Litnet

The JM Coetzee | Athol Fugard Festival took place in Booktown Richmond recently. See photos from the festival. Ronnie Govender, one of the participants, shares his speech from the festival with LitNet.

A genetic accident “tunes” about this and that

or

Contemplation of the human condition on equal terms

I was once introduced at a literary seminar as an “Indian” playwright. Swallowing a choice expletive which, regrettably, is my wont at such provocations, I said, as politely as I could, “I have never heard of Athol Fugard being introduced as a white playwright, or Mbongeni Ngema as a Zulu playwright. Why do you introduce me as an Indian playwright? I wasn’t born in India. I was born right here in South Africa. That makes me an African.”

This did not go down well with a fellow participant, who exploded, “Everything about you is Indian. It is ridiculous and arrogant to claim you are an African.”

That got me on to my well-worn soapbox. “My friend, you and I are genetic accidents. You didn’t ask to be born so-called African, neither did I ask to be born so-called Indian, although I think neither of us are without some appreciation of our respective heritages. What then gives you the right to define a fellow genetic accident, to mark out which piece of earth he or she belongs to or doesn’t belong to?”

That provoked the following meditation which wrestles with the question, “Who Am I?” and which, incidentally, was written well before Thabo Mbeki sought to invoke a more appropriate paradigm in his “I am an African” speech in parliament.

 Who am I?

I have been called
An Indian,
South African Indian,
Indian South African,
Coolie,
Amakula,
Amandiya,
Char ou
Who am I?
I am,
Like my father and my mother and their fathers
And their mothers before them,
A cane-cutter, house-wife, mendicant, slave, market gardener, shit bucket carrier, factory worker, mid-wife, freedom fighter, trade unionist, builder of schools, of orphanages, poet, writer, nurse
Embraced by the spirit of Cato Manor
Unbowed, unbroken
I am of Africa
Surging with the spirit
Of the Umgeni as it flows from the Drakensberg
Through the Valley of a Thousand Hills
Of the timeless Karoo clothed in a
Myriad fynbos blooms
I am of Africa
Africa pulsing with the spirit
Of Lumumba and Luthuli
Of Rick Turner, of Lenny Naidoo,
Of Valliammah, Braam Fischer, Timol and Haffeejee
Of Victoria and Griffiths Mxenge
Whose assassins lurk in the shadows
Their voices still spreading the venom of race hate
Of internecine strife
And who seek to deny me
What is mine, given me
By Thumbi Naidoo, Dadoo,
Naicker, Luthuli and Mandela
Given me through the loins of
baker’s vanman Dorasamy
Through the womb of house-wife
Chellamma
On 16th May 1934
In a humble abode in Cato Manor
They will not displace me
Though I feel the weight of generations
I know who I am
I am an African.

The real world, of course, is not as simple and as innocent as that, as it must have been aeons ago when the first thinking beings left the Sterkfontein caves, the cradle of humankind. Many, many moons later, held hostage as we are by the forces of history, we appear to have lost that innocence.

I have absolutely no archaeological pretensions, but I imagine that as those early trekkers and their descendants settled in distant places and different climes, they must have taken on distinctive physical features. The further they went from the equator, the less the content of melanin in their blood. A simple trick of nature which went on to cause such mayhem in the years to come. James Baldwin, author of Giovanni’s Room, looks at himself in the mirror and curses himself for his dark skin, his “negroid” features and his homosexuality to boot. Sammy Davis Junior wails, “I’m a one-eyed, black negro Jew and you think you got problems.” In the face of such aridity, telling perspectives were advanced by the likes of Frantz Fanon, Robert Sobukwe, Nelson Mandela and Steve Biko, if not in tracts of lucid common sense, then in the very lives they lived.

Alongside misinterpreting nature’s quirks, we also seem to be pawns in a never- ending cosmic drama in which the final curtain is nowhere in sight. There is an ancient Tamil thevaram written by the celebrated poet Sunderamurthi centuries before Nietzsche pondered existentialism:

Vaazh Va Wathu Mayam Ithu
Manavathu Thinum …
Life is illusory, the only certainty is death.

Since the dawn of consciousness we’ve been asking ourselves: What am I? Who am I? What is this thing called life? What is the purpose of life?

Perhaps we are making too much of a big deal about it. Perhaps, as George Harrison would have us do, we should just let it be. Let it be and wait for that day, hopefully not too far away, when the Hadron Collider smashes that goddamn particle and discovers what really constitutes dark matter. In the meantime, while we wait for Godot, it would seem that Jean Paul Sartre set the scene for us by losing himself in the blues sung by the likes of Billie Holiday in the smoky haze of a night club on the Left Bank.
Omar Khayyam was no wiser: “Myself when young did eagerly frequent/ Doctor and Saint, and heard great Argument/ About it and about; but evermore/ Came out by the same Door as in I went.”

