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Abstract
In this article we consider the divided reactions to Afrikaans author Marlene van Niekerk's play Die Kortstondige Raklewe van Anastasia W (hereafter Anastasia W), directed by Marthinus Basson. We give a wide-ranging overview of the various opinions generated by the drama's production and publicised in daily news media and online forums. We argue that it is a category error to read Anastasia W as simply feeding into discourses about crime. Through close analysis of the unpublished 2010 script and partial recordings of its production, we show that the play might be read as a performance of perceived social decomposition in which the materiality of language itself is staged as a substance which must, if it is to convey the feel and texture rather than the mere rational ‘sense’ of pervasive social decay, itself undergo a process of decomposition. We conclude that Anastasia W reveals a deep preoccupation with the complicity of ‘ordentlike mense’ [decent people] in the perceived ongoing decay of social responsibility. Finally, we argue that the play also grapples with the role of the artist in an ‘excremental’ state.
Notes
1. Van Niekerk is the author of formally unconventional and discursively explosive works such as Die vrou wat haar verkyker vergeet het, Triomf, Agaat, Memorandum and Die Sneeuslaper.
2. In a letter in Die Burger (9 April 2011) Mrs Hermien Basson of Wellington suggests that in supporting the production, the University of Stellenbosch has failed in its educational function, and that the production is a misuse of the donor money provided by the L.W. Hiemstra Trust and the Het Jan Marais Nationale Fonds.
3. Sus and Daan are two characters who will be well known to those readers/viewers who read the Afrikaans ‘Sus en Daan’ children's books (comparable to the ‘Dick and Jane’ books), a foundation phase reader series which has been in use since the 1950s. There is a dual significance in Van Niekerk's choice of names. First, these characters served as ‘alter egos’ for children learning how to read and speak Afrikaans, as Elbie Henning illustrates in her article ‘Finding the real culprit’ (Citation2011). The names would thus be very familiar to some audience members and readers, and would also evoke an association with the act of learning language – a significant device in a play that performs a ‘language funeral.’ Second, as can be seen in Jan-Jan Joubert's comment in his 10 April Citation2011 review in Rapport, these names are associated with memories of a carefree childhood. They are therefore also a catalyst for nostalgia, which, as we argue, is a central preoccupation of the play.
4. An attempt to hold a language funeral for a certain kind of language.
5. In a letter to Die Burger (7 April 2011) Val Marsh of Groot-Brakrivier writes about her experience of seeing the play. She describes the audience members streaming from the auditorium in an ‘almost-tsunami,’ and her decision not to be a ‘victim’ of such ‘verbal and visual crudeness’ leads to her ‘fighting back with her feet’ and also walking out. Marsh suggests that not a single audience member was unaware of the horrendous crime statistics in South Africa, or the moral bankruptcy of South African society, and that they were unwilling to be ‘raped’ by theatre. Marsh's response is typical of those by audience members who considered the production immoderate and tasteless.
6. See the reader's comments under the online letters ‘Teatergangers moes so iets te wagte wees’ (Die Burger 9 April 2011) and ‘Verhoog-kruheid laat mense loop’ (Die Burger 7 April 2011).
7. Like Anastasia W, Spyt is a sexually explicit piece that debuted at the ABSA KKNK in 2011.
8. Sordid, vile, offensive. See Andries CitationBezuidenhout's blog on Versindaba.
9. Van Niekerk, in her interview with the authors of this article (personal communication, 27 February 2012), describes ‘the serious and worrisome [sorglike] subject of the text: social decomposition [verwording] and brutalisation, the violence committed against defenceless people, especially the killing and ruination of the most vulnerable – children more than any other class’. She adds: ‘Perhaps, in the wake of the bureaucratised, consciously administered “holocaust” of apartheid, we are now living in a kind of unbureaucratised, unadministered “holocaust” – a natural “holocaust,” or a “holocaust” of “spontaneous” or “helpless” or “irremediable” oppression, and the question arises whether, as a writer, one should/could remain silent in the face of this oppression. The situation is indeed “unspeakable,” if one considers the behaviour of the government, the growing class differences, crime statistics, AIDS statistics, road accident statistics and child deaths against the values and ideals set out in the [South African] Constitution. Murder and mayhem, destruction, neglect, accidents and illness might be read as symptomatic of a country that is finally paying back – in the form of a tragicomedy of an apparently unavoidable and fatal neo-colonial grab, batter, rape and destroy – the debt incurred by rampant, violent and ongoing colonisation.’
