As-salaamu-alay-kum.
wa-rah-matul-laah-hi
wabara-katu ...
… or simply, "Salaam!" as they say in Cape Town.
In my professional life I am not a playwright. In South Africa today it is not possible to be the mythic thing that could be called a professional playwright. Professionally I work as the project manager of a writers' support project, where I find myself spending my days convincing other writers and mostly would-be writers that it really is worth the effort and that if they persevere with their writing, with patience their work shall prevail.
The part of me that is a playwright is vampiric and relegated to working in the wee hours. In these wee hours I spend a lot more time thinking about plays and writing them than I do writing about them. I also often think about never writing another play but invariably I find myself working on another and then wondering why I bother.
In this paper I shall attempt to look at why I bother, and more specifically, why I bothered to write the play Salaam Stories and to consider the role that memory plays in the construction of personal and collective histories.
Many have been the productions that made us aware of the "white" experience,
of the "black" experience, the latter often in the service of the
wider cause of political emancipation. In the process an awareness
of our much-vaunted diversity has suffered as apartheid's nefarious
simplicity divided people into white and non-white, blind to differences
of class, religious affiliation and a labyrinth of other nuances
that make people cultural beings.1
There is an energetic range of theatrical activity being produced in South Africa today despite the economic challenges facing playmakers. Yet the published playwright is a rare creature in our contemporary cultural landscape. First of all, having a play professionally produced means surviving the long process of writing and rewriting (and rewriting) a play: finding a theatre, a producer or the funding to present the work and then surviving the budget constraints, the critics and the box-office bottom line. And at the end of this process there is little hope for the playwright of seeing anything but a meagre financial return on the blood, sweat or tears invested in the play-writing and -making process because of the cost-intensive nature of producing live theatre. Finding a publisher who will consider plays for publication is a much shorter process as there are, unsurprisingly, few publishers who will brave the financial risks of venturing into this territory. Just as theatres struggle to attract audiences, so the play on the page struggles to find readers, and hence the publication of a play offers virtually no prospect of profits. Those publishers willing to look at play submissions will usually consider only plays that have already been professionally produced.
The nature of the play in performance is ephemeral, leaving no actual record of the event. The archival remains of a night at the theatre will perhaps amount to a playbill in an arts administrator's filing cabinet or a faded programme in someone's scrapbook. There are those theatres that may take photographs or video a performance, but these records are usually for internal recording purposes and rarely find their way into any central or accessible cultural archive which could serve as a record of the range of theatrical activity in South Africa today. The failure to document plays in printed form also translates into performance texts that are short-lived and quickly forgotten.
Somehow Salaam Stories has managed to escape this fate - for now at least. In a review for the Cape Times Wilhelm Snyman described the play as follows:
Rather than create a conventional or "Western" play with Muslim characters, Johaardien has created a series of vignettes thoroughly rooted in a Muslim awareness, in a Muslim way of looking at the world, with a Muslim sensibility. Through these vignettes, humorous, provocative and atavistic, Salaam Stories tells us of the circumstances which brought Islam to the Cape: from South East Asia, Macassar. Java, Malacca. Some of the territories colonised in the wide sweep of mercantilist Dutch imperialism in the 17th Century.
The Cape of Good Hope played an essential part in maintaining this empire. Brought to the Cape in bondage, the Muslims were the artisans, skilled craftsmen and women, politically aware and in many cases came from the upper echelons of their own society in the East. And they spoke Malay. Salaam Stories makes reference to this and to the contribution Malay culture has made to the Cape and to the Afrikaans language in particular.
Balancing the historical aspect, Salaam Stories also tells
tales of courtship, revivifying legends brought here from the East
and taking the mickey out of clichéd images many Capetonians may
have of Muslims. September 11 is also given a daring reading, free
of the familiar irrational hysteria. In keeping with the nature
of this play, the ritualistic religious elements of Muslim life
are woven into the text.2
A decade ago I returned to South Africa from the UK, where I had just finished high school. My first job was as an usher at the Baxter Theatre and it was there that I fell in love with the comfortable darkness of an auditorium when the lights go down, with the sound of an audience shifting quietly in their seats and with the smell of chocolates being passed around. Ten years later one of my plays was being staged in the Main Theatre at the Baxter and that was a big deal for this boy from the Cape Flats.
