by his reckless bravado and post-punk philosophy, Sal plunges into extreme situations, but his innocent experimentations in rebellion lead him increasingly into hazardous realms. Although ultimately a tragic tale, Sunnyside Sal is borne up throughout by an exuberant humour.

Anton Krueger teaches drama at Rhodes University. His award-winning plays have been performed in nine countries. He has published poems, short stories, reviews, academic articles and song lyrics. Sunnyside Sal is his first novel.

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ANTON KRUEGER: Looking back on your life now, before you got into this you were, first a magistrate in Rhodesia, and then eventually a Professor of Criminology at UCT. If you had stuck with that you would probably have been quite wealthy by now. You might have had a little holiday property in Italy, driving a BMW –

ROB NAIRN: Well, I would have been a retired professor.

AK: Ja, you would have had –

RN: A pension.

AK: For one thing…

RN: Funnily enough I was about it just the other day. I would have retired probably three years ago and I would have been bored out of my skull.

AK: If you think of the alternative life you could have had – you don’t have any regrets?

RN: No, it makes my hair stand on end, to think I could have landed up in a life as meaningless as that.

AK: Being originally from Zimbabwe – what do you think should be done about Mugabe?

RN: Nothing.

AK: Okay, next question.

RN: (Laughs.)

AK: Would you recommend the spiritual path for everyone, or do you think some people are not suited to it?

RN: How do you define a spiritual path?

AK: Okay, a Buddhist path.

RN: Well, Akong Rinpoche, who is one of the high lamas of the lineage I follow (the Kagyu Vajrayana lineage) often says anybody who lives a moral life, doesn’t do harm and lives to help others is a Buddhist. I’d recommend that to anybody, but I’d recommend they do it within the parameters of what works for them, and for many people Buddhism doesn’t. So if they’re Christians or Muslims or Jews or whatever, then I think that’s what they should do.

AK: What were the three things again?

RN: Do as much good as you can, don’t do any harm, and train your mind…
You know the Buddha emphasised that there are 84 000 different personality types, so quite clearly Buddhism as we understand it wouldn’t fit every single type, and the more devotional religions, where belief is a major factor and so on, would probably work better for a lot of people.

AK: People can sometimes be critical of Buddhism because they say you have to do everything yourself. They say it’s self-centred, that you have to save yourself and that sort of thing.

RN: Well, the Buddhist perspective isn’t that we are evil and fallen and wicked and therefore need somebody to come and save us. Buddhism is a do-it-yourself religion where the emphasis is on you having to do the work. You can’t say “Oh, I believe” and then sit back and lead a harmful life and expect to go to heaven.

Having said that, also you need to understand that in the Mahayana and Vajrayana tradition, the emphasis is on doing things solely in order to help and benefit others. So although it can look very self-centred at one level, because people spend their time meditating, the Mahayana perspective is that we’re doing this so that we can develop the qualities that will enable you to help others. You might say it’s very selfish for somebody to go and spend 8 years training to be a doctor, but having qualified, that person can help huge numbers of people. The Buddhist approach is the same.

Then, when you get into Vajrayana, the whole picture changes completely, because the central issue of Vajrayana is that you cannot enter into those higher practises without help from teachers and lamas and so on, so the emphasis switches. So a lot of what you said would perhaps be inspired by people who looked at Theravada, but certainly in Mahayana there’s a great emphasis on the fact that if you want to move forward it’s essential to have a guru to help you.

AK: Do you think there are any similarities between the Buddhist and Christian conceptions of Heaven and Hell?

RN: What I’ve heard from Christians is the general reference to burning in hell, so quite how they conceive it I don’t know. I think they see it as a very definite place, whereas my understanding of Buddhism is that hell is seen as a mind state, so that if people lead lives of tremendous harmfulness, hatred, vindictiveness and destructiveness, then what happens is they generate energy in their own minds which has a massively painful backlash which produces states of intense suffering in their own minds. If you see somebody who’s experiencing a paranoid neuroses, or a paranoid psychotic – that would be the Buddhist idea of somebody in hell.

If you equate Nirvana with Christian idea of heaven, they don’t seem to equate, because Nirvana is the realisation that there is no individual ego-centric entity, whereas Heaven presupposes somebody who goes up there and has a good time.