10. In one of the printed media interviews about Anastasia W Van Niekerk comments that the play is ‘merske [sic] snaaks, dis die effek wat ek op die gehoor wil hê! Hulle moet die heeltyd voel ha-ha-ha, en dan moet hulle dink o-o-o! Dis baie naby aan die goed wat in Triomf aangaan. Jy lag jou dood, maar dis eintlik terrible’. [‘It's terribly funny, that's the effect I want to have on the audience: throughout, they must feel ha-ha-ha, but then they must think o-o-o. It's very close to the kind of thing going on in Triomf. You laugh yourself to death, but actually it's terrible.’] (Brümmer Citation2010, p. 10).
11. In her interview with us Van Niekerk lists the other members of this writer's collective: Ena Jansen, Irna van Zyl, Hanlie Malan, Johanni Pretorius and Marianne de Jongh. She notes that they were all ‘bourgeois girls’, all ‘lesbian women’, ‘fully and unanimously out of the closet’, most of them working in academia or the arts industry (personal communication, 27 February Citation2012).
12. Mbembe uses the term ‘commandement’ ‘in the way it was used to denote colonial authority, that is, in so far as it embraces the images and structures of power and coercion, the instruments and agents of their enactment, and a degree of rapport between those who give orders and those who are supposed to obey them, without, of course, discussing them’ (Citation1992, p. 30). While democratic South Africa might appear to be beyond colonial structures of power and coercion, continuing police brutality, the mooted Protection of Information bill and the continued exploitation and marginalisation of the poor by the political-economic power elites, suggests that the logic of the ‘commandement’ persists in contemporary South Africa.
13. Baby coffins.
14. Treppie Benade is one of the Benades of Van Niekerk's novel Triomf. Shaun de Waal describes the Benades as a ‘violent, incestuous, alcohol-saturated family’, who ‘represent the “poor whites” courted and favoured by the Nationalist government’ and given new houses in the suburb of Triomf which, ‘with its hubristic name, was … famously built on the ruins of the demolished Sophiatown’ (De Waal Citation1999). Treppie is ‘poetic’ and has a ‘huge problem with nominalism and realism’. De Waal also quotes Van Niekerk describing Treppie as ‘representative of the bloody-minded anarchist strain within the Afrikaner bosom’.
15. Gareth Cornwell suggests that the ‘problem of evaluation’ when dealing with ‘protest literature’ is that we tend to dismiss as ‘inferior’ literature which ‘actively seeks some sort of moral or political conversion’ (Citation2007, p. 185). In his reading of the poetry of James Matthews, Cornwell argues that literature that serves a social function acquires value through its fulfilment of that function, but that value is necessarily provisional and contingent: ‘we have ultimately to acknowledge that this is “short-term” writing, sustained only by its topicality, and destined to perish alongside the social and political system of which it is so urgently expressive’ (p. 189).
16. Miki Flockemann notes that the development of what she calls the ‘staging of complicity’ in South African theatre is shaped by three ‘broadly defined performance modalities which shape current engagements with complicity. These modalities are identified by the adjectives “thick” (as in densely layered, complex, deep), “reflective” (as in reflecting upon as well as revealing), and “hard” (in the sense of direct, uncompromising, difficult to penetrate)’ (Citation2011, p. 129). Flockemann, adapting the term ‘thick description’ as employed in the work of Clifford Geertz, describes the first modality, ‘thick theatre’, as ‘theatre that is richly layered, attempts to give physical expression to unspoken and half-recognised experiences, draws on local histories and vernacular traditions, and often incorporates multimedia performance styles that unsettle surface realities and “given” knowledge. In the process the spectator can become a co-author of meanings generated, and the relationship paradigms between those situated as host, or guest, or stranger, become blurred … At the same time, the term “thick” in the sense of deep and difficult to access also refers to experimental theatre characterised by its search for a new language of artistic expression and for finding expression for the ‘inner life’ of the unconscious’ (p. 133).
17. It is interesting that De Beer should compare the play to Foot Newton's Tshepang, also a tale about baby rape, since, as Lucy Valerie Graham argues in her article ‘“Save us all”: “baby rape” and post-apartheid narratives’, Tshepang (the new name given to the raped girl-child, meaning ‘hope’) as well as Gavin Hood's Tsotsi, ‘present sacrificial characters whose suffering becomes elevated in redemptive national narratives’ (Citation2008, p. 105). There is, then, a sense of redemption and a hope for the rehabilitation of the deeply damaged social body in Tshepang that is completely absent in Anastasia W, which ends with the confirmation that the South African social order is beyond redemption.
18. This issue with the length of the play does also raise the question of time in the play. In his discussion of Ralph Ziman's Jerusalema, Dawid de Villers suggests that the film represents a post-1994 South Africa that is the ‘eternal present of the eschaton, the new world which is also the last world. In logical terms this world is irredeemable, for the simple reason that it has already been redeemed’ (2009, p. 12). Van Niekerk's play seems to register the present moment in South Africa with this same sense of the ‘eternal present of the eschaton’, a futureless world which offers economic opportunity and no redemption.
