Biological Essentialism

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CHAPTER THREE – POLITICAL IDENTITIES

POST ANTI-APARTHEID THEATRE

[A]fter April 27, 1994, « the enemy » was all of a sudden gone….Apartheid and violence made for powerful images, poignant stories, stirring poems, heart-stopping film…can we learn to create again without « the enemy »? (Metz 1996: 57)
While anti-apartheid theatre was known worldwide for dramatizing the struggle against apartheid, theatre in South Africa today is hampered by the loss of a focused movement for change… (Kruger 2002: 231).
The observations above by Gordon Metz and Loren Kruger typify the reactions of a number of commentators on post-apartheid theatre. When the behemoth of the nationalist regime was replaced by a democracy, the impetus behind the revolutionary protest theatre created during apartheid quietly fizzled away. The creativity which had been exercised on behalf of agit-prop and protest theatre lost its urgency. As Ian Johns lamented after a South African festival in London: « The plays’ hearts may still beat with passion but the playwriting joints have grown stiff » (2002: 20). Perhaps it is no wonder that some writers are still turning to the old themes for inspiration. And yet, eighteen years after the unbanning of the ANC, theatre which indicts the apartheid system hardly seems as much of a necessity as it may once have been.
Post-anti-apartheid theatre (to use Loren Kruger’s definition [2002: 233]) is work which takes place in a completely different context to revolutionary work created during the heyday of the nationalist government. As Gael Neke maintains, there is a distinct difference between a revolutionary art which fought against a system at great personal risk, and art which retrospectively attacks apartheid from the safety of the post-apartheid era. She states that this work carries less potential of censure and requires less courage in that it does not contest an existing situation. Its themes are generally now accepted as having moral validity thus no longer holding the risk of alienation for the artist. These factors change the very notion of the ‘political’ in this art (1999: 5).
In other words, the sense of the ‘political’ in current anti-apartheid art seems to be more a kind of reification of ideology, rather than an appeal for transformation, since the transformation has now ostensibly already occurred. Where apartheid is still today used as a theme, it may perhaps seem more appropriate to celebrate the freedom from oppression, rather than dwelling on accusations of injustice. And then there is also the development of a new form of protest theatre, which challenges the present status quo.
Every society requires performances which recall defining moments of its history, particularly times of transition and transformation. As an analogy, two of the most important moments in the historical trajectory of families (which could be seen as smaller, more private examples of societies58) also constitute the most widespread and familiar performance events – namely, marriages and funerals. In South Africa today, possibly in the world, the most common form of performance event is likely to be the wedding ceremony, which provides the staple fare for many musicians, singers, photographers, interior designers, chefs and dressmakers. Marriages also sustain a good many churches, mosques, synagogues, temples and religious officials. Funerals may require less preparation, and yet, they are also very significant. The ending of apartheid has been presented both as a marriage between the different races of the country59, as well as the end of an era (albeit a rather more joyful putting to rest than is associated with most funerals). And yet, the question remains whether one ought to put the past behind one once and for all; or whether one should, like the Malagasy, continue to exhume and rebury the dead.
If one is concerned with the transformation of identity, one might ask whether texts which continue to rebury the apartheid past might be hampering processes of change by reinforcing the memory of identity structures created in terms of opposition. In recalling the oppressive apartheid system one is also recalling the construction of an oppositional subject position, and this may reinforce the very polarisation which apartheid created. Ironically, many writers during apartheid who resisted the confines of the labels created for them by the state, still unwittingly reinforced a no less fundamentalistic subject position for themselves in terms of their opposition to the identities imposed on them by the Department of Home Affairs. Even though redefinitions in terms of subject positions advocated the loosening of bonds, the way in which revolutionaries against the state described, defined and classified their subject position was often no less essentialist than the state-sanctioned classifications. To put it more simply: both sides were participating in the same grand narrative. And as David Medalie says, with reference to an argument by Njabulo Ndebele, « the narrowness of apartheid finds its counterpart, not its antidote, in an anti-apartheid polemic which does nothing more than combat the offending ideology on its own terms » (2008: 3).
It seems that this grand narrative of apartheid and its counterpart have not necessarily been put to rest. In his essay « Unspeaking the Centre » (2001), Mark Fleischman notes that since the coming of democracy there have been those productions which continue to focus on the grand narratives: apartheid and colonialism….These represent attempts to re-write the colonial/apartheid narrative from the post-colonial/post-apartheid perspective. However, despite being productions of great note, like all such attempts they remain anchored to the grand narrative, one foot in the past, struggling to move on (98).
Fleishman’s intent here is clearly not to disparage the claims and concerns of such narratives, nor to cast doubt on their legitimacy. Instead, his point is that totalising grand narratives are in danger of smothering and subsuming a myriad alternative histories and experiences into a single story, which can limit one’s frame of reference. Since Jean-Francois Lyotard’s description of grand narratives as confining visions in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984), it may seem preferable to seek out multiple descriptions of history, instead of stories which feature a single track at the exclusion of all others. Lyotard states that he senses a growing « incredulity towards metanarratives » (xxiv). The Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury has also warned of the dangers of becoming a people who are « prisoners of one story ». He refers particularly to the Israelis and Palestinians, and according to Jeremy Harding in the London Review of Books (2006), Khoury warns that these peoples « have begun to tell a single, fatal story and must look to themselves and the world for other stories or they are finished » (10). This is not, then, a question of whose story is the right story, nor of who has the right to tell a story, but it seems rather to be an indication that many stories are preferable to any single story. Deleuze’s model of a rhizomatic structure which deals in multiplicities (1993: 29-30), is particularly apt here.
On the other hand, one should also be clear as to which segment of the population is most opposed to stories dealing with the apartheid narrative. For example, there seems to be a particular resistance among the white community to stories which rehash the apartheid past, casting all whites into the role of perpetrators and seeing all blacks as victims. There seems to be a feeling that, since power was, to an extent, willingly relinquished60 and since a clear public apology was made, the white population does not want to keep on being reminded of the past. Similarly, in post-World War Two Germany, a new generation turned vehemently, and with disgust, against the ideologies maintained by their parents; and since they were not complicit with their views, the new generation also, eventually, felt that they should have no share in their shame61. In the same way, those who were born in South Africa in 1989 when the tumultuous processes of change first began – will turn twenty next year, and the new white adults feel that they do not share in the guilt of their forefathers. Mike van Graan reported the following feedback on his play Some Mothers’ Sons (2006) at a public lecture to the University of Cape Town Drama Department:
Now we often hear that audiences – still overwhelmingly white and middle class – don’t want to be reminded of those times. It’s been suggested to me that perhaps some of what the black character Vusi says about his experiences at the hands of the brutal apartheid regime in my own play, Some Mothers’ Sons, be toned down for white audiences, no matter that these experiences are central to the choices that he makes. « We’ve done the guilt thing. So let’ s move on, dammit! »
<http://www.drama.uct.ac.za/newsevents/general> 4 February 2007
Some Mother’s Sons is an interesting example of a work which deals with the violence of apartheid, since it draws a parallel between the injustices of apartheid and the violent crime endemic to contemporary South Africa. The play tries to reach behind acts of injustice to reveal the humanity of both victims and perpetrators while approaching issues of forgiveness and reconciliation. Although Van Graan is an antagonistic opponent of the present government and its policies, he certainly does not feel that it is too soon to stop speaking about apartheid. The fact that he is himself coloured allows him to be a lot more forceful in his denunciations of both the past and the present than if he were white.
Mike van Graan was elected the General Secretary of PANSA (Performing Arts Network South Africa) at its inception in 2002, and he held the position up to 2006. During his tenure as General Secretary, Van Graan conducted a nationwide survey of theatres and audiences. In the above quoted speech to the drama students of UCT, he summarises an important finding from his research, namely that theatre audiences are (still) « overwhelmingly white and middle class ». Despite government’s best efforts to support theatre which is considered to be « relevant », and of « cultural significance », theatres cannot keep their doors open without an audience. In this sense then, the work which audiences choose to see will play a role in what is being produced. From this point of view, it is clearly impossible to force audiences to support plays about apartheid.