AK: You’ve mentioned before that psychology may be the means by which to relate Buddhism to Western ways of thinking. Do you think Buddhism can be used as a psychological therapy?

RN: I think that would be slightly missing the point, because you have to remember that psychology and therapy come from the medical model, and the medical model is based on the notion of disease and pathology, therefore something that us inherently wrong that has to be fixed; whereas the whole Buddhist approach is not that. The Buddhist approach is that everything’s actually fine, always was and always will be fine. All you have to do is recognise that your attitude towards it is one of misunderstanding the nature of what’s there. And therefore, if you can see through the delusion, or the mistake in the way you’re looking at it, you will be free from the suffering of viewing things in a way that’s causing you pain. So there is no assumption of anything that is inherently wrong.

I have to say that to give the whole Buddhist perspective. But, having said that, when you look at meditation, and what happens to the vast majority of westerners when they start meditating, they unquestionably, mostly, encounter neurotic issues. According to Carl Jung, neurosis is a state of psychosocial pain which incapacities one. Jung goes further and says neurosis is a substitute for authentic pain. So what he’s pointing to is that we’re unable to experience ourselves at an authentic level, which is one of the big issues in psychology.

So I think for a lot of meditators, psychology is probably going to be one of the most helpful tools to enable them to deal with the neurotic trap sufficiently to enable them to get free enough to meditate. And it doesn’t mean you go and do psychology sufficiently to meditate, it means you do the two simultaneously. But I think there are a lot of parallels, but one has to be very clear that the paradigms from which they’re coming is very different.

AK: I was reading recently that the Dalai Lama was saying that when the Tibetans first escaped from China in the 60s a whole posse of psychologists descended on them wanting to help them and give them counselling in post-traumatic stress and things like that, but they didn’t seem to have it. Because they had a totally different orientation towards their torturers in these traumatic situations, they recovered very quickly. They didn’t harbour the classic syndromes, because of their different way of approaching suffering.

RN: I think at a psychological level there are quite big differences between Tibetans from Tibet and Westerners. I don’t think they’ve got the sort of neurosis we have. The biggest thing is they’re not indoctrinated with guilt. I think as a result of that their minds are a lot stronger than ours.

AK: Because their minds are calmer?

RN: Maybe, maybe not – but they’re stronger. You see westerners minds are very weak, if one could generalise, because they’ve been so severely undermined with this belief that they’re inherently wrong and bad and inferior and all that sort of thing. So in terms of actual psychological strength, that’s done a lot of damage to westerners, whereas Tibetans haven’t suffered that damage.

AK: How would you define a strong mind and a weak mind?

RN: A weak mind is one that collapses under psychological stress. For example, you put the average westerner into solitary confinement, let’s say, in a situation of sensory deprivation. Within three days, the inner psychological imbalances will become so magnified that they will go mad. A person with a strong mind wouldn’t, because the inner self-destructive forces are not the same. So in the west a lot of people are thought to have strong minds, when in fact they’re very weak. For example you get a lot of people who are control freaks – they’re very assertive, very aggressive, very demanding.

AK: I suppose we see strength as wilfulness, or ambition –

RN: Ja, and all those are signs of weakness, because people manifesting those states are usually manifesting them because they’re incapable of resting at peace with themselves. They’re suffering from a lot of anxieties and insecurities so they have to compensate by dominating and asserting themselves against the environment. On the other hand, a person with a strong mind is at peace with themselves and for that reason wouldn’t manifest these qualities. They wouldn’t go around trying to dominate or be aggressive, or assertive, because they have no need. They don’t feel inferior. They don’t feel as though others are taking advantage of them.

AK: In Buddhism much seems to be said of relinquishing the ego and so on. Does this mean that Buddhism is anti-individuality?

RN: Buddhism isn’t anti-anything. I think you’ll probably find more individualists within Buddhism than anywhere else. Buddhists are tremendous individualists. So much so that somebody once said that trying to organise Buddhists is like trying to herd cats – they’re always off doing their own thing.