I first started working on Salaam Stories in the May of 2000. One month later I remember writing and then reading Haji Tailor's story to my sister Nazli. I had based the story loosely on my father, who was a tailor for most of his life. Nazli and I were discussing whether our recollection of him sewing exploding buttons onto the jackets of the choir was real or if we had imagined the whole thing. This became the basis for a series of stories, both real and imagined, which make up the play.
"Die Slamse taal van die Kaapse Slamse is 'n snaakse taal", not only because Westerners somehow find the quirky pidgin Malay spoken by the Cape Muslims hilarious for some unapparent reason, but also because the evolution of this particular dialect has trace elements which mark the evolution of the community itself over a period of three hundred years. As a child growing up in a Cape Muslim community in the seventies I came to learn that it was respectful and appropriate to use the Malayu word kanala to say "please" and its counterpart teram-akasie to say "thank you". About a decade ago these words from my childhood fell from vogue and were replaced with the Arabic substitutes, shukran and afwan. A random occurrence which no amount of literary research or Googling on the internet could explain. I found the displacement of these words from my mother tongue very distressing and my search for answers led me to the Cape Malayu Cultural Society. A member of the society explained to me that as more and more Muslims started undertaking pilgrimages to Mecca, a far greater number of Muslims were being exposed to the customary Arabic expressions used in the Middle East and over the years these Arabic expressions have come to supplant the Malayu expressions carried down from generation to generation by the Muslim Diaspora who were brought to the Cape as political exiles and slaves from islands in South Asia in the 1700s. The awareness of this phenomenon, coupled with the events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent demonisation of Muslims by the American media, encouraged me to explore the idea of capturing the history of the Cape Muslims in a play.
Of all the quirky pidgin Malay spoken by the Cape Muslims, salaam is probably the most well-recognised. In fact, throughout the Muslim world salaam is the customary expression for almost every occasion: used to commence or complete a prayer, to say hello and goodbye, good morning and even goodnight. With this simple little word Muslims offer their greetings and wish peace and mercy upon the listener. It was this idea of a peace-loving culture that I wanted portray in Salaam Stories. I believed that this everyday greeting captured the essence of the Muslim community and that if I explored "daai snaakse Slamse taal" I could open a window into the heart of this community.
Historical critic Hayden White writes:
… historical consensus about any event of interest to a given society is very difficult to achieve, is always open to revision from another perspective, and never lasts forever.
The crucial question then becomes one of ownership: Whose history is being theatricalised and what does that mean in terms of representations of that community's history and future?
In the play I tried to focus themes of cultural identity, history and group belonging through the lens of personal memory. In Salaam Stories minor events are treated as souvenirs and through the writing process they seemed to attract layers of politicised and cultural meaning. The romantic association of the play with past events represents my own personal longing for the past, a spiralling backward and inward rather than outward and towards the future. Stories are metonymic references between faint past events and the present. The souvenir stories which make up Salaam are essential for making sense of the personal and collective histories invoked by the play. As memory items, the stories required accompanying narration to perform a link with the past. I felt that the stories could serve their purpose without a supplementary narrative discourse. It was only by employing a narrative storytelling technique that I was able to create characters that had access to historical information and this in turn performed the essential function of attaching the play to the origins of the Muslim community.
In the plays of Nazli George and David Kramer and Taliep Peterson's District Six The Musical the performance of nostalgia is an extremely calculated and ultimately cynical ploy trading on memories (in the way that Americans trade baseball cards) rather than offering any new or engaged reading of the history of the Cape Coloured community. Memory is a construction and in Salaam Stories I was acutely aware of memory as a carefully constructed process that not only reproduces the past, but filters, changes and interprets history. In writing Salaam I wanted to evaluate nostalgia as a form of cultural transmission that can shift in its political and historical purposes so that the play could bear a more complex and more productive relationship to the history of South Africa than it would have, had my aim been to offer audiences an evening's entertainment. This is the key dilemma faced by South African playwrights, producers and theatres. Should we give the masses what they want or do we venture to explore new truths? Does the playwright have a social responsibility to tell the truth? What is the truth? Whose truth?
