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19th February 2006 Athol Fugard on ‘Tsotsi’, truth and reconciliation, Camus,
Pascal and “courageous pessimism”...
An edited interview with South African playwright Athol Fugard (in San
Diego) on the publication of his only novel Tsotsi in Australia, January 29,
2006.
[CHRIS BOYD:] TSOTSI IS ABOUT TO BE PUBLISHED IN AUSTRALIA -- FOR THE FIRST TIME -- WITH THE FILM TO FOLLOW
IN APRIL. WHY IS THERE NO OTHER PROSE FICTION?
[Athol Fugard:] I wrote Tsotsi at the same time that I was writing the first of my plays to really receive recognition
within South Africa, and then ultimately outside of South Africa: The Blood Knot. It went to London where good old
Ken Tynan killed it stone dead. It launched my career, really, [it was a] watershed play.
I felt I had arrived, then, at a kind of crossroads. I had to choose disciplines. Of course they’re such very, very
different disciplines. To this day, I still don’t think that I really know how to write a novel. I really mean that. I know I
took the plunge [at the] deep end with Tsotsi.
I think I just naturally gravitated -- by virtue of my chemistry as a man, my metabolism as a writer -- towards theatre.
And that snuffed out the possibility of being a prose writer, a novelist. I don’t think I could do the two in tandem. I
don’t know if you really can... Can you think of any successful novelist who is also a good playwright --
PERHAPS BECKETT --
I don’t think you can --
“His Sunday night now, come in a warm cloud of smoke and darkness in the streets and moths raging
in soft storms around the lamp; come under a velveted spread of smudged stars and a promise of the
moon in the east where a white radiance is already leaping off the rooftops of houses that way; come
at last after the hazy end to a day that loitered its way lazily through sunshine and prepares now for
sleep with the widest yawn and longest stretch of the week. And wherever the people are gathered
togethter in drowsy knots, in rooms, around fires in backyards, on street corners or drinking in the
shebeens, words are thrown out dispiritedly like a dice game without a stake. The prospect of sleep
and the passing of time recur like lucky numbers, but no one gets excited because no one stands to
win.”
[extract from Tsotsi, pages 139-140]
TSOTSI, THE NOVEL, TO ME, IS MORE LIKE BLANK VERSE, WALT WHITMAN OR LAWRENCE --
You’re absolutely right. You know I’ve -- can you believe it -- but since writing it and forgetting it, and thinking the
manuscript was lost or destroyed or whatever, I have actually not sat down and read the thing again. But I was
asked once to go in a very very good literary festival up in Toronto, called the Harbor Literary Festival.
I HOPE THEY ASKED YOU TO READ SOME OF IT ALOUD!
Well they asked me to read something! And I thought to myself, you know, why not go back to [Tsotsi] -- cos it’s very
difficult to read a play aloud. And I read [an extract from Tsotsi]. And it went down really well. The point to come
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back to is that you’re totally right about that style of writing that characterises Tsotsi. What is interesting and so
frustrating is that, now that I’ve become aware of Tsotsi again, I realised that it could have led somewhere. That
style could have developed and gone somewhere. I can’t go back there now. I can’t go back there now.
I REREAD CAMUS L’ETRANGER RECENTLY. IT READS LIKE A SCREENPLAY, IT’S SO SPARE...
It’s so beautiful. Have you had a chance, I’m sure you have, Chris, to sit down with his notebooks?
I HAVEN’T, UNFORTUNATELY.
Gosh, you must give yourself that treat. I owe so so much to Camus. I do a lot of reading, and I still do, but Camus
was a decisive influence. If one’s going to look at influences in terms of my thinking -- whatever little things are
stitched together to make a personal philosophy that works for my life and how I live it -- it’s encompassed,
unquestionably, in the notebooks.