But it’s not individualist in the sense of asserting or attacking or criticising, it’s just individualist in the sense of feeling free to pursue their own path, but within helpful parameters. Because the big difference, as you well know is that there is no requirement to believe anything in Buddhism, so that throws a huge responsibility on every person, to find their own way and to take responsibility for themselves, which I think a lot of other religions find problematic, this idea that you should take responsibility for your own destiny.

AK: Relating to that is the idea of doubt, which is central to western philosophy, the idea of questioning everything…

RN: The subject of doubt is a very important one, because it has so many overtones and distorted connotations. If you look at the simple meaning of “doubt”, it means “I don’t think it’s true”, doesn’t it? If you say something is true and I say “I doubt that”. So what we imply from that is “I don’t think it’s true, but I’m open to being presented with the evidence, and I would be willing to review evidence objectively. Or, alternatively, I’d be willing to try something out and find out for myself”. So if you look at the Buddhist approach, the Buddha quite clearly says: “Do not believe anything I say, test it, and find out for yourself”. What he’s saying in that sense is – doubt it, but with an open mind. The open mind that is prepared to try out what the Buddha taught and not reject it out of hand.

Then, on the other hand, you have scepticism. And from a Buddhist perspective, scepticism is the ground of stupidity, because the sceptic does not want to know. The sceptic has a closed mind, he uses a sceptical stance to discredit everything even in the face of overwhelming evidence. So if you look at sceptics, they will wriggle and writhe and resort to all sorts of absurd devices to discredit anything. In which case, they are protecting themselves from the danger of ever having any real experience. So within Buddhism doubt is encouraged, but sceptical doubt is seen as an obstacle to any form of intelligence or moving forward. And also what goes with this is, the Buddha said “Don’t just blindly believe things. Keep a very open, alert, questioning, investigating mind.” That’s what’s encouraged in Buddhism, as opposed to say the cynical path.

AK: I saw a cartoon of Dilbert which is a kind of comic strip you often see on office doors, and it’s a rip-off of the guru on top of the hill saying “No thought, No thinking” and the guy says: “Maybe it would be better if you thought of something”, so he mocks the idea of aiming for “no thought, no thinking”.

I remember also growing up and hearing in church that if you empty your mind you make it vulnerable to demons and other forces. So there was a warning about not emptying your mind, and, I suppose, seeing meditation as not necessarily a good thing.

RN: Well, this concept of emptying your mind is only put forward by people who know absolutely nothing about the subject, because you can’t empty your mind. And as to demons getting in, I think the people who say that sort of thing are probably talking about the overwhelming effect of their own unresolved psychological issues, so what they’re describing is their own unresolved negativity, which comes in and is seen as demonic. So they’re actually describing their own minds, which has nothing to do with what’s coming in from outside. Whereas a meditator is purifying that, and taking responsibility for all those underlying tendencies and freeing them. They need to take responsibility, so they’re cultivating loving kindness, compassion and putting out a peaceful vibe into the world, instead of a harmful, destructive one.

AK: What do you think is the most important thing that Buddhism has to offer the west at this time in history.

RN: I think it’s probably training in mindfulness. Buddhism had a highly practical method of training the mind to enable people to deal with all forms of stress and difficulty in the world today, particularly to do with their own psychology. I think it can offer people a means of getting beyond self destructiveness or destroying the environment or themselves or others or being harmful or damaging and showing people how they can train their minds so that they can manifest their finer potential within a few years and do what is necessary to become truly happy and at peace, rather than constantly causing trouble among their family or the rest of the world.

AK: That’s a nice closing statement. Thank you very much.

(first published in Odyssey, December 2009)

coming soon from cambridge scholars press.

pre-orders here:

http://www.c-s-p.org/Flyers/Experiments-in-Freedom–Explorations-of-Identity-in-Recent-South-African-English-Play-Texts1-4438-1425-3.htm

incwadi is here. it features work by kagablog contributors gary cummiskey and anton krueger.

