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Some problems of a playwright from South Africa - Athol Fugard Issue - Transcript
Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1993
I'd like to respond first by saying that anybody who thinks South Africa's journey to a just and decent society is going to be a short and an easy one is naive and terribly uninformed. The continuing violence (in this case it's called black-on-black violence) that racks my country is a fair indication of the formidable hurdles that still lie ahead of us before we'll be that just and decent society. Let me put it in perspective this way: I am fifty-eight years old and am resigned to the possibility that, in my lifetime, I might not see the fully democratic society that I so passionately wish for my country and its people.
But even apart from the fact that those questions are embarrassing because of their ignorance and their naivete, the very frustrating thing about them is that they create an expectation of my work that I think interferes with what I'm trying to do. If anybody in an audience for one of my plays sits there expecting that I am going to make a political statement, or give a message, or lay out a blueprint for a better and juster South Africa, they are going to be disappointed. What is more, because of this expectation, and because they are looking in the wrong direction (this I think has happened to a lot of critics in their reactions to my work), they will most probably miss what I have got to offer, which is a story.
My essential sense of myself is that of a storyteller. I once said something about myself and my work, I think I said it about ten or fifteen years ago, which remains as true today as it was then. I said the only truly safe place I have ever known is when I am in the middle of a story as its teller. At this point I am hovering over commitment to a new play, because in a sense I've cut the umbilical cord of my last work, My Children! My Africa! That's got to look after itself now. It's always frightening--nothing I've done in the past ever makes the commitment to a new piece of writing easy. At the same time I know that, once I make the commitment, unlike the man who stands here at this moment talking to you, I will know who I am and why I am who I am. That is what writing and telling a story mean to me.
I don't want to be naive about the business of storytelling. I'm not fighting shy of the fact that politics is in a sense part of the substance of the stories I tell. The notion that there could be a South African story that doesn't have political resonance is laughable. When it comes down to it, any story, from any time in history, from any society, is political--if you take the word "political" in its broadest and most meaningful sense. Every act of storytelling is in a sense a political action. Certainly this is so in South Africa, which is unbelievably politicized. As I experience that country, living there day to day, there is no area of my life, even my most private moments, which does not have a political resonance. Politics is there in everything we do in South Africa. So the notion of telling a story in South Africa and not being political is naive. I know, particularly as I have an interest in the dispossessed of my country, with whom I identify very strongly, it is inevitable that there is going to be a political byproduct to what I make. But that is not my focus as I start out.
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