The concept that comes to mind immediately -- it remains as true for me today as it did for me back then -- what I
think he defines at some point in one of his notebooks as “courageous pessimism”. The fact that the condition is
ultimately pessimistic -- the one that we face as human beings in a hostile world, in a hostile universe -- but that we
need courage. Given courage, there are certain things we can do which gives us dignity.
WHEN I HEAR “COURAGEOUS PESSIMISM”, TWO THINGS OCCUR TO ME. ONE, I USED TO KNOW A LOVELY LITTLE JEWISH
PIANIST WHO TOURED SOUTH AFRICA WITH THE BODENWEISER DANCE COMPANY MANY YEARS AGO... SHE USED TO
TALK ABOUT “GUILT FEELINGS”... SHE USED TO LIVE QUITE ASCETICALLY. I INTERPRETED HER PHRASE AS REFERRING
TO FEELINGS OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR WHAT’S HAPPENING IN THE WORLD. THE OTHER THING I THINK OF WHEN I HEAR
“COURAGEOUS PESSIMISM” IS THAT WE NEED TO FACE THE TRUTH, CLEAR-EYED AND FEARLESSLY AND HONESTLY.
Somewhere in his notebooks Camus takes up a paragraph from Pascal’s Pensees. The Pascal paragraph is,
simply: imagine a lot of men sitting in the darkness, chained together, sitting in the darkness in a room. Every day at
sunrise, the door opens and the man at the end of the chain is led out and executed. The door closes, and those
left behind know that, one day, their turn will come. To leave that darkness, to go out and end it all.
And Camus says yes, fine. But the question is: what do we do in that darkness? Do we feel sorry for ourselves? Do
we bemoan our fate and shake our fists impotently at the gods who have done this to us? Or do we reach out and
touch the shoulder of a stranger next to us, ask his name and his story, give him your name and your story. And for
me that is such an incredible image of what one can do with one’s life or the challenge one faces with one’s life.
If, like myself, you do not really have a faith that posits a heaven or some sort of event after, you know, the heart
stops beating, that for me is such a beautiful image.
IT’S A BEAUTIFUL METAPHOR FOR MAKING THEATRE, TOO, ISN’T IT?
Yes, that’s right. It’s interesting that you raise the question of guilt because, inevitably, apart from whatever other
things go into making me the man I am... As a white South African with a liberal conscience, I had to shoulder my
full share of a sense of responsibility for what was happening in my country. And guilt was really something I had to
learn to live with.
Afrikaners realised they could not button up this country any more, and South Africa made this dramatic -- virtually
miraculous -- turnaround in terms of what it had been and what it was going to try to be... And that of course had a
hugely liberating effect on me. And I think that I’m beginning to jettison, now, that burden. I think I’ve already
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actually, truthfully, jettisoned quite a lot of it.
I’D LIKE YOU TO TALK ABOUT COMPETING DEMANDS AND DESIRES... TO SPEAK OUT AND RIGHT WRONGS VERSUS SELF
EXPRESSION? DO THEY ALWAYS COMPETE? WHEN HAVE THEY BEST BEEN ENTWINED IN YOUR WORK?
You can’t escape it, you know. It was there, in bed, when I made love. It was there in the toilet when I sat on the
throne. You know, it was there everywhere. It creates a dynamic of its own. And anything I have written -- I think
everything I have written -- even the most seemingly innocuous [plays] that ostensibly have nothing to do with the
so-called politics of South Africa -- are profoundly influenced by it.
IS THIS THE SENSE IN WHICH YOU FEEL LIBERATED, NOW?
Absolutely, absolutely, yes, yes, very much so.
WHAT DOES THAT LIBERATE YOU TO DO?