1. line

all maps are imaginary…no maplines stand still…this story begins with
a line containing the map of germany, a line defined in 1871…

this was a line which expanded and contracted…it’s a line which ebbed,
flowed, surged, shrank during the century of my grandmother’s
lifetime…a membrane cut in two, then reunified…

this is a story about my grandmother, marie-luise wortmann
(”mareile”)…now that she has stopped moving, now, that her life-line
has stopped, now it can be traced:

a story of how she emerged from a land obsessed with lineage, a land
possessed by the idea of territory, a restless line eager to eat up
the lines around it…

a story of how my grandmother crashed through the moat this line
became and crossed the seas towards an imagined haven in africa, only
to find that once out here, her dreams were of home and that she
hadn’t left the bombs behind and that the stasi were still after
her…

my grandmother never could remap her mind, she never could escape the
cartography of her memories…she carried always with her a map etched
in by love and dread.

2. point

in 1939, bad blankenburg, mareile modersohn married ludwig krueger,
the perfect man…i knew he was the perfect man because he was good
and good looking and honest and kind and brave and so on…i knew he
was the perfect man because his perfect portrait framed every room in
which she slept…i knew he was the perfect man because she never fell
out of love with him, even when the bombs began to fall…

they fell in love while they were on the winning team, while posters
portraying golden youth with strength and summer smiles filled the
streets…when marching troops were welcomed with flowers and young
women kissed the soldiers striding in…blitzkrieg – love like
lightning…there was hope and faith in the dream of fatherland;
victory was assured the brave, and the joy of freeing europe from the
bonds of capitalism, communism, imperialism…

they must have felt bold, fearless…ludwig handsomely flying off to
the front to patch up the sons of the fatherland…every second good
to be alive, to keep on surviving…three children in three
furloughs….every sex an ecstasy of desperation…a perpetual falling
into love… …

then the tide turned…then the conquered territories stopped
welcoming the warriors with flowers…then smoke started slowly to
unfurl from the towers of the crematoria…then the news was no longer
of spring, but of autumn and winter, and then one day – er ist
gefallen…he fell…the telegram read …im dienste des
vaterlandes…stumbling and falling…like falling in love…falling
behind the lines…

by then married five years – two of victory, one of uncertainty, two
of defeat – by then the bombs falling closer to home…the monsters
she’d been told about, the beasts came creeping closer…day by day –
the commies, the yankees, the tommies – the reds the blues the brits –
all closing in…

and then the russians came clamouring through her tiny town, battering
the doors down; pricks like axes splitting apart all the legs they
could find, killing all the boys left, massacring old men –

…the russians crossed the line and remapped the world with guns
spitting ink, renaming the torn landscape as villages of women walked
into the waters with their infants in their arms, preferring death to
the perpetual raping – the hours, the days, the weeks, the months, the
years of retribution…

…they were peasants, mareile said, who marvelled at the magic of a
flushing toilet…who hacked the plumbing out to take it back with
them to the steppes, not realising that you needed a system to sustain
the shit…

3. area

by the time the dust had settled on the blood barely congealing on the
streets, the new maplines had been drawn and mareile found that she’d
become soviet, that now she was in enemy hands…

and so mareile settled in for the longest winter yet…faced not only
with poverty, hunger, the bitter cold, but also with the taste of
shame…their führer father suicided…the humiliation of defeat…

mareile and her ludwig never faced their shame together…he had been
swept away, dispersed into the perverse golden fantasy of honour…and
she was left alone with the wreck of the rubble and the
reds…deserted by her lover husband friend…

instead of the burning buildings and blood, instead of this bombed out
shell of a building with the stench of corpses she might have now been
easing another log into the coal stove to prepare her husband’s dinner
after his day at the village hospital, she might have now been baking
bread for her children fresh from school and happy to see her…

and then – talk of the wall…

day by day, the world was being redrawn around her…day by day, new
lines were being chalked in…the cold squalid cement of collectivism
sinking in, setting…those who could began fleeing west…mareile,
trapped with infants as she watched the law enfolding them, closing
in, sealing them off, who held tightly to the memory of ludwig’s face,
to the photograph she carried with her, as she prayed for release from
the east…

4. (life) line

and then the letter came from africa: i saw your story in the mission
magazine, i’ve read your father’s sermons and – god has called on me
to help you…the boat is ready to sail, let me marry you…god has
spoken – let me saddle up the steed…let me wear your colours on my
sleeve…god has called me – let me save you…