CHAPTER ONE – EXPLORING IDENTITY
1.1 Identifying South Africans
1.1.1 Self as Body
1.1.2 Self as Symbol
1.1.3 Transforming Identities
1.1.4 A Deleuzian Vocabulary
1.1.5 Aims
1.2 Drama and Transformation
1.2.1 The Importance of Play
1.2.2 Text and Performance
1.3 Identity as Performance
1.3.1 Psychological Descriptions of Identity
1.3.2 A Jungian Analysis of Drama
1.4 Sourcing the Self in the Desire for Freedom
1.4.1 Frames
1.4.2 Freedom
1.5 Society and Self
1.5.1 Defining Society
1.5.2 The Fragmentation of Collective Identities .
1.5.3 Conclusion – Postmodern Paradigms
CHAPTER TWO – GENDERED IDENTITIES
2.1 White Men in Exile: Masculine Subject Positions
2.1.1 Introduction
2.1.2 Biological Essentialism
2.1.3 Alternative Definitions of Gender
2.1.4 Pejorative Definitions of Masculinity
2.1.5 Doing Instead of Being
2.2 Separation and Sexual Maturity in The Captain’s Tiger
2.3 Language and Land in Sorrows and Rejoicings
2.4 Outright Male Chauvinism in A Man Out of the Country
2.5 Sexuality as Healing in The Bells of Amersfoort
2.6 Concluding Remarks on Gender
CHAPTER THREE – POLITICAL IDENTITIES
3.1 Post Anti-Apartheid Theatre
3.2 Performing the TRC – Ubu and the Truth Commission
CHAPTER FOUR – ETHNIC IDENTITIES
4.1 Defining Nationalisms
4.2 Ethnic Identities in Happy Natives
4.3 Concluding Remarks on Ethnicity
CHAPTER FIVE – SYNCRETIC IDENTITIES
5.1 Defining Syncretism .
5.2 Syncretic Theatre in South Africa
5.3 Brett Bailey – Black Mask on a White Face?
5.4. The Heterogeneous Indigene in the Plays of Reza de Wet
5.5 Situating Syncretism within the Postmodern
5.6 Reacting to the Syncretic
CHAPTER SIX – CONCLUSIONS
6.1 Race and the Rainbow
6.2 Changing the Body
6.3 Experiments in Freedom
PRIMARY TEXTS 
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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