It’s effect is a very simple one, actually. I have likened my experience during those [years] -- which made up what
will always be the bulk of my writing life -- the 40 years of official apartheid in South Africa, from the point when the
Afrikaner National Party came into power, then the release of Nelson Mandela, I’ve likened my sense of myself and
living a life as a man walking a tightrope. And the safe platform at one end was the purely personal issues, family
issues, dramas within the family, dramas within the relationship. And the safe platform at the other end of the
tightrope was the platform of the political: of acting, of active engagement in politics and of speaking up and
speaking loudly, speaking out about whatever was happening, whatever outrage was currently on the front pages of
our newspapers. And there I was wishing those two platforms could come together! Knowing that I had to somehow
balance myself between the two of them. Sometimes moving a little closer to the personal, sometimes moving a
little closer to the political. But always, always, living always on a line that was defined by the polarity of those two
opposites and the tension it created.
One of the problems I had... I was a writer. And it has taken me the longest time to arrive... Because it was a
dilemma. My friends... There were friends of mine who were in jail because they had made bombs and had planted
them. There were friends of mine who had to run for their lives into foreign countries. There were friends of mine
who committed suicide outside of South Africa because they just couldn’t live with themselves anymore and by
virtue of all that had happened... There were friends of mine who were driven into exile. And there was I writing. And
it has taken me a very long time. I’ve arrived at it, now. I arrived at it with a very important play of mine -- in terms of
my own personal progress -- with a play of mine called My Children, My Africa. With that play, I examined this issue
in a sense. And I realise that the written word, the spoken word, are effective forms of action... every bit as
significant -- every bit as potent in terms of consequences -- as any bomb that could be placed anywhere.
I’D LIKE YOU TO TALK, FOR A MOMENT, ABOUT TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION...
It is the ultimate challenge that we face in South Africa and we are still facing it, Chris. There’s no matter that a
legally-appointed body, no matter how well intentioned the people are who sit on it and interview and ask the
questions. Not matter how rich and deep and profound and meaningful all those intentions are... There’s no way
you can legislate for the human heart. The truth has come out, the full horror... although there might be incidents we
know nothing of, and will never know anything of, and others that we will eventually hear of -- in terms of a
catalogue of those nightmare years -- so it’s achieved that. It’s achieved that.
We have had the courage to try and face our past -- and are still trying to face it -- and deal with it. But the question
of forgiveness, that is a mystery, man. That is locked away in the human heart, and you can’t say that it’s going to
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happen if you create a certain situation that you think is going to be favourable for it.
You know, it’s the mystery of the confessional in the Catholic Church. The confession and absolution. God knows,
the church knows what a profound and mysterious event that is. Not that I... I’m obviously not a Catholic. But I have
a respect for that experience of people’s lives...
IN A PLAY LIKE -- I THINK IT WAS PLAYLAND -- ALSO IN TSOTSI...
You’ve got it, of course. You’ve put your finger right on it. That is my essay into that area of mystery: when do you
tell another human being “I did it”; and when does another human being with absolute rock bottom sincerity need
open himself and ask you: forgive me?
IS IT “COURAGEOUS PESSIMISM” TO ACTUALLY MAKE A CONFESSION TO SOMEONE AND NOT KNOW WHETHER THEY
WILL [FORGIVE YOU]?
Yes it is, absolutely. Absolutely. Because you know it’s... To forgive... My god, we all know we must do it, but, wow!
In certain instances, that is a very very very high Everest to climb.
See also, Fugard’s comments in a follow-up email [http://chrisboyd.blogspot.com/2006/02/power-without-power-athol-fugards.html] .
Athol Fugard’s novel Tsotsi is published in Australia by Text Publications. Gavin Hood’s Oscar-nominated film is in Australian cinemas
from April 13.
A new book of short stories ‘Karoo and other Stories’ is published by David Philip in South Africa. (It’s available on-line for R130 plus
P&H through kalahari.net.)
Posted 19th February 2006 by Chris Boyd
Labels: Athol Fugard, Camus, interview, playwright, South Africa, theatre, Tsotsi
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genevieve 10:17 AM
This is terrific - thanks Chris. Very interesting in the light of some of the remarks of Irish writers who have
considered themselves to be in similar positions regarding violence over the years. What a great spirit Fugard
has.
Reply
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