…two furtive letters later all had been arranged…by then former
friends were already turning into spies, the stasi’s ranks were
swelling with informers…she didn’t know whom she could trust…

was midnight when the children were woken from their violent dreams;
midnight when they fled to a deserted chapel carrying two battered
suitcases of silverware…she couldn’t tell them “we’re going to be
free”, she couldn’t say, “we’re going to africa”, she couldn’t even
tell them “it’s my wedding day”, so all she said was “kom”…and
“schnell” and “ruhig sein”…

mareile met fritz for the first time at the chapel, his hair hastily
sidecombed, having rushed into berlin, sleepless, wordlessly
appraising his three new children…i can see my father, dietrich,
six, little brow furrowed…confused…
“das ist euren neuer vater…wir mussen loß…kom schnell…ruhig sein…”

…the waves rocked them to the horn of africa, mareile’s fragile,
frightened body unused to his rough bricklayer’s hands…

5. point

so mareile, having burst through the boundary being bricked in around
the east of germany, settled with her fritz and three bewildered
children at the foot of the drakensberg…she had ploughed her way to
freedom, over the ocean, all the way down to the tip of africa…

yet still in mareile’s mind’s eye the cool woods of bad
blankenburg…she was baffled by the bright skies, the burning heat,
the strange new tongues…still the memory of the ancient castle on
the hill…

what she may not have expected from her liberation was the bile of the
english in africa…here they were now surrounded by the enemy…at
school my father was the “stinking german boy”…

mareile held on fast to two maps of home: a picture of the forests of
bad blankenburg, and a photograph of ludwig, sustaining memories of a
world she’d lost…

mareile never assimilated…having fallen so heavily in love, she
found that she could not get herself up again… she’d fallen south
into africa, but her heart still lay with the man fallen in the
north…

6. area

in one desperate action mareile had entrusted her life to fritz, but
in her heart she’d never lost the memory of the love first forged in
the fire of war…the memory of that love leeched out of her heart and
into her arteries…it burrowed into the marrow of her bones, bloomed
like sores on her skin…that love stained her entire life…

slowly, mareile and fritz grew accustomed to each other…they grew
new folds of skin, slowly becoming used to the furnishings of each
other’s flesh as they fell into the routines of sleeping, washing,
eating / dirtying and cleaning / breathing out and in again…but
mareile was never able to see fritz, because he wasn’t a person, he
was a thing that extended the hand of god reaching out towards her, an
answer, perhaps, to prayer…and after he’d fulfilled his duty he sank
back, emptied…there was never a need to invest any more emotion in
him than was his domestic due…and he sank back and back…perhaps
perplexed, how was it that she didn’t love him after what he’d done?
how was it possible not to love him for such daring?

but fritz had never realised she was sick…that mareile was infected
still by love…he’d never bargained on the dead man…the man
perfected by death…

mareile found herself dismayed by fritz’s ignorance of things she’d
spent her lifetime learning…all the refinements she’d accumulated at a
finishing school in switzerland were lost on him…he knew nothing
about culture and art, only of plaster and dust…his only knowledge
was of a country she had no desire to learn anything about, because
she lived outside of the languages of south africa and had no desire
to fold herself within their creases…

on her eightieth birthday, my uncle otto made a toast to mareile,
adding also a homage to the man whom, he said, she’d lived with and
loved for forty years / she cut him short – “nein”, interrupting,
“gewohnt, ja, aber nee geliebt” …lived with, yes, but never loved…

expressionless, resigned, fritz said nothing…mareile smiled, as if
this were a victory: a sign of her fortitude, a sign of her
commitment, an indication of the intensity of her passion and her
resolve at maintaining it…she wanted to show us the suffering she
had guarded as her precious possession… she would never forget,
never fall out of love…

that portrait must have haunted every house he lived in…as fritz
grew older, as every passing decade strained his flesh, ludwig
remained forever twenty-seven…standing there in his starched
officer’s uniform, his beautiful mouth smiling forever – the
gentleman, the doctor…how could fritz ever live up to that map of
beauty, that abstraction of lost innocence and irrecoverable grace?
how could fritz ever compete with what might have been?