19. Crime fiction, however, generally does not crack the nod for the major South African literary prizes, an indication of how the polarised views around the notion of ‘crime’ can be seen to be making their mark even in the ‘economy of prestige’ – a phrase borrowed from James F. English – that is entailed in literary prize-giving. English's book, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Citation2005), deals with the exchange or ‘intraconversion’ of symbolic capital and economic capital.
20. Johan Burger (Citation2009, p. 4), in an Editorial in the South African Crime Quarterly, reports that ‘[t]he good news about the murder rate is that it achieved an overall decrease of 44 per cent since it peaked at 67.9 per 100 000 in 1995/96’. The Institute of Security Studies (ISS, www.iss.co.za) has its head office in Pretoria, with branches in Cape Town, Nairobi, Addis Ababa, and Dakar.
21. Huntley, a white South African, was granted political asylum in Canada – later revoked – on the grounds that criminals were targeting white South Africans more than other groups and that the state could not guarantee the safety of whites in the country.
22. Kynoch (Citation2012, p. 3) argues that ‘[h]igh crime rates have been a feature of life in many black townships and informal settlements for the past hundred years or more,’ noting that this is a history which has been charted in a significant number of scholarly works in which an urban African population is victimised by police, criminals and politicised conflicts. Kynoch cites Charles van Onselen's New Nineveh (Citation1982), Clive Glaser's Bo-Tsotsi (Citation2000) and Don Pinnock's work on street gangs in Cape Town, The Brotherhoods (Citation1984), among others.
23. In a wide-ranging analysis of white narratives about crime, Kynoch (Citation2012, p. 20) concludes partly as follows: ‘The crime epidemic is the most visceral reminder for whites of their diminishing status and protestations against crime provide an outlet for articulating anxieties about the new order without openly resorting to racist attacks.’ Kynoch (Citation2012, p. 20) cites Antony Altbeker, a respected writer about policing in post-apartheid South Africa, as commenting that the ‘fear of crime has sometimes become a conveniently “apolitical” vehicle through which a disenfranchised elite can mourn its loss of power without sounding nostalgic for an unjust past’ (cf. Altbeker Citation2007, p. 64).
24. Points attributed to the Comaroffs are drawn from notes on a talk given by Jean and John Comaroff at Stellenbosch University's Department of English on 9 May 2011 entitled ‘Crime and Writing.’
25. ‘There's nothing quite like carnival / its hotchpotch and its big hubbub / in which to hide your protests.’
26. In her collection of essays, Precarious Life, Judith Butler argues for an ethics of vulnerability, where dislocation from First World privilege allows one to ‘reflect upon injury, to find out the mechanisms of its distribution, to find out who else suffers from permeable borders, unexpected violence, dispossession, and fear, and in what ways’ (Citation2004, p. xii).
27. This has an interesting historical resonance with the history of Afrikaner nationalism: in his seminal work, Die Afrikaners, historian Herman Giliomee recounts that in 1975 the Afrikaner Broederbond's Executive Council ‘noted with alarm that Afrikaner businessmen were no longer attaching great value to nationalist goals.’ It said that Afrikaner businessmen ‘considered economic growth and materialist considerations a higher priority than the freedom and sovereignty of the Afrikaner people’ (Citation2003, p. 544).
28. In his unpublished MA thesis Petrus du Preez (Citation2003) discusses the power of ritual in theatre. Du Preez suggests that structured performances such as those in theatre owe their existence to ritual (p. 63).
29. See Petrus du Preez's comprehensive essay ‘Babel en Breytenbach’ (Citation2004), in which he traces the different possible ways of creating meaning or understanding of the seemingly ‘incomprehensible’ dialogue in Boklied.
30. The title refers to Treppie's loathing of the wallpaper depicting pastoral scenes that he sees when he spies on the girls in his neighbourhood. The poem registers the desire for an encounter with ‘real’ or ‘natural’ beauty, as opposed to the simulacrum offered by the wallpaper pastoral.
31. The disintegration of language as an image of a tortured and alienated individual is not new to Afrikaans literature – similar devices might be found in Breyten Breytenbach's plays Boklied (1998) and Die Toneelstuk (2001), for example.
32. Three-year-old Adilson Cassamba was beaten to death with an iron pipe in October 2006 in the township of Philippi, just north of Cape Town. His father's girlfriend, Cynthia Buyiselwa, accused Adilson's father, Angelino Cassamba of the murder. According to reports, Buyiselwa was seen walking around Philippi with the body of the dead child, and was therefore charged as an accessory to murder. Buyiselwa and Cassamba were acquitted of the murder in March 2010. The judge, Siraj Desai, acknowledged that the system of justice had failed Adilson Cassamba and his mother, Cynthia Hendricks, in not being able to conclusively prove alleged guilt (See reports by Serra Citation2010 and Schroeder Citation2010, online).