Thus to wine, women and poetry did the great Persian poet turn: “A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,/ A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread, – and Thou/ Beside me singing in the Wilderness –/ Oh, Wilderness were Paradise now!// “Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring/ The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:/ The Bird of Time has but a little way/ To fly – and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”

Sartre’s blues and Khayyam’s cup were, however, unlikely to have held in similar thrall the likes of Samuel Beckett and Adamov. They and other playwrights of the theatre of the absurd met life’s randomness head on. At the heart of their powerful and absorbing theatrical pieces was the sobering finality of death, rendering pointless, it would seem, even the noblest of human striving and endeavour.

To the world’s hungry, however, hunger is no illusion. To the victims of violence in all its grotesque forms, violence is no illusion. In this part of the world where, to a great extent, plans to create an egalitarian society are fast running aground on the rocks of opportunism, the ranks of street children and the homeless grow apace. Abroad is a deep sense of betrayal at the way institutions of state are being manipulated with impunity to protect those whose “turn it is to eat”, to put it in the vernacular. Schools may now be “mixed”, but we are still singing the same sad songs, and innocent young minds are still being vigorously corralled into mindless collectives. Reason chokes on the weeds of a different kind of despair.

The haunting questions of life’s ultimate meaning matter little to those in this part of the world, where the divide between the haves and the have-nots grows wider and wider. In their impotence, hungry people burn tyres, burn libraries and schools, while police bullets rip through the likes of Andries Tatane and Marikana mineworkers. Are these orgies of wanton self-flagellation, as we replay the killing fields of Nazi Germany, Rwanda and the partition of India, not a detour from the real causes, aided and abetted by narrow nationalisms, by xenophobic pigeon-holing, aborting an organic sense of belonging to life’s vastness, to the awe-inspiring infinity of time and of space? And is a nation’s art then to be circumscribed by the ponderous, dead-end weight of such absurdity as it was during the years of the apartheid locust?

The words of the eminent critic Kenneth Tynan come to mind:

Adamov has recently changed his mind. He now maintains that theatre must show … both the curable and incurable aspects of life. The incurable aspect, as we all know is that of the inevitability of death. The curable aspect is the social one. He has thus espoused Marxism. Not in order to make men equally happy, but to allow them to contemplate their condition on equal terms.

When the material obstacles are overcome, when man will no longer be able to deceive himself as to the nature of his unhappiness, then there will arise an anxiety all the more powerful, all the more truthful, for being stripped of anything that might have hindered its realization.

Indeed! Wisdoms that should inform not just theatre but all forms of literature.

In the wake of such reflections, to my fellow genetic accidents whose facile rationale serves nought but to give the real enemy easy cover, is humbly offered this further meditation entitled:

Beyond fences, beyond boundaries

Indeed
Curry excites me
Sublime in its immediacy
The sari does the same
Sublime in its subtlety
Carnatic Music attunes my being
To the rhythms of the Universe
Beyond time
Beyond self.

These loves I share with rabid capitalists and primal communists, with racists and humanists, with sinners and saints, with idiots and geniuses, with pamphleteers and poets.

What then defines me?

The things I love, or those who by an accident of nature, share them with me?

The sweep of Cape Point, the Wild Coast,
The Valley of a Thousand Hills,
The Drakensberg
And Table Mountain
Quicken my pulse

I love jazz
The jazz of Charlie Parker, Duke Ellington,
Wynton Marsalis, Abdullah Ibrahim, Lionel Pillay,
Hugh Masekela, Sonny Pillay
I love the Samba, a scotch, a braai,
A good game of football
I love and hate the sport of boxing.

These things I share with rabid capitalists and primal communists, with racists and humanists, with sinners and saints, with idiots and geniuses, with pamphleteers and poets.

What then defines me?

The things I love, or those who share them with me?

Above all, I love ideas, the fact of ideas, the movement of ideas
I love words, the fact of words, the movement of words
This love of ideas and of words
Takes me beyond boundaries,
Beyond boundaries of the mind
Beyond fences that cut me off from
My brothers and my sisters

Should my being, my brief, mortal being
Not be defined by this timelessness
This freedom

Or

Should I be defined by
Boundaries and fences
Diminishing my existential self?

Should I not heed the impulse to walk beyond boundaries

So that I may tread

The pathways
Of those nameless souls,
Who,
Unmindful of time, race or belief
Who,
Untutored,
Joyously affirmed life
Through paintings on the walls of caves
Through dances of the spirit,
Of nature
Of fear
Of the gods and shamans
Who,
Within the stark brevity
Of my being
Within the stark brevity,
Of your beings
My brothers, my sisters
Kindled an anonymous, spontaneous celebration of life
Beyond fences
Beyond boundaries?

 

Ronnie Govender
28 May 2015
Booktown Richmond