i remember once, maybe fourteen, playing zxspectrum games in my
parent’s lounge with my friend david…we were sitting with our backs
to a rocking chair and leaning into it, pulling away from the action
of the game quite wildly at times…only after half an hour did we
notice opa sitting on the chair, wordlessly submitting, surrendering
to the rucking, accepting it with quiet complacency, the way he’d been
trained by then to do…poor fritz, his one noble deed had been spent,
he’d already played his trump card and now his hand was empty…

mareile gained strength from her suffering…her handshake like iron,
she exercised a severe matriarchy…the fierce will it had taken to
survive the war was used to keep ludwig’s memory alive…as fritz sank
into the background…

7. line

but when fritz contracted cancer a change came over him…when he
became incapacitated, when he became confined to his bed, when he
became, for the first time, the centre of attention…suddenly – he
began to speak…fritz finally found his voice, growing an unruly
beard he started flirting with the nurses as mareile sat,
disapproving, in the corner of the room…

fritz came into his own as he was dying, at last claiming some of the
sympathy for himself, some of the pity which had always been mareile’s
due… he would soon be joining ludwig…at last they would be
equal…

leaving mareile trapped, eventually in a security village, hemmed in
by alarm systems and strangers…her body finally closing down its
borders, relinquishing its access to a world to which she’d never
belonged as she became shut in by blindness, deafness…

8. point

mareile was born ten years before the end of the first world
war…only six years had passed since the boers had handed their arms
over to the brits…the streets of pretoria were covered with horse
shit and you needed an ox wagon to get to louis trichardt…

mareile died three months ago when she was 99…the tibetans,
measuring from conception, would have granted her the century…she
clung on tightly right up to the end, saying that she had to hold on
for her children, that they needed her…and yet, there was relief
when she finally embarked on her final voyage out into the mapless
terrain from which no traveller has yet returned…

the funereal speeches all celebrated her virtues – perseverance, faith
and diligence…my father (no longer 6, but 60 now) said he had a
better memory of the few occasions on which she’d let them off church
and had a picnic, than of the many hours between the pews…(two
pastors speaking in rapid succession after him quickly setting the
record straight pointed out mareile hadn’t missed a single service in
ten years)…

i wondered afterwards what i might have said if i had had the nerve to
offer a eulogy of my own…i might have said that when i thought about
my oma, i always saw her sitting at the head of the table, fingertips
lightly touching in the diamond gesture of superiority, quietly
judging us…

i might have said that, actually, i never knew her at all…or maybe
that my picture of her was always through the lens of my father’s
pain, the view of the little boy who’d always wanted her to love him
more…

i might have said that i had found her fiercely logical, moral, proud
and more aloof than loving…i might have said that despite her
lifetime of sorrow, i’d never found her to be very compassionate…i
might have said that i’d always thought of her as a real old battleaxe
whose children were all afraid of her…a master mistress of emotional
blackmail…

but why rock the boat? fritz was long gone by then…and i knew that
all of these vindictive thoughts came from my sympathies with
fritz…poor fritz, i’d been watching him my whole life…fritz
sitting rocking silently, wordlessly…he’d saved her skin and gotten
what…?

and what do i know anyway? i was the ungrateful grandchild who never
phoned …i couldn’t bear her denying the holocaust, i guess…perhaps
i felt myself superior to her superiority…all of those sundays at
the old age home as she sat spooning down the last of the mint sauce
so that it didn’t go to waste in order to teach us all a lesson about
something or other…perhaps, at eleven years old – perhaps i was the
one who was judging her…

so maybe it’s time for me to stop judging mareile…it’s strange that
what had for her been her life’s greatest sin (she had once consulted
a fortune teller) i think of as an interesting diversion, whereas i
judge her for what she considered her life’s greatest victory – for
never having let go of love…

the night when she was dying i had a dream about her…she said she
couldn’t feel the cold anymore…

9. area

on googlemaps i look up bad blankenburg and measure the distance to
pretoria…then zooming out i look down at the ocean, that roadless
deep, following the ridge of africa down the dry edge of
namibia…dragging africa up into view, a few centimetres and two
generations away…

now i am here, bone of her bone and gene of her genes…and now i do
feel this land a part of me…now the roads of pretoria form neural
networks in my mind, now they map my memories…there’s hardly a
street in the city which doesn’t harbour some or other connection,
some link to a moment, a person, a feeling…wandering through the
streets…”remember when – …remember when –… remember when
–…”…and now i know nothing of germany…that harsh tongue lies
unworked on my lips…

all maps are imaginary…the first map was not of the earth, but of
the stars in the sky above lascaux 16 000 years ago… the latest maps
of the world are made by satellite…they’re maps of the world within
the sky…of a world falling into space…

abendland

longing to find the font
of the dream of fatherland,
we found a road
fallen into the sea…

holding breath
alive we dived
into a crossing
longer than a life,
travelling against time
to find our father…