Athol Fugard's notebooks give a good insight into the South African playwright's dilemma. Contemplating Ernst Fischer and his description of the Marxist artist as being "commissioned by society" Fugard writes that this is his whole dilemma as he is writing Boesman and Lena.
Do I want a commission? Have I got one? Must I function without one?
Is my context as an artist irremediably bourgeois? How do I align
myself with a future, a possibility, in which I believe but of which
I have no clear image?3
Fugard's early plays reflect a tension between historical, social themes and a-historical, universal ones. Boesman and Lena opens with a bare stage, which in its nothingness represents everything. This empty stage represents infinite and unlimited possibilities. It could be any place at any time. However, the entrance of Boesman and Lena initiates a process through which the scope of the play is gradually focused and the range of possibilities narrowed down. The heavily-burdened, barefoot Boesman wearing his torn blazer, and Lena "wearing one of those sad dresses that reduce the body to an angular gaunt cipher …" immediately communicate a social context of poverty. The stage thus becomes not only a symbol of their isolation; in its bareness it is also a symbol of their dispossession, simultaneously making the play universal but also uniquely South African. By comparison the production of Waiting for Godot (in Africa) directed by Lara Foot Newton was definitely neither authentic nor South African. Fred Abrahamse's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream - badly styled as a "Hair" musical - was misguided at best.
The utility of drama is not limited to the reproduction of the real. The great potential of drama exists in the use of theatrical performance for the creation of imaginative spaces in order explore other possibilities, other ways of being, to imagine the future Athol Fugard writes about in his Notebooks. Authentic South African theatre and performance recovers the lives, feelings and dilemmas of real, ordinary South Africans from the fringes of mainstream theatre that these concerns have been relegated to for so many decades. For this reason, plays like What The Water Gave Me by Rehane Abrahams, Out of Bounds by Rajesh Gopie, and Down Adderly Street by Itumeleng Wa Le Hulere diverge significantly from realism. This pattern is informed by the common attempt of these plays to capture the genuine and often disregarded details of the lives of ordinary South Africans. This striving for authenticity liberated these plays from the conventional form which emulates the flat realism of a photographic image and made them find forms that are metaphorical and that capture the illusive rather than the manifest gesture.
Towards the end of Salaam Stories the narrator tells the audience that as he grows older, perhaps a part of him has started remembering things which are so much a part of him that he hadn't realised he had forgotten them to begin with. I believe that this is what South African audiences want - for their stories to be remembered, for their lives to be reflected on stage, for their sorrows and joys to be acknowledged and affirmed. Behind this impulse lies a key to some universal truth, a key to commercial and popular success, a key to our little place in the sunshine.
Many important factors combine and refract through the process
of writing a play in such a way that the final script cannot escape
the gender, race, class, social location or history of the playwright.
The South African plays I have mentioned, whether they involve the
interaction of several characters or whether they depict the life
or story of a particular character, in using the truth gleaned from
specific stories, memories and histories they illuminate universal
truths. That said, the quality of a piece of work more importantly
depends on the playwright's imagination, the director's skill and
the actor's craft and not upon the predominance of South African
characteristics.
1. Wilhelm Snyman, Cape Times, Tuesday 7 January
2003
2. ibid
3. Athol Fugard, Notebooks |
Ashraf Johaardien is the National Co-ordinator of the
Writers' Network and responsible for the overall management
and development of the organisation. He is a playwright and
has been associated with several South African arts and culture
organisations. His plays include Coloured Son X (Baxter
Theatre Centre, 1998; Circle East Theatre Company, New York,
2001); Salaam Stories (Judges Choice Award, Spier-PANSA
Festival 2002; Theatre Row, New York, 2002; Spier Summer Arts
Festival and Baxter Theatre, 2003); "Happy Endings" Are
Extra (Baxter Theatre, 2003). Some of his work has been
published by Compress and in Fidelities.
Click here to receive our newsletter - your weekly cultural fix!