– before we could reach
the start of the past,
we saw him floating by –

our father who
will not rise again,
since we neglected
to bury him.

first published in itch

Living in Strange Lands
The Tsafendas Story
By Mary Corrigall

It is fifteen years after apartheid and we are still counting the cost. But the focus has shifted from the physical effects on the collective to the consequences on the individual’s psyche. This approach draws our attention to the insidiousness of this corrupt racial system, which has wormed its way into conceptions of the self.

This aspect is amplified in the case of Dimitri Tsafendas, the Mozambican-born South African who assassinated then-prime minister Dr HR Verwoerd in 1966. The segregationist laws caused a seismic rupture in Tsafendas’ conception of himself.

The progeny of a black woman and white (Greek) man, Tsafendas didn’t readily fall into any of the prescribed racial groups. This had terrible practical consequences for him for most of his life; if he married the person that he loved, a coloured woman called Helen, he would have to be classified as a coloured.

This classification, however, would limit job opportunities, making it that bit harder to support his wife and prospective family. Besides, one senses from this dramatisation of his life that Tsafendas was an activist at heart, who was unwilling to give into the authorities’ rigid laws.

But the apartheid laws didn’t only have an impact on his working and romantic life but on his psyche, causing the ultimate split of the self: schizophrenia, a disease that manifests in multiple personalities. Not that we experience Tsafendas as a double-sided character in this play. Rather he appears like a cohesive persona given to fantasy and delusion as a means of escape from his real-life predicaments.

When we meet Tsafendas (played by Renos Spanoudes) it is towards the end of his journey, shortly after he has been imprisoned. He paces up and down his cell as he relays his life-story.

Though his actions and persona are so obviously a product of racial segregationist policies, ironically, Tsafendas seems to have posed a riddle to the authorities at the time.

Not that the audience is ever privy to the voice of authority. Aside from infrequent visits from an abusive guard who rarely employs verbal communication, Tsafendas remains the audience’s sole source of information.

Given that he is mentally unstable he isn’t a reliable witness either and there are moments when his narration becomes jumpy or irrational or there are blanks in his memory, implying that the truth can never be fully ascertained.

His sanity becomes an important issue: if the assassination was an act of madness then it undercuts the heroism of his attack on Verwoerd, the central architect of apartheid. No doubt the Nationalist government were keen to embrace this explanation.

But given the dehumanising and destructive ideology that Verwoerd propagated, Tsafendas’s act of violence seems reasonable. Certainly the apartheid system was predicated on a brand of madness.

This is juxtaposed with Tsafendas’s state of mind, leaving the audience wondering whether Verwoerd was as disturbed as Tsafendas and pondering on the nature of sanity and how it is temporarily defined.

Driving the narrative is the desire to uncover the conditions and events in Tsafendas’s pitiful life that propelled him to stab Verwoerd repeatedly.

As Tsafendas begins to recount a life of rejection and pain it becomes clear that the attack was simply the culmination of frustration and anger, which sought an outlet and a suitable target, the main architect of his distress and loneliness. In regaling the audience with each painful rejection and drawing attention to his social isolation, writer Anton Krueger quite firmly positions Tsafendas as a victim rather than a perpetrator, implying that the apartheid system caused the roles to become obscured and moral codes to be distorted.

No doubt, if he had had any strong political affiliations (he alludes to once being a member of a communist party) he would have been hailed as a hero and his name would grace a street sign, park or plaque in the new South Africa.

Krueger has reclaimed his position in our history and uncovers the personal cost that apartheid’s mad policies incurred. One can’t help but wonder, however, whether Tsafendas would have found happiness in the so-called Rainbow Nation, where racial and ethnic groups remain voluntarily defined and largely separate and where his fellow Mozambicans have seen their shacks burned to the ground because they “do not belong” .

The issues that this play raises therefore continue to resonate (it was first staged in the early 1990s) and Spanoudes turns in a very convincing and emotive performance, it’s as if he has somehow miraculously channelled the real Tsafendas.

Nevertheless the play isn’t as compelling as it should be; there is no dramatic tension. It runs at an even pace and the visits by the guard serve no purpose except to reiterate how Tsafendas has been persecuted throughout his life.

His assassination of Verwoerd should have been more drawn out: what was the expression on Verwoerd’s face when Tsafendas drove the knife in?

This should have been a vivid scene yet it melds into his life story as if it was an everyday occurrence.

To underpin the tragedy it might have also been interesting to have highlighted the futility of Tsafendas’s attack, even with Verwoerd out of the way the segregationist system he originated continued to flourish. As Benjamin Disraeli, the British prime minister, once quipped: “assassination has never changed the history of the world”.

Living in Strange Lands: The Tsafendas Story showed at the University of Witwatersrand Nunnery Theatre as part of the 969 festival and Arts Alive Festival which run until the end of the month.

this review first appeared in the sunday independent of 20 september 2009

i’m feeling slightly overcome after watching the film “disgrace”…and having now created the appropriate conditions: fire lit, gorecki’s sorrows begun, the red wine opened, i’ve set the scene for the romantic spirit, the tragedy…because within it’s despair, the byron and blake of the film course through, that solitude of the romantics…

but mainly after the film, i was struck dumb by the country, by this place i’m living in…and wondering why i don’t write more about it…what world is it i’m living in?…there’s this world out there which everyone and the mail and guardian seems to know about and keeps talking about…but it’s as much my reality as hollywood is the real of america…there’s this vast discrepancy between my life and experience of living in “a country” and that story told publicly by others, the media, the novelists, the documentary movie makers & etc – it seems like another place…or maybe the past or the future…like a rumour…some already distant landscape…

the movie is set supposedly in grahamstown, but it isn’t…i sit there in the grahamstown cinema watching this lie, this american playing the stoic south african…and it seems so real and heart rending, and he’s so honest (is john c, and maybe also john m) about his own fuckedupness and inability to feel and to relate and his staunch moralism and rationalism and yet one admires his cold gaze, his unsentimental appraisal…

but i’m so completely removed from this kind of writing, this kind of life…and yet i think then – what is my scene…?…where is my writing coming from? all of coetzee’s books are so rooted in his context…even now writing so authentically about australia since moving there, but my words are so rootless, my writing is so candyflossed, intangible, without awareness of my surroundings…i’m up in the air man, i put on a play set in prague about a therapist? come on dude – what the fuck?…perhaps it’s true what louise says, that i’m operating largely in terms of ignorance, all the time, unaware of my surroundings, not in contact with the world, a kind of sloppiness of consciousness…what is it i’ve been doing all this time?

the movie made me think of how fugard and coetzee have made this country and it’s pains and paradoxes so central to their work, whereas i have a hard time getting out of my mind, i mean, of actually conceiving of a world out there… where is that world?…that world of the “picture portrait of south africa” and what it seems like objectified from the outside?…impossible to put it together with what it’s like “from the inside”…and yet – what inside?…what is “this country” like from the inside? there’s no country here at all, man….i have to do some marking tomorrow and prepare my classes for monday, that’s this country…my wife forbids me to give money to the mad beggar woman when she bangs on the door at night..

i must find those love letters pessoa wrote to his fiancé,
his love with words and not the flesh…

eventually she called him a “personne” in french
(”pessoa” meaning “person” in portuguese) –
but in french it means a “nobody”,
his words were not enough for her…

his letters might be similar to
those unconsummated words kafka wrote,
& there must be others – liz barrett browning?
svetayana? rilke? lovers in love with letters,
afraid of the world…

portugal: a juggler with his two dogs walks across the plaza in front of the national theatre shouting “love”, “love”, “love” at intervals…in my hotel room watching pornography as louise runs a bath…the tram runs down the hill, past a poster saying “do something positive – sleep.”

i write too quickly, impatiently…it hurts my hand which means i only manage rapid bursts of words, not really getting to the lentamente nice and slow…not getting to the well brewed thought